ANNOUNCER: On this episode of EcoSense... TESSA SKILES: The water started getting very milky, filled with algae.

JILL: Wow!

Would you look at that?

CARLTON: My chance to get this shot could be over for another year.

It’s the type of thing that makes you just want to throw in the towel.

JENNIE GARLINTON: Over 20 years ago, a filmmaker named Wes Skiles, sounded the alarm about the Floridian aquifer.

now his daughter, Tessa Skiles, carries his work forward.

♪ ♪ TESSA: My first time in a scuba tank, I was six.

I was scuba certified by 10 years old, and the first time I popped my head into a cavern, I was 11 years old.

My father, Wes Skiles, he was a National Geographic explorer, a cave diving pioneer, a cinematographer, photographer.

And he accomplished a lot for Florida's water while he was with us.

I wanted to be a part of every shoot.

At the age of eight, I took it upon myself to write my own, little mini short documentary and write the script for it.

And I forced my dad to film me.

And it was all about Springs conservation.

“Please help springs by making good decisions, not bad decisions.” ♪ ♪ I was 10 whenever my dad started filming Water's Journey.

I was in a few scenes.

One was drinking water from the tap at my house, alongside my next-door neighbor and best friend.

Another scene was actually at this very location, I took a dive about 20 foot down at Blue Hole Spring.

And you can tell I'm very tiny [Laughing] Swimming against a very, very big flow because this is the first magnitude spring.

I think that my father was a genius in the storytelling of Water's Journey because of the way they illustrated the connection between land and aquifer.

NARRATOR: We’ll join a team on a daring journey to follow the connective path of water through the landscape, above and within the earth.

TESSA: We had a team of divers and on land, they tracked them while they were diving through the cave system.

It was hysterical.

The divers were diving underneath restaurants and underneath highways that are very familiar to us locals in the area.

It was amazing to see how the caves wove through our town, and it helped connect those missing dots that people don't understand.

We have cave systems of our aquifer underneath you at any given point, underneath our feet in Florida.

They used a really unique piece of technology.

It was a tracker that allowed the surface team to track the divers as they were diving through the cave.

And it was very new technology at the time, developed by the Navy.

TOM MORRIS: My friend Wes dreamed up this idea about, Jill and I being underground doing a journey underneath the landscape and how the, the surface related to what was going on down there.

- 'Kay, incoming.

NARRATOR: The team starts their journey in north Florida.

They will be traveling over and through “Karst terrain,” a limestone landscape that is characterized by caves, fissures, and underground streams.

The goal, to navigate the complex system of underground rivers from where water disappears underground to the point where it resurfaces in Florida’s springs.

Each dive will require up to 2 miles of swimming and hours of decompression time.

TOM MORRIS: We've done thousands of cave dives, we've been doing all our lives, but the one thing that was a bit of a surprise, we had those full-face masks on so that we could talk to each other.

And so that we were talking to the audience also.

TOM MORRIS: Can you hear me okay?

NARRATOR: Jill and Tom will be in contact with each other through wireless communications in their masks.

But because of depth and the thickness of the rock over their heads, they'll be out of voice communications with the surface, their experiences, a mystery to the rest of the team until they come up.

TOM MORRIS: One of the things they really liked was when we were in Alachua sink and Wes and Brian are tracking us into Sonny's... WES: This is great.

Excuse us.

Underground survey in progress.

BRIAN: Headed toward the salad bar.

WES: Heading towards the salad bar.

Who would have thunk it, huh?

BRIAN: Yeah.

TOM: Everybody loves that.

NARRATOR: Although this could be an entire community source for fresh drinking water, the divers find very disturbing signs.

TESSA: At one point in the dive, they start to see a drastic change in water quality.

The water started getting very milky, filled with algae.

There was tires in the cave and oil barrels, and they could tell just from the look of the site that they were about to surface in that it was going to be a trash dump.

JILL: Wow!

Would you look at that?

A huge oil drum right in the middle of the cave!

Can you believe it?

TOM MORRIS: Yeah, I believe it.

For many years, people in this state have used these sink holes to get rid of trash.

What they don’t realize is they're dropping it right down into the water they might be drinking tomorrow.

TESSA: It really communicated that the general public does not realize that what we put in our water or on our ground is ending up in our drinking water.

WES: People are obviously backing up to this place and dumping their garbage right into the sink.

TESSA: Wes was the first citizen scientist advocating for the Floridian aquifer, its springs and our drinking water.

He rang the alarm bell before a state scientist did.

TOM GREENHALGH: I think that the public that watched it got a better understanding of the Floridian Aquifer system.

Matter of fact, to me, that is the crux of what we need to do now to address groundwater issues, is educate the public with accurate information.

STACIE GRECO: The Floridian aquifer is huge.

It's under Florida and Georgia all the way up into South Carolina, and it's a very productive aquifer, but it's still threatened... We're definitely experiencing, shortages with our water supply as is all over the country.

It's a little different here because our aquifer, our groundwater, it's hidden beneath us.

When you're driving over a reservoir out west, you see the water levels drop and you can make that connection that, you know, it's important to conserve.

But here in Florida, we're a peninsula, we're surrounded by water and we have so many rivers and lakes that it's really hard for people to understand that our water source is also constrained.

The springs are the window into the aquifer.

So it really can let us know how is our drinking water supply doing?

TOM: You never know when you're gonna wake up to the sound of a bulldozer in Florida.

And it can be a 6,000 acre subdivision.

Back in the 1950’s, I was a kid.

There were maybe 3 million people in the state then, and now we got 22 million plus, another million or a million and half tourists here at the same time.

We're all drinking water; we're all flushing toilets.

And lots of people are watering their lawns... the largest single use of water in, in most households.

And every one of those straws, every one of those pipes into the aquifer is pulling water out.

WES: This just goes to show you that there’s no facet of life that these underground systems aren't able to travel under.

Here we’re literally going underneath somebody’s patio here.

TOM MORRIS: Well, well, well, how about this?

JILL: You’re a comedian.

So this is someone’s water well?

TOM MORRIS: Yeah, there’s millions of wells that tap the Floridian aquifer here in the state.

it’s not uncommon for us to find these things down here.

TOM GREENHALGH: Seventy-two percent of the state right now is currently in a “water use cautionary,”.

So we're pumping water or mining water at an unsustainable rate.

STACIE: We have a water quantity and a water quality problem here.

So one big thing we need to do is we need to reduce the amount of nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus, that is going into our water.

The big source is fertilizer from farms and from people’s yards and sports fields.

TOM GREENHALGH: Qualitatively, every land use that we have in Florida, because the aquifer is so vulnerable, will contribute something to the water, whether it’s a single family unit all the way up to an industrial site or, you know, an industrial farm.

You have to be extremely careful with what you do, because if you spit on the ground, it goes to the aquifer.

That’s about the truth, in Florida.

NARRATOR: One of the biggest utilizations for water in Florida is farming.

Although it is a justifiable use, it has also created serious issues that are surfacing in springs, the windows into our aquifer.

While some of Florida’s springs are healthy, many show alarming, even dangerous levels of nitrates, a common by-product created by both inorganic fertilizers and animal waste.

TOM GREENHALGH: I know of several springs that the nitrate exceeds the drinking water standard in it.

So technically, ought to be posted in my mind showing, don't drink the water.

As a scientist, all I see is declines and detrimental changes.

But to the average person down there swimming in that spring, they're having a blast.

TESSA: Water's journey proposed sound solutions to these issues, many of which our state was in the process of implementing, but 20 years into the future, we're watching those regulations fall very short.

STACIE: We're at this interesting place where we really need to make big changes.

So that might mean, are we growing the right crops in the right place?

Are there changes we can make in agriculture?

Are there changes we can make in the crops we're growing in our yards?

Is it time that we stop irrigating landscapes that we're not eating?

As a young advocate, I see my generation and younger generations' attention being pulled in so many different directions, but one thing is very clear.

Without a clean and abundant drinking water source, the rest of our problems will soon feel very small.

My dad did a wonderful job teaching about the water cycle through his cave diving and filmmaking, but he was just one storyteller.

It's up to us to keep the pressure on our policymakers now.

We need to strengthen our regulations.

We need to prioritize land conservation.

The thing is, is that there is no secret army out there speaking up for us.

Our water supply needs our collective voice.

The first step is following Water's journey from its source to your tap.

NARRATOR: They finally found their way forward.

JILL: Looks like we're back in the flow, Tom.

TOM MORRIS: Wow, this is gorgeous.

JILL: Yeah.

TESSA: Diving in the springs is a very spiritual experience for me.

It is meditation.

It is where I can clear my mind.

And diving in a healthy spring is one of the best things that I can do to lift my hopes and keep the energy flowing into me to then put back out into the world in the form of conservation and advocacy.

JENNIE: With only about 200 Florida panthers left in the wild, the odds of seeing one are about zero.

But photographer Carlton Ward, Jr. managed to beat those odds to show us their hidden world.

CARLTON WARD, JR: A native Floridian is a rare species these days.

Um, I think fewer than a third of Floridians were born in the state and my family's been here for eight generations.

Even when I was born, you know, in the 1970s, Florida's development was relegated largely to the coasts.

You know, we have a family ranch in the middle part of the state, and my whole upbringing going to the ranch, it was just rural and open country.

I had this tremendous opportunity to get my career started working in Africa, publishing in magazines like Smithsonian and publishing my first book.

But this is the early 2000s.

And every time I got on an airplane and left Florida for two or three months, I came home and there was a new subdivision on what used to be a cattle ranch, or what used to be natural open land.

And I started to get torn because there are dozens of people who would happily take my spot to be photographing wildlife in Africa with the Smithsonian.

But I didn't see enough storytelling focused on those kind of stories in my own backyard.

I started photographing Florida cowboys and ranches in 2005.

By photographing ranches, I discovered that Florida had this amazing population of black bears.

They were living almost entirely on ranches in the middle part of our state.

In 2010, inspired by ongoing science and the bear research that was happening in South Central Florida, I founded the Florida Wildlife Corridor Project.

We had done a pair of thousand mile expeditions through the state of Florida to show that this Wildlife corridor network still exists and we still have a chance to protect it.

I actually went to my editor at National Geographic Magazine and said, "Hey, I wanna do a story about the Florida Wildlife Corridor."

And she said, "Well, I don't know if we're interested in the story about a wildlife corridor per se, but you could use the panther to communicate the story of the corridor."

So that 15 minute conversation sent me into a five year-long obsession to get the pictures needed for a National Geographic story about the Florida panther.

Got the legs of a panther flying through.

All the time I had spent trekking through Florida on photo assignment in the Everglades and other parts of panther habitats, I had never seen a Florida panther.

So, my chance to get this shot could be over for another year.

It's the type of thing that makes you just want to throw in the towel.

One adult male Florida panther has a home range of 200 square miles, that's twice the size of Orlando, or four times the size of Miami.

That's how much land a single panther needs.

When you're dealing with an animal as rare as the panther, sure there are 200 of them today, but they're spread across millions of acres.

They're primarily nocturnal.

They have huge territories.

And so to try to find locations where we can reliably get pictures where they're gonna meet the standards of National Geographic took a very long time.

I don't think I really understood the scope of the challenge I was stepping into.

The only way to reliably capture and portray these images was using a technique called a camera trap.

You might be familiar with game cameras that hunters and scientists use.

It's a motion-detecting camera you can put on the side of a tree that gets pictures when wildlife go by.

Well, for me to get the pictures for National Geographic Magazine or the 4K video for the film, we took that same concept, but we built custom systems that put professional cameras inside waterproof boxes connected to multiple strobe lights, or LED illuminators triggered by an infrared beam so that when an animal comes by, it kind of takes its own picture.

The odds are stacked against us to try to keep this sensitive high tech electronic system operating in this swamp environment and being ready in the instant an animal crosses through.

We've had cameras burned by wildfire, drowned by hurricanes, toppled by black bears, stolen by poachers, shot by a hunter or an angry landowner.

Ope, that's the bullet.

BIOLOGIST: That's it.

CARLTON: That's the bullet, I think.

I think, almost two years went by before I got a picture that was good enough for the magazine.

And then I had to get 20 more.

And so this was the biggest challenge I've ever attempted to try to get these photographs of panthers in their habitat and capture 'em in a way that could hopefully capture the imagination of Floridians and people around the world.

CARLTON: That's awesome.

KID: How in the world did you take that picture?

CARLTON: What does that remind you of?

CARLTON: A lot of wet areas still on either side... - Which one did you want to check first?

We got how many here?

Four?

CARLTON: I'd been chasing panthers with camera traps for nearly three years.

And my relationship to panthers had been images on the back of my screen or tracks in the sand.

You know, they've been there, but they're like ghosts.

And the idea of seeing one with your own eyes hadn't even crossed my mind.

But I was driving down this dirt trail.

I came around the corner and about a, about 200 yards up ahead of me.

There was a large dog-sized animal sitting in the road.

I was actually on a conference call with the director of the Panther film.

I was like, oh my gosh, I think I see a panther.

And the last thing he said to me before I threw the phone down and hung up, he's like, take horizontal video of yourself.

And I was like, that's the last thing I want to think about.

Oh crap, here it comes!

Here it comes!

I got to whip this video around then I got to get my real camera.

And there's this panther up in the road, it would start walking down the trail towards me and it would sit down again.

And so when it was sitting down, I'd pick up my cell phone, made a selfie video.

I'm staring at a Florida panther right now.

In the middle of the road right here.

And then as soon as I started making one of those videos, the panther would start walking and I would freak out and like drop my cell phone on, on the other seat, pick out my real camera and get ready to try to capture this moment.

I had my window down and I shared this moment where I'm looking straight into the eyes of a female Florida panther...

I can hardly believe this.

who's staring right back at me.

And it was electrifying.

I can't freaking believe it.

I cannot.

It's crazy.

A Florida panther right under this tree.

I had been on this quest for years at this point, and it's like she was there trying to encourage me to keep going.

It's connected to a more tragic moment too, because there was a injured kitten that was trying to keep up with her.

When this kitten came walking outta the swamp hind legs discoordinated from a neurological disorder that's recently shown up in bobcats and panthers, it was, it was a heartbreaking moment for me.

But such a privilege to witness this all with my own eyes.

You know, panthers face so many challenges, not having access to enough territory, having access to mates.

One of their biggest challenges is being hit by cars.

The growing network of roads, the growing population.

Florida's been losing nearly 30 panthers a year to collisions with vehicles.

And in some cases the panthers don't die.

And sometimes there's a story of hope.

So there was this one panther that got nicknamed Tres because he actually had three broken legs, was recovered by the Fish and Wildlife Commission, and spent some time, at Naples Zoo and at Zoo Tampa.

But after several months of quarantine and recovery, Tres was able to be released back into the wild.

And when you're dealing with a population of 200 or fewer, you know, from a genetic standpoint, every individual counts.

And so giving him a chance to get back out there made a difference.

To be recovered from the endangered status, there needs to be more than three times as many panthers.

And that means access to three times as much land.

The only way that's gonna happen if panthers are able to reclaim historic territory further north in the state of Florida, and even beyond.

BETTY OSCEOLA: The animals, they don't see those lines.

Those divisions that are created.

These imaginary lines.

For them, they still see that system connected, and they're trying to get to the areas that they knew.

CARLTON: You can't tell the story of the Florida panther without the story of the Miccosukee and the Seminole people.

There's a cultural connection that is really deep and really profound.

The woman featured in the film, Betty Osceola, who's a leader and advocate with the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, she comes from the Panther clan.

And the Panther clan is the largest family clan system of the Miccosukee and the Seminole people.

Going back centuries, the panther was part of their cultural fabric even before they came to Florida.

And there's this beautiful sense of coexistence that Betty and her voice bring to the film.

CARLTON: The Panther and the Seminole and Miccosukee people suffered similar types of persecution and pressure from early Americans and early Floridians.

You know, born out of this tragedy of persecution and isolation, you now have this upwelling of hope in the voices of native people like Betty Osceola who are really a guiding light for what we need to do to save balance in the state of Florida and across this planet.

And it's also the hope for the recovery of an iconic animal like the Florida panther.

Because if we follow its path, the panther's gonna show us what we need to do to save balance on this planet for ourselves.

We've had incredible success in the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, unanimous bipartisan support and 2 billion dollars invested for protecting the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

But in order to actually save the corridor, we need to keep that level of investment going for the rest of this decade because recent studies have shown that we need to save an additional 900,000 acres by the year 2030 to give the Florida Wildlife Corridor a chance.

There's nothing that motivates me more to do this work than to be out in the woods with my kids and to see their sense of wonder, to see their eyes light up when they look at the back of a camera trap, to see the deer or the bear or the hog or the turkey that walk by.

To sit there by the campfire and marvel the smoke rising up beneath the orange trees.

You know, it takes me back to my youth and it reminds me of what's important and it's these natural connections that are gonna sustain us into the future.

♪ ♪