Meet the man cleaning up Florida's mangrove forests

WBUR | By Catherine Welch

Published April 16, 2026 at 10:03 AM MDT

In this Thursday, Oct. 24, 2019, photo, the Marsh Trail bisects a section of the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge in the western Everglades near Naples, Fla. Clusters of mangroves form islands in a shallow estuary. A healthy mangrove forest is important for protecting coasts during storms. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)

Picking up trash in mangrove forests has become a calling for one Florida man.

Here & Now‘s Catherine Welch reports.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Catherine Welch

Now that she manages a full newsroom she files less regularly for NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Weekend Edition. In 2009 she was part of an NPR series on America’s Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, NC following Marine families during the battalion’s deployment to southern Afghanistan. And because Wilmington was the national test market for the digital television conversion, she became a quasi-expert on DTV, filing stories for NPR on the topic.

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