By the time that Manatee alert was launched, I had gathered sufficient evidence from my own observations to conclude that if transformation was, as some scholars where suggesting, a  key to the survival of humanity and therefore the world with life as we know it, then the arts would have to be the first to undergo a verifiable degree of transformation.

How exactly would the arts have to transform was not fully clear, however, it was clear that art would have to embrace a new level of utility before art could bridge the gap between art and life. That way, the aesthetic terms or the parameters of the transformation could be ascertained. That was of outmost importance because without an aesthetic structure there would have been no way to design models to test the ideas.

Therefore Manatee Alert was a model, a test model not just for the transformative nature of art itself but also a test for the role that art is to play in the transformation of human nature at large.

This page will focus on the features with the most visibility and impact on the subject matter of the model

Albert Einstein had proposed that "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

Manatee alert was a test of an approach to conservation from a different level of thinking, a level that acknowledged the innate ability of the citizen to act favorably on his/her own free will, if provided with workable tools and an attractive cultural incentive.

This was and is today of supreme importance as we are painfully realizing that the approach to conservation through legislation and enforcement is not only expensive, but also beyond the economic reach of most nations and rather futile considering its overall results.

I designed Manatee Alert to operate simultaneously with the official conservation program as prescribed by the scientists working with the government authorities. I very much wanted to establish a comparative contrast between the two approaches. The idea was not to compete but to approach the aesthetic symmetry that would provide the most positive engagement of society for a cultural solution to conservation.

It was a popularly accepted notion that the leading cause of manatee mortality came as a result of boats colliding with unsuspecting manatees. The official  manatee recovery plan established fines and penalties for boaters in various measures, but failed to provide a tool to encourage vigilance and protection.

This was my first encounter with the limitations of public awareness, ineffective laws and missed opportunities to enlighten and engage the public to be a part of the solution. instead the boating public was barricaded as part of the problem.

Manatee Alert was conceived as a survey of just how can the effective population regarding the West Indian Manatee be engaged to participate directly in the recovery process and produce results that can be used to form a new criteria regarding conservation.

The Manatee Alert project was at its core based upon the oldest approach to animal husbandry known to humanity, namely, if you can keep an eye on the herds you can keep them away from harm.

I therefore formulated a plan to organize a collaborative of voluntary "Manatee Alert Rangers" to report manatee sightings to a telephone hotline. the reports were then relayed to newspapers, radio and television in the form of a "Manatee Alert  Report" to let boaters know where manatee sightings had been reported and alert for caution in those waterways.

I invited my close collaborator Brent Scheneman to be the official in charge of manatee alert operations and together we managed to sustain the project and to exceed all expectations. A sample Manatee Alert report follows.

It was already a triumph that the media had been persuaded to feature a daily Manatee Alert Report, but imagine that the report was a function of a work of art that successfully reconciled itself with life, so seamlessly in fact, that by the time I retrieved the documentation to make the daily collage like the one above, the material in it was the reality created by the work itself in the real world. To make matters more marvelous the reality created had a utility that was redeemed with a pay-off in prevention and positive engagement of the community to the conservation of the imperiled Manatee.

Not wasting an opportunity on my part I also gathered extant  meteorological data that I knew would become usable, in future comparative studies of climate trends and fluctuation while at the same time recording a correlation between the data and the presence of manatees at  specific locations. (see the text work above)

 This was being done at a time when global warming was barely a concern going around the scientific circles and communicators like the great Carl Sagan where already on the beat. 

There was also a problem with scientists reaching the corpses of dead manatees while the carcasses were still viable for study and also in determining the cause of death. Manatee Alert solved that problem by locating and bringing the carcasses to a place where the scientists could retrieve the corpse within ours of the fatality.

Below one such case carried out by Voluntary Manatee Alert Ranger Captain Gerald J. Radtke in March 26, 1989.  In the image, a Fish and Wildlife Service scientist loads a carcass onto a trailer bound for the Pathobiology lab in St. Petersburg Florida.

The signal mimicked the shape of a manatee tail as the mammal dives under the water. the boater would make the signal and point to the area where manatees were seen. simple and sweet, model Julie Clarke demonstrated the signal for the media in 1991.

Luckily we were able to maintain the pace and new and marvelous elements were added to the program, some of which will be shared in the next page.