Turning Environmental Challenges into Tourism Opportunities in Destin Fort Walton Beach with Alex Fogg and Jennifer Adams

Yeah.

So Jennifer already kind of said some of it, but I'm Alex Fogg.

I'm the natural resources chief here in Destin-Fort Walton Beach, and Jennifer and I come from very, very different backgrounds, but I think that's what makes us work together so well and a lot of our programs being so successful.

Managing a team of, gosh, eight, nine people now.

You mentioned on the coastal side is where it all started.

I'm a marine biologist by training, so I went to school right after the, or graduated right after the BP oil spill, made my way down to the Gulf Coast, uh, worked for the federal government, state government, academia, and then found myself in local government working in the tourism department.

And it was, at first it was great.

I mean, I was out on the water three, four [laughs] times a, four times a week.

Jennifer would have to, you know, call me and figure out where I was.

But after, you know, a year or two of, of me running around, it was time for us to, to hunker down and start thinking about how we can apply a lot of the things that I do into the, the tourism space that, that she's so familiar with.

Started with lionfish, an invasive species that I'm very familiar with and, you know, showed up in the, oh gosh, around 2010, and have really exploded on our artificial reefs here.

So we started launching a number of initiatives to encourage people to harvest them and eat them and, at the same time, do a bunch of research on them, and that's blossomed into this huge program that we have now from artificial reefs to the land side and paddling and beach restoration.

We're neck deep in a beach restoration project right now.

So the beaches are still something that we pay attention to, but there's so many other things that are happening in areas.

Introverts.

Turtle, turtle program is-

Yeah

... pretty, we're, we're ready to kick off.

We are.

But it's, you know what? The nice thing about the other programs, so when I realized that we could actually invite people to go dive with Alex and do lionfish, and then we started the turtle program, I mean, it's interesting because people wanna get up at 5:00 in the morning and walk the beach.

I mean, they want to learn about the turtles.

They wanna come here on the weekends that we do beach and pier cleanups and join the crowd to do something good and sustainable, which is, you know, the more that we can offer these type of opportunities, experience, particularly to teenagers, you know? They're so in tune with this movement, that the more that we can offer and connect with them, the more delightful it is.

I, I just, I love seeing it.

Yeah.

I wanna talk more about this, and this kind of gets to a little bit of what my first question is about, which is this idea of how competitive it can be in travel and tourism and, you know, how you create a product that really kind of cuts through and, and helps you stand out from the crowd.