By Joe Murphy, former Healthy Gulf staff and board member
I am honored to contribute blog posts in 2026 to one of the Gulf’s premier conservation organizations, Healthy Gulf. Back in my day, they were the Gulf Restoration Network. Healthy Gulf as a name is a better fit and captures their mission and its urgency in two elegant words. Well done.
In these times we need to support organizations that speak truth to power, that hold the line, and that work to defend the people, places, and wildlife of the Gulf.
I have lived along the Gulf Coast of Florida my entire life. Fifty-five years in and with a grey beard to show for it. This is where I was born and raised, where I got married and started a family, and where my granddaughters live. The waters of the Gulf flow through our veins and through our souls. It is home.
I support Healthy Gulf. They take firm, clear stands on issues and base their positions in sound science and policy. When they take a stand, they hold it with fidelity and express it with clarity and purpose. They fight for the Gulf.
I admire this because the Gulf of my birth and the Gulf that is my home is worth fighting for and worth saving.
My earliest memory is learning to swim in the Gulf. I remember the warm, salty water and the brilliant sunshine. My Mom and Dad had me swim back and forth between them. They made sure I was safe, wrapped in the warm embrace of their love and of the Gulf. The Gulf is where my grandfather taught me to fish and crab. I will always remember long walks along the beach with my mom as we searched the wrack line for the treasures the surf released from the Gulf, and shared with the sand. We filled buckets with every manner of shell. I still have some of them today.
While the Gulf is a critical economic engine for the United States, it is so much more than that. It is a magical place, full of mystery, filled with creatures and patterns of existence we are just now beginning to understand. Along its shores live people who are part of its culture and heritage. They have been for generations.
I am blessed to live along the Nature Coast of Florida. Stretching from above the Tampa Bay area north to the Big Bend region, the Nature Coast is one of Florida’s last truly wild frontiers. It holds vast expanses of coastal marsh, seagrass beds, spring fed rivers, cypress forests, and upland longleaf pine sandhills.
You won’t find a sandy beach anywhere in sight. This has saved it in many ways thus far from the fate that befell other parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Alas though, the water’s edge is the water’s edge, and the development industry has discovered what some locals refer to as the Forgotten Coast. It has been found, and the bulldozers and the dredges are approaching the gates of Eden.
The story of the Gulf Coast can be a tragic one, yet it can be a hopeful one filled with accomplishments that protect people and places that matter. The future of places like the Nature Coast have yet to be fully written. We hold the collective pen in our hands. How shall the final narrative read?
I ask you good readers to take a journey with me in 2026 through these blog posts and explore such questions. I hope to offer compelling and hopeful stories about interesting people and places along and from Florida’s Gulf Coast. I hope to share them with you along the way.
My goal in contributing blog posts to Healthy Gulf this year is to share my sense of connection to and fascination with the Gulf. I will contribute to them as a citizen of the Gulf, as a nature writer who grounds much of my writing in the waves and currents of the Gulf, and as someone who has a sense of place born of a lifetime of existence along the edge of America’s third coast.
There is hope in the Gulf. There is an opportunity to show future generations that we could get it right. Healthy Gulf is part of that hope, as are you. May we embrace that hope and infuse it with action to save the Gulf we love. That will be a fine way to spend 2026.
Joe Murphy is a native and lifelong Floridian who lives along the Nature Coast of Florida. He is a former Board Member and Staff Member of Healthy Gulf (then Gulf Restoration Network). He is a freelance nature writer and conservation advocate, and more importantly a grandpa. You can follow Joe on Instagram @naturecoastjoe
