(Bloomberg) -- Paul Tudor Jones stood on a chair in a ballroom of the Breakers in Palm Beach Saturday night, bowing down to Pitbull performing for the Everglades Foundation.

Earlier that evening, he had joined David Tepper, Robert Kraft, Gary Cohn, Ken Langone and Thomas Peterffy for ceviche in a papaya boat and grouper with blood orange-grapefruit slaw. And he’d made his case for supporting restoration of 1.5 million acres of South Florida wetlands.

Getting freshwater to flow south again is not just about ensuring a clean water supply for Floridians, and stopping algae blooms that hurt tourism and the economy. And it’s not only about protecting habitats for birds, critters, fauna and fish.

“It’s the antidote for all the climate anxiety Florida feels,” Jones said in an interview at his table. “Saving the Everglades is one of the best ways to buttress resiliency, achieve carbon neutrality and it’s our best hope for carbon sequestration, to reverse the effects. This ecosystem -- and we’re working on the science to prove it -- might be one of the most valuable ecosystems in the world for that.”

The event, like the Palm Beach Zoo’s gala last month, drew many animal lovers, but while the zoo enlisted its flamingos and a porcupine to entertain guests, this one relied on Pitbull and 10-year-old Samantha Ramos, who introduced the Miami-based rapper and singer as “Mr. 305, Mr. Worldwide.” The ForEverglades benefit raised $3.5 million to protect “the river of grass,” over half of which has been destroyed since 1900.

Amy and John Phelan, who attended the Everglades benefit, have meanwhile been doing their part to strengthen another ecosystem in Florida: that of artists, collectors, museum directors, curators and dealers.

The managing partner of MSD Capital and his wife hosted dinners at their Palm Beach home during New Wave Art Wknd in December and before this month’s Norton Museum of Art gala. On both occasions, guests including artists Jose Alvarez, Mickalene Thomas and Delia Brown mingled poolside and danced in the discotheque -- some in pink wigs and astronaut suits supplied from their costume room.

“I want everyone to have fun,” Amy Phelan said, noting she’s “a newcomer to an amazing community of arts patrons that I’m just starting to get involved in.”

Sarah Gavlak, who has galleries in Palm Beach and Los Angeles, founded New Wave Art Wknd to spark “an artist’s community and a dialogue, to make things more diverse and inclusive here,” she said.

Part of her mission is creating a residency for immigrant artists from distressed areas “so they can be safe and create in a beautiful place, swim in the ocean.” She’s shaping it with input from Henry Reese, who brings persecuted writers to Pittsburgh, where Gavlak is from, through the nonprofit City of Asylum.

“I told Sarah, a lot depends on how the first artist interacts with the community,” Reese said. When City of Asylum’s first writer, Huang Xiang, painted his poetry on the exterior of his home, teenagers on the block walked over to ask him about it.

At the Phelans’ home, Renzo Ortega stood in front of an Ellsworth Kelly painting and reflected on his New Wave Art Wkdn experience before filling its first artist residency in June and July.

“It’s been very intense, but good,” said Ortega, a painter inspired by Diego Rivera, who was born in Peru, spent two decades in New York, and now lives in North Carolina.

In a suite of the Colony Hotel, he’d exchanged views on Ai Weiwei with Guy Ullens, founder of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. He said his visit to the Bunker, Beth Rudin DeWoody’s private art space in West Palm Beach, made him want to become a collector.

But it was moments in the community -- attending a discussion at the Norton on the idea of home, ordering in Spanish at the Peruvian restaurant Dr. Limon, observing Latino skaters around a fountain at Rosemary Square -- that had made the greatest impression.

“Before I came here, I was thinking, Palm Beach, it’s superficial,” Ortega said. “But it’s like any other place. I see the potential.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill

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