Solving An Environmental Disaster With “Film3”

How a Film3 project is documenting the radioactive disaster in the Florida Gulf Coast and funding conservation.

Devin Muller will be the first to tell you: he’s no doomsayer. And yet his message of a likely impending ecological and agricultural disaster waiting to happen, born out of the central Florida coast, has all the makings of a high-budget apocalypse film. A producer with long roots in the film industry and erstwhile based in Los Angeles, he’s found home again since the pandemic in that same central Florida coast that he’s not turning into a feature documentary.

A Disaster Waiting to Happen

“This situation is just totally insane,” Devin told me on a recent phone call. “We’re not just talking about the Florida coast here, I mean even that’s terrible in and of itself, but this could stretch all across the country and globally. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

The big scare? For that, we will have to delve a bit into the past. It turns out, first and foremost, that Florida produces about 75% of the country’s fertilizer, and about 25% of fertilizer globally. Seems simple enough. But one important byproduct of this fertilizer production is gypsum, which is kept in large quantities as waste in what are called “gypsum stacks” — essentially just holes lined with plastic dug out of the ground and filled with gypsum.

The issue is that this very same gypsum, if it gets into the ocean, provides the perfect nutrients for something called karenia brevis, which is the organism that creates the dreaded killer known as red tide.

Red Tide: Scourge of the Sea

Red tide is nothing new in Florida. Simply put, it’s the poisonous byproduct of an algae that appears semi-regularly off the coast. It’s not the healthiest thing around, and but residents over the years have learned to live with it on the seasons that it’s come on strong. However, this recently there have been some monumental red tides. “Last year, we’ve just… I grew up here, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Devin as he recalls on a childhood growing up on the coast.

So what happens when ted dide meets a gypsum stack failure? Well, according to Devin and many others, you get a supercharged red tide does major damage and poses serious ecological and health risks. We know the red tide that hit last year off the Florida coast was so bad that humans were reporting respiratory irritation just from being near the coast, and that dead fish and sea life were washing ashore in record numbers. In fact, according to several news sources, it was the worst red tied in over 50 years.

“Over two million pounds of dead fish washed up, and that’s just what washed up, that’s not including stuff that died out at sea and got gobbled up or sank into the ocean,” Devin is quick to point out. “The amount of destruction is astounding.”

Government Cover-up, Ineptitude, or Simple Inaction?

Official accounts differ on what caused this monumental red tide. Some will say, like Devin, that it’s not small coincidence that just after a gypsum stack failure, which caused dumping of gypsum off the Florida coast, a monster red tide formed that likes of which are far beyond anything in recent memory. Others will tell you, however, that it’s just a coincidence. Devin hopes his documentary will shed a light on some of these nuances, but an even bigger threat looms across the state.

There’s many other gypsum stacks, dotted all over Florida — over a dozen, according to Devin — which in many cases are just as old and just as prone to failure. And that’s where Devin feels like we need a call to action.

“It’ll just take one big storms, and all of these could fail,” Devin warns, “Imagine all that gypsum seeping into the groundwater, or contaminating our farms and agriculture. We move out 75% of the country’s fertilizer; what would happen if that all got contaminated pretty much overnight?”

A Documentary and a Call to Action

This is where Devin has decided to try to make his mark. He has leveraged web3 technologies to support and produce a documentary on this red tide saga and its solutions. He’s calling the work “Blood in the Water”, and if all goes well it’s due to come out next year. To generate funds for the documentary, he has asked local artists to create NFT artworks which will be sold on the theme of ocean conservation. These NFT pre-sales, beside funding the documentary itself, will also go toward ecology-awareness initiatives, including a contest at local schools.

“I was briefly a teacher once,” Devin explained to me on our call, “And I just have so much respect for teachers and teaching, and so I wanted to create a contest where students can model out some solutions to this problem, and winning students will get prizes.” The contest is slated to take place at elementary, middle and high schools in Florida, and Devin hopes that the prize categories and unique, local topic will spur on a lot of inspiration in the student body. As Devin explained: “the amount of kids we can turn on to ecology by a contest like this is just huge. We want to inspire the next generation’s scientists and leaders.”

Aside from community outreach along traditional paths, Devin is also looking to create a DAO around his documentary and the funds it receives and earns. He wants to empower a community to vote on topics relating to ecology and cleaning up the Florida shore, and he expects to realize his goal of creating this DAO as his project moves further along through and past production.

Ultimately, what Devin is quick to point out is that he’s not trying to make just another documentary complaining about some problem that can’t be fixed. He feels strongly that there are real solutions to this issue, and that by highlighting them around a documentary and social movement, he the rest of the followers of the cause will affect positive change. As we wound down our call he spoke with heightened passion on the topic, and left me with an important message: “It’s just not enough to show the problem. I’m tellin’ you, we need to bring the solutions, and they’re out there and we’re gonna show them to all the right people with this documentary.”

As of this writing, Devin is continuing to work on his documentary “Blood in the water,” and has started production. He’s also offering an NFT pre-sale which a detailed roadmap of his process in both making the documentary as well as giving solutions to this problem. You can learn more at abracadabra-films.com.