The Salt Line, Vol. 104: An Invasion Best Handled With a Fork
An Invasion Best Handled With a Fork
Pensacola spends this weekend on its Lionfish Festival, which aims to protect the reefs by removing lionfish from the Gulf. The coverage describes “extra efforts” to clear an invasive species. That is true, and it undersells the rarest thing in coastal policy: an environmental problem whose solution people will happily stand in line for.
For the visitor, the case against the lionfish is short. It is a gorgeous, striped, frilled fish from the Indo-Pacific with no business in these waters. It eats the small reef fish a reef depends on. Almost nothing native has learned to eat it back, and it carries venomous spines, which is how an aquarium ornament got away with an invasion. It is taken mostly by divers with spears, one fish at a time, which is exactly as laborious as it sounds.
Now consider everything else we ask of people on behalf of the Gulf. Stay off the dunes. Don’t feed the pelicans. Give the dolphins room, fill in your holes, turn off the balcony light for the turtles. Every one of those is right, and every one of them is a request for restraint. Stewardship on this coast is mostly the art of not doing things.
The lionfish is the single exception, the one case where the reef’s interest and the diner’s appetite point in the same direction. Swift proposed solving a crisis by eating it and meant it as satire, because the dish was unthinkable. Here the dish is white, mild and flaky, and the modest proposal is simply lunch.
Which is why a festival, welcome as it is, cannot be the whole program. A festival is a weekend. The lionfish works weekdays. The fight is won or lost on menus, on both sides of the state line, the rest of the year. This coast has spent generations teaching visitors to order whatever came off the boat that morning, Royal Reds included. It can teach them one more fish. When you see lionfish on a menu between here and Orange Beach, order it. When you don’t, ask. A server who hears the question often enough mentions it to a kitchen, and a kitchen that hears it often enough calls a diver.
The Settlement, Reopened
Orange Beach and Gulf Shores run their own city school systems now, and the tax money, as it tends to after a separation, did not all move out with them. State Sen. Chris Elliott is trying again to steer additional tax dollars that now go to the Baldwin County Public School System toward the two beach cities’ schools; he has pushed for it without success since last year. The county superintendent’s reply is the one every settlement gets: the terms were “made and signed many years ago,” by cities that left “with a good understanding of what was being agreed to.” Nobody in it is a villain, which is precisely why it keeps coming back. A county system has a county to teach, two city systems have the ambition that made them leave, and there is one pot. This time Elliott wants it in one bill with a possible countywide lodging tax and a property tax for the Bay Minette hospital. That is the part to resist. School money that rides into law alongside a hotel tax gets decided by whoever wanted the hotel tax. Give it its own vote, argued in plain public numbers: whose dollars, which children, what each side gives up.
The State Line, by the Hour
Visitors treat the state line as a novelty. The people cooking their dinner treat it as a pay scale. Florida business owners say the coming minimum-wage increase could help them keep Alabama workers: on September 30, Florida’s floor rises a dollar, to $15 for non-tipped work and nearly $12 for tipped. Alabama has never set a minimum wage of its own, which one Pensacola restaurateur summed up as “$7 and some odd cents, so we’re double.” Note the verb, though: retain. The owners are not describing a recruiting drive. They are confirming, in passing, that Pensacola’s kitchens already run partly on Alabama commuters, some from as far as Mobile. The same story found an Alabama manager conceding the obvious about $15 versus $7, and noted that the seasonal workers most likely to stay on that side are the ones with good tips. Worth remembering the next time you sign a check in Orange Beach.
Truth in Naming, Through Wednesday
Escambia County Animal Welfare is waiving adoption fees for dogs and cats aged one year or older, through Wednesday, September 30, as part of the Bissell Pet Foundation’s “Empty the Shelters” event. Spend enough time with the names institutions give their work, all those initiatives and frameworks and stakeholder engagements, and it is bracing to meet one that states its goal in three words and concedes, simply by existing, that the goal has not been met. The fine print does the quiet work: puppies still cost $50 and kittens $25, while anything a year or older goes free. Anyone who has walked a kennel row knows who that describes. If you are renting on the Key, the condo rules have an opinion here, and they win. If you live here, you have until Wednesday.
Most of today’s news turns on which side of a line something ends up on: a fish on the far side of the world from home, a cook deciding which side of the state line pays better, school money that two cities and a county each believe belongs on theirs, a grown dog on the wrong side of a kennel door. The lionfish is the only one of them that crossed without asking anyone’s permission, and the only one whose solution already fits on a menu.
— Chris
P.S. If you run a place on the Key or in Orange Beach and it’s on this site, it’s yours to claim — free, always, on either side of the line: /submit/claim/
