Obviously our ancestors knew little about environmental issues, especially about how valuable mangrove trees are to marine life in adjacent waters, in this case Biscayne Bay. Besides destroying just about every tree on the barrier island that became Miami Beach, developers destroyed most of Biscayne Bay by dredging sand and soil from the bottom of the bay for 15 years to fill in more land area around the barrier island that became Miami Beach. Man destroyed not only the area that was dredged but most of the rest of the bay by covering the bay's sea grasses with a layer of silt that took decades to recover from. Biscayne Bay, robbed of the life sustaining mangroves on the east with Miami Beach's development and mangroves on the west mainland by developing Miami, and covered in silt from dredging and human waste from sewer lines and agricultural wastes in canals now dumping into the bay, went from a fisherman's paradise chock full of marine life to an almost dead body of polluted water.