Wilson McCourtney doesn’t approach the beach as scenery. He approaches it as habitat—and warning.

Born and raised in Sarasota, he grew up on Siesta Key in the late 1980s, behind the village, with a canal across the street and mangroves within barefoot biking distance. He watched dolphins surface in the water along Shell Road and manatees drift past docks. His father and brother fished, but McCourtney was more interested in what moved beneath the surface. At 12, snorkeling off Key West in water so clear he could see nearly 100 feet ahead, he felt something settle into place. He didn’t want to stay on the boat. He wanted to go under it.

That instinct to submerge and look closer now defines McCourtney's filmmaking. His latest documentary, Fighting for Florida, follows two environmental crises that have shaped the state’s waters: shark exploitation and the 2018 red tide outbreak.

The film cites Florida’s annual shark kill rate at 1.6 million sharks per year and traces the legislative effort behind Senate Bill 680, the Kristin Jacobs Ocean Conservation Act, which passed in 2020 and ended Florida’s involvement in the shark fin trade.

For McCourtney, sharks are not villains. They are ecological infrastructure. He describes them as apex predators that regulate marine systems; animals that reproduce slowly and are vulnerable to over-harvesting. In his view, the popular narrative—sharks as mindless threats—obscures their role in maintaining balance.

He also makes an economic argument: shark-focused ecotourism generates $221 million annually for Florida’s economy and supports nearly 4,000 full-time jobs, compared to roughly $1 million earned from shark fin sales nationwide.

Living sharks, the film suggests, are worth more than dead ones. But McCourtney’s relationship to water is not just cinematic or political. It’s personal.

His childhood home on Flamingo Avenue on Siesta Key—a midcentury house built in the 1960s by famed architect Ben Baldwin—took on six feet of hurricane floodwater during the 2024 storm season. His father, J.B. McCourtney, remained inside as water rose to his waist and furniture floated past. Bridges were closed. He had no phone. McCourtney, texting from afar, posted on Facebook asking for help. The post went viral. Eventually, a neighbor reached his father by kayak, paddling through debris and submerged mailboxes in the dark. The house was declared a teardown. McCourtney estimates the loss at about $1 million overnight. The impact of the storm sharpened his focus on the environment. The same waters he films as ecosystem are the ones that flooded his family’s life.

That house contained the darkroom where he learned photography. His father, a fine art photographer who documented Sarasota’s civic leaders and protest movements, from powerful politicians and famous artists to weathered cowboys and farmers, taught him to develop film under dim red light. His collection, black-and-white Florida Portraits, shot with a large 8-by-10 field camera, was on display at the Sarasota County Terrace Building for years. When Wilson picked up a camera around age 15, he says it felt like a continuation of a family language.

Still, his path to conservation filmmaking wasn’t direct. In college in Santa Fe, he studied documentary work and spent extended time in Brazil, where he witnessed deforestation and environmental strain firsthand. A professor introduced him to film equipment; he fell into video editing and never fully returned to still photography. In 2005, an early documentary called Landless Dreams screened at Burns Court Cinema. He still keeps the ticket framed.

Years later, watching the documentary Sharkwater by Rob Stewart, he found a model for how cinema could intervene in environmental debates. Stewart’s death while filming reinforced McCourtney’s sense that the work was urgent and unfinished.

McCourtney’s film arrives at a moment when water itself has become a policy issue. Sarasota and Manatee counties are under severe drought conditions, with local authorities enforcing once-a-week outdoor watering restrictions to protect dwindling supplies. Meanwhile, long-range plans to draw drinking water from the Peace River have raised ecological concerns about headwaters and habitat. At the same time, conservation groups are working on warm-water sanctuaries for manatees—another reminder that Florida’s water issues are not just cinematic but daily lived reality. Seagrass meadows, which provide habitat for fish, shellfish, turtles and manatees and help stabilize sediments and filter water, have declined in Sarasota Bay over the past decade. Aerial surveys and water quality data show a long-term drop in seagrass acreage in the bay and adjacent waters, raising concerns about ecosystem health and connected food webs. These declines are linked to water clarity issues, nutrient loading, and other stressors, and local programs continue to monitor and implement restoration efforts to improve conditions. In the red tide portion of the film, McCourtney revisits the 2018 bloom that killed 400 endangered sea turtles, hundreds of dolphins, thousands of fish and even a 27-foot whale shark along Florida’s Gulf Coast.

McCourtney follows the bloom upstream, examining nutrient runoff, wastewater failures and herbicide spraying programs. In the film, he is sharply critical of Florida’s chemical use policies and regulatory culture, arguing that environmental damage often remains out of public view because it occurs underwater or downstream. 

Funding the film has required compromise. Commercial projects finance his conservation films and the expensive barrier to entry of underwater cinematography—housings, rigs and dive training that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. He now lives in Yarmouth, Maine, with his three sons and guides private birding tours through a small ecotourism venture called Wildlife With Wilson.

When he’s stressed, he goes birding instead of to a bar. He kayaks with seals in Maine and dives whenever he can. Underwater, he says, the noise drops away. “The chatter evaporates,” he says. “A new world opens up.”

He doesn't measure success by awards or distribution deals, though Fighting for Florida earned multiple festival recognitions in 2025 and is scheduled for screenings through 2026, with a streaming release projected for early 2027, pending distribution. Florida remains his reference point because it concentrates so many global pressures in one place: tourism, development, nutrient pollution, marine biodiversity and rising seas. The waters he grew up in are the waters he now films as fragile.

What matters, he says, is persistence and example. He wants his children to see him committing time to work that reflects his values.

“Conservation is the rent I pay for being on this planet,” he says.

For updates and to learn more about the filmmaker's work, click here.