About This Event
UNFILTERED: The Truth About Oysters
Florida Climate Week · Tuesday, October 6th · Highlands Branch Library · 5:30–7:30 PM
You'll never look at an oyster the same way again.
This Emmy award-winning documentary reveals the oyster's hidden double life. On our plates, they're a delicacy and a livelihood. Beneath the surface, they're one of nature's most powerful tools — a keystone species that filters and cleans vast volumes of water, buffers shorelines from storms, and anchors entire estuary ecosystems.
But the reefs are vanishing. Ninety percent of the world's ancient oyster reefs have collapsed in the last thirty years, and Florida's own Apalachicola Bay is slipping toward the same fate under the pressures of pollution, coastal development, and overharvesting. The film makes a hopeful case: shell recycling, artificial reefs, and freshwater management can still turn the tide.
That work is already underway right here in Jacksonville. Along the Ribault, Trout, and St. Johns Rivers, we're putting these same nature-based solutions into practice — building Pervious Oyster Shell Habitat (POSH) modules and Vertical Oyster Gardens to restore living shorelines, and helping launch a recycled oyster shell collection system that gives discarded shells a second life as new reef. Every oyster we return to the water is another filter cleaning the St. Johns.
After the film: Stay for a conversation with local panelists who are harnessing the power of oysters to restore and filter the St. Johns River — and learn how you can get involved.
Florida Climate Week Jacksonville - Hosted by COJ Sustainability Department - St. Johns Riverkeeper - Jax Oyster Conservation -
About This Event
UNFILTERED: The Truth About Oysters
Florida Climate Week · Tuesday, October 6th · Highlands Branch Library · 5:30–7:30 PM
You'll never look at an oyster the same way again.
This Emmy award-winning documentary reveals the oyster's hidden double life. On our plates, they're a delicacy and a livelihood. Beneath the surface, they're one of nature's most powerful tools — a keystone species that filters and cleans vast volumes of water, buffers shorelines from storms, and anchors entire estuary ecosystems.
But the reefs are vanishing. Ninety percent of the world's ancient oyster reefs have collapsed in the last thirty years, and Florida's own Apalachicola Bay is slipping toward the same fate under the pressures of pollution, coastal development, and overharvesting. The film makes a hopeful case: shell recycling, artificial reefs, and freshwater management can still turn the tide.
That work is already underway right here in Jacksonville. Along the Ribault, Trout, and St. Johns Rivers, we're putting these same nature-based solutions into practice — building Pervious Oyster Shell Habitat (POSH) modules and Vertical Oyster Gardens to restore living shorelines, and helping launch a recycled oyster shell collection system that gives discarded shells a second life as new reef. Every oyster we return to the water is another filter cleaning the St. Johns.
After the film: Stay for a conversation with local panelists who are harnessing the power of oysters to restore and filter the St. Johns River — and learn how you can get involved.
Florida Climate Week Jacksonville - Hosted by COJ Sustainability Department - St. Johns Riverkeeper - Jax Oyster Conservation -