Robert Knight was 5 years old the first time he saw a spring.
His grandparents drove him two hours to Silver Springs from the Naval base in Jacksonville where his dad was stationed. He was born in New England and had experienced fall foliage and harsh winters; but that day, he glimpsed something unique to Florida.
The water was blue from a distance but clear up close. Fish hovered above green grasses that waved in front of caves black as night. Alligators, snakes and beavers trailed in and out of the water.
Today, that memory is painful for Knight. Instead of fish hovering over Silver Springs, visitors see clogged algae. These days, Knight, 76, can’t even tell you his favorite spring. He says he doesn’t have one, even after decades studying some of Florida’s most precious ecosystems.
“I love any healthy spring,” he said. “Unfortunately, there aren’t any healthy springs anymore.”
Knight and his family moved every couple years when he was growing up. They lived in Florida, Maryland, Georgia and Iowa, among other states and countries, before he went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There, he met Howard T. Odum, a professor of systems ecology at UNC. Knight was captivated by Odum’s view of the environment as highly organized and predictable. After Odum moved to the University of Florida in 1970, Knight followed him to Gainesville to earn his PhD in systems ecology.
It was Odum who reintroduced Knight to Silver Springs. Odum had done a four-year study of Florida’s most-visited spring in the ‘50s – that research helped establish the basis of the field of systems ecology. He brought Knight in for a restudy.
In 2007, following Odum’s death, Knight was one of the lead scientists on a 50-year retrospective study.
“Odum introduced me to ecology, how unique springs are and how constant they used to be,” Knight said. “How they should be.”
After finishing his PhD with Odum in the ‘80s, Knight went to work in wetland treatment — constructing wetlands to restore functions like cleaning up pollution and giving floodwaters a place to go. He worked for an environmental consulting company, CH2M Hill, for 17 years before starting his own, Wetland Solutions. His son, Scott, 42, is now its principal scientist.
“That was the way I made my living, raised my family,” said Knight. When he moved to Florida in 1988, the plot he bought north of Gainesville had only a trailer. He set about building a house for his family.
“I look at the trees I planted, and they’re 4 feet in diameter,” he said. “I’ve been here a long time.”
In 2002, the state of Florida hired Knight and his company in preparation for a legal challenge over Volusia Blue Springs. The state wanted to prove Volusia Blue had improved since it was last studied, in the ‘90s by ecologist Jim Stevenson. That report identified 10 environmental and human values the state should protect.
The state wanted to return the springs to its historical water quality, Knight said, but pumping 50 million gallons of water per day made that a challenge. Twenty-five years after Stevenson’s report, the springs had not bounced back. Flow was down 15%; nitrates were up. The manatee population had increased despite it all, but there was no vegetation for them to eat.
“This was a warning,” Knight said.
After 20 years planning wetlands and writing restoration reports, the Volusia Blue study led Knight back to the springs for the first time since his work with Odum. He was determined to make a change.
Then in 2011, now-U.S.-Senator Rick Scott became governor.
Scott’s administration cut $700 million from Florida’s water management districts, purging water scientists. “The three-year study of Volusia Blue Spring was canceled,” Knight scoffed. “That’s when I started my advocacy.”
Knight opened the Howard T. Odum Florida Springs Institute (FSI) in 2010. It was becoming increasingly clear the state could not provide the monitoring he believed the springs needed. He collected a salary for only one year before directing that money to fund staff and more research.
Knight created a team with the capacity and infrastructure to fill data gaps. But he also did much more than science: He wrote op-eds warning of the detriment of springs in newspapers throughout the state. He led SpringsWatch, a citizen science program that trained volunteers to work in the springs.
The challenges were as numerous as the springs he was trying to save. His op-eds were poorly received by people who thought he crossed the line of science by dipping into advocacy. His SpringsWatch program struggled to find citizen volunteers with enough time and commitment. FSI lost its distinctive office in downtown High Springs, forcing him to find a new location on short notice. Despite the struggles, Knight continued to build FSI to monitor the springs and develop a strong community of springs lovers and advocates.
While he stepped down as director in early 2024, he doesn’t consider decreasing his time at FSI as retirement.
“It’s not a job,” he said. “It’s my passion, you know. I’m still actively involved with all of the work.”
Looking back on half a century of science and advocacy, Knight thinks the road to change will be paved by Floridians themselves, not legislators or politicians. Listening to Knight, it’s easy to see how he prickled politicians: He calls them “liaisons of evil powers” who work with lobbyists to help developers but hurt people and ecosystems.
The system has approved some 30,000 permits that allow major users to pump 100,000 gallons of water out of the springs daily, Knight said. Add in another 150,000 smaller permits, and it’s too much for the springs, he said.
“Literally half the public water supply goes to outside irrigation,” he said. “Agricultural water goes to animals who pollute waterways and crops we don’t need.”
A big point of contention for Knight is the amount of water going to agriculture in Florida. The industry uses a third of all water—about 2.4 billion of the 7.2 billion gallons of freshwater drawn in Florida every day, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. That’s an outsized impact on Florida’s water for a relatively small slice of the state’s GDP, Knight argues.
Florida’s GDP is $1.6 trillion and Florida agricultural revenues are about $8 billion, a small fraction. But agricultural economists such as with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences put the total “added value” closer to 20% of GDP.
Over-pumping lowers water flow, worsens pollution and causes a cascade of harm such as tannic backflow, to individual springs, Knight says. He frequently recounts that Wakulla Springs, where visitors could once see 185 feet to the bottom, is now dark. Gilchrist Blue Spring has back-flowed and since recovered. The Santa Fe River north of Gainesville frequently becomes dark with tannin acids because there isn’t as much spring flow to keep the river clear.
Knight used to bring his wife, two sons and daughter out to the Santa Fe River not far from where he lives. While he would dive for artifacts and arrowheads, they would play in the water by the shore and snorkel to find fish. The fossils and pieces he found are on display in the FSI building in High Springs. But the fish are largely gone, he said, replaced with exotic species and algae.
“It used to be clear,” he said. “It was nothing but spring flow; it was like a run itself. I went when it was black, too, but I knew it would be clear soon. It used to be enjoyable.” He cites septic tanks and agriculture as the leading reasons for changing water quality in the Santa Fe River and all other water bodies in Florida.
Knight’s critics say his advocacy hurt his scientific credibility. He argues science alone wasn’t saving the springs because the system didn’t let it; he didn’t begin advocating for the springs until later.
“I wasn’t advocating before; I was learning,” Knight said. “But they wanted to change how I said things. Op-eds didn’t go over well.”
Nathan Crabbe, former op-ed editor for The Gainesville Sun, crowns Knight as the most forceful advocate for the springs in Florida. He worked with Knight on his essays for The Sun’s “Springs Heartland” series, which called attention to threats facing Florida’s springs. Knight’s columns focused on interdisciplinary approaches to healing the springs. No subject was spared – politics, the economy, development – everything was on the table.
“What you see is what you get,” Crabbe said. “He wears his heart on his sleeve in the sense that he lives and breathes springs, and he has for quite some time.”
Too many Floridians don’t know about the state’s rare and precious springs, Knight says. More than 1,000 artesian springs bubble up from the aquifer over 10,000 acres, but that’s trivial in 35 million acres of Florida’s land. Knight said the key is getting Floridians to see how incredible that is. He has continued to write op-eds for The Sun and Orlando Sentinel since retirement. His most recent column urges readers to understand just how dire the springs situation is.
“A thousand people move to Florida every day; they’ve never been to the springs,” he said. “New people still see clear water. People coming back see the change.”
On a recent trip to the Midwest, Knight was reminded of the passenger pigeon. Once numbered in the billions, passenger pigeons went extinct in 1914 because of over-hunting and habitat loss. In his column, Knight said 80% of Florida’s artesian springs are severely polluted.
“Everyone assumes the springs will be around forever, like the passenger pigeon,” he said. “They have a gravestone now.”
Knight has also written a few books. “Saving Florida’s Springs” is one of them. The FSI website describes it as a manual for springs protection in under 100 pages.
“I wrote it nice and small for legislators so they could read it,” Knight said. Even if they did read it, he doesn’t think it’d be enough to move them from a development mindset to one set to save Florida’s environment.
Because of his disenchantment with Florida politics, Knight urges Floridians to vote for the environment. To vote for water. To vote for their future. In retirement, his biggest hope is that people wake up and see the dark turn Florida’s environment could take.
“My heart is still with the springs,” he said. “I still recognize the endangered situation they’re in. I have a lot of academic experience and understanding of what’s good, what’s bad, what’s ugly. But now, I travel. I enjoy the environment.”
Since stepping back from his primary passion, Knight found time to explore others, like snorkeling in the Sante Fe River and digging for artifacts. Now age 76, he prefers to walk and watch birds up and down the East Coast. He and his wife, Debbie Segal, an environmental scientist and president of the Alachua Audubon Society, recently traveled to North Carolina for songbird migration season.
“I was wrapped up in her bird-watching exploits,” he said. “Birds are moving from north to south in the hundreds of millions right now.” He himself went from a life of constant migration at the whim of the Navy to planting roots in Alachua County.
Haley Moody, a Geographic Information Systems expert, joined the Florida Springs Institute as an intern out of the University of Florida’s Landscape Architecture department and now serves as interim director of FSI, taking over the mission Knight launched 14 years ago. She says the many springs advocates and researchers Knight has inspired and trained along the way are a significant part of his legacy.
“I’m always shocked when I look back at interns, employees, staff,” Moody said. “What they’ve gone on to do in the world; it’s just incredible. All the rockstar springs advocates have been through these doors and learned under Dr. Knight.”
Christopher Meindl, author of the new book “Florida Springs” and a geography professor at the University of South Florida, read Knight’s prolific work for his own book research. Meindl teaches a class called “Florida Springs” and said Knight joined for a canoe trip and to swim with his students.
“There’s no way for us to say our understanding of Florida springs would be the same without Bob Knight,” Meindl said. “I couldn’t have possibly written the book I wrote without saying anything about Knight. It’s like writing a biology textbook and not discussing evolution.”
Knight still remembers the first time he saw Silver Springs. The fish in clear water, the flamingos in the Seminole village attraction and the “reptile guy” (Ross Allen) are clear in his mind. Seventy-one years later, the fish are scant and the attraction has closed. But hope for the springs remains – in the legacy of advocates and ecological science that began with Odum.
One day, this generation’s advocates will inevitably retire. At the same time, a 5-year-old child may visit one of the springs still bubbling up in the state, marveling at their natural beauty just as Knight once did.