St. Pete Water

Final Project - Environmental Communication

May 19, 2021

St. Pete Water

By: Chloe Carter

This semester in my Environmental Communication class, my professor tasked my classmates and I to come up with a final project that would encompass an environmental problem of our choice. The world is unfortunately experiencing many environmental problems as the years go on and one subject that I am very passionate about is preserving the water quality of the oceans.

Growing up in rural Indiana, there weren't many opportunities to connect with the ocean. Once I finally cam face to face with those wide, blue waves I dedicated myself to learning about the watery world around us and how we can best work as a community to protect it.

I wanted to be able to gain media attention for the recent problems that had been noticed in early 2021 in Tampa Bay. For example, there was a wastewater incident in which these extra chemicals were being poured into the water and increasing Tampa Bay’s risk of Red Tide returning to the beaches of the area.

Instagram Main Page: First Instagram Post:

For my project I put together a series of information regarding the water quality and current protection procedures for the Tampa Bay area. Most of the info that I found was that the water was being overlooked in comparison to other environmental problems in the area. My goal was to make a public Instagram to spread awareness of the threats against Tampa Bay, some of the ways that people can combat the problem and who are new St. Pete mayoral candidates who advocate for water quality.

I want to protect Tampa Bay because many people, especially those who are locals, don’t seem concerned with the multiple water quality problems that have popped up in recent months. I posted a total of four Instagram posts with three different Instagram stories in order to spread awareness. I chose to set up my page this way because overloading the main feed page doesn’t always work when getting mainstream media’s attention.

Second Instagram Post:

One of the most important things that I have learned while taking on this challenge was that running a media account is a full-time job. In order to have a more successful Instagram page I think I would have to be running the account with undivided attention and focusing more on posting consistent content. Other than not having enough time to dedicate to the page, I came across a different problem within my project.

Another issue that I ran into with this project was that many of my followers who had just found my page weren’t liking any of my posts or reposting my stories. This was a surprise because I figured if the followers were all active enough to follow, they would also like the informational posts. What I suspect the main problem to be with my environmental communication is the deficit model and no matter the amount of scientific information, others may not listen. If I was to attempt this again I would focus on more specific environmental communication tactics that I could utilize, such as environmental melodrama to incite empathy from others.

Third Instagram Post: