Manatees and Margaritas: Toward a Strange New Paradise

Abstract

Florida manatees gather in the warm water discharged from power plants, which they have come to rely on during cold winters. The “55 and better” also seek warmth - and a life of leisure - at the state’s booming “active adult” communities. As populations increase, human waste leaks into the lagoon and seagrass dies. Manatees starve in record numbers and are fed romaine lettuce in a last-ditch effort to keep them alive. This project probes the strange ecologies of Eden in the Anthropocene – that of romaine lettuce and power plants, manatees and margaritas. It finds, in landscapes of paradise, spaces where one can love nature, while killing it at the same time, where the “obscene” realities of the body – waste, aging, death – are kept concealed outside the figurative garden wall - to deleterious effects. This thesis proposes new visions of paradise for a world where this separation can no longer stand, where no ‘elsewhere’ remains and entanglement is unavoidable. A series of gardens – or, more accurately, anti-gardens – serve as prototypes for a strange new Florida paradise, where the obscene enters and new forms of coexistence – between the retiree and manatee, the human and the nonhuman – emerge.