Water played quite the leading role during the week of Stetson’s 2016 fall break. After preparations and the subsequent damages caused by Hurricane Matthew led to the cancellation of a week’s worth of classes, Stetson’s new Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience collaborated with the City of DeLand and the Blue Spring Alliance to host the first annual Water Festival.
Festival events, which followed the theme “Water in Art,” and ran from Saturday, Oct. 15, to Monday, Oct. 17, were meant to celebrate Floridians’ unique relationship with water and raise awareness about the health and importance of Florida’s freshwater springs, which supply drinking water to 90 percent of the state.
The celebration kicked off on Saturday with The Water Festival 5K, spanning the 3.1 miles of a new Rails-to-Trails section of the Blue Spring Trail. Proceeds from the race benefited the River of Lakes Heritage Corridor, a scenic highway along the St. John’s River. In addition to festival events, the DeLand Utilities Department hosted tours of the Wiley M. Nash Water Reclamation Plant throughout the weekend, allowing citizens to see the processes involved in reclaiming water for irrigation and aquifer recharge.
The namesake event occurred at Earl Brown Park on Sunday, October 16th, featuring live local music, giveaways from environmental sponsors, a splash zone for kids, food trucks, and a selection of nationally renowned speakers covering a variety of topics regarding our most precious resource. In addition to those speakers, the community was addressed by DeLand Mayor Robert Apgar and Fla. state Sen. David Simmons, who is sponsoring the Florida Springs and Aquifer Protection Act to provide $50 million dollars of funding for springs restoration.
The first speaker to present inside the park’s Sanborn Center was Bill Belleville, an author and documentary filmmaker with the Discovery Channel. Following Belleville’s presentation on the relationship between nature and culture, Clay Henderson, an environmental policy professor at Stetson and the executive director of the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience, talked about the future of springs in Central Florida. Henderson spoke on Florida potentially facing a critical water shortage by 2030.
Photographer John Moran, whose work focuses on Florida’s vanishing natural habitat, spoke on the perils facing Florida’s water supply to the audience. The day culminated with journalist Cynthia Barnett, who is currently a finalist for the National Book Award, and a discussion on water ethics. Barnett described how art has driven national conservation efforts since the nation’s first national park was established in 1872.

Festivities closed on Monday with a free water film festival at Athens Theatre. The Forgotten Coast: Return to Wild Florida, created by the Florida Wildlife Corridor, followed three friends on a 1000 mile, 70 day hike from the headwaters of the Everglades to Gulf Shores National Seashore. The documentary highlighted the diversity of Florida’s wildlife and the importance of protecting important habitats such as the longleaf pine forests. Only 3 percent of the original 90 million longleaf pine acres remain.
There was a short intermission from Moran’s Springs Eternal Project, a video titled “Swimming in Air” that followed a turtle’s journey within one of Florida’s springs. The night was capped off with the documentary In Marjorie’s Wake, a modern attempt to recreate author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s 1920s journey down the St. John’s River.
Just one week after facing Hurricane Matthew’s watery assault, kids could be found playing with bubbles and painting a sea life mural, food trucks lined seemingly every corner, and the sound of guitar filled the air – all to rejoice the miracle of water. Florida’s freshwater springs continue to face many threats, including reduced water flow and invasive species. The festival provoked the community’s hope that they will be as resilient as we are.