It’s hard to imagine a state beyond Florida that has generated as many books about its natural endowments. Collectively, these works form a scenic excursion through Florida history.
Readers can start with early European naturalists that Gail Fishman introduces in the 2017 reprint of her Journeys Through Paradise. Or choose an original work, such as Travels, by British American William Bartram. Composed in 1774, his lyrical descriptions of wild Florida inspired poets.
One was likely Sidney Lanier, who in his 1875 book, Florida, left behind among the most elegiac passages written of the indigenous setting. Reflecting on what visitors could expect from it, his contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in Palmetto-Leaves, as forthrightly as the former abolitionist she was, “Nature has raptures and frenzies of growth, and conducts herself like a crazy, drunken, but beautiful bacchante.”
Although the term didn’t exist at the time, ecotourism was an important industry of the state. Tens of thousands of visitors a year, famous painters and writers among them, came for the natural scenery. One was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Similar to Stowe, she eventually relocated from the Northeast, grew oranges, and wrote books. Her regionally inspired 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Yearling, has provoked a critical obsession with its racial and gender stereotyping. Rawlings’s own fascination was in the communion between her characters and the physical environment, evident in eloquent passages on hunting, scavenging, and traveling in backcountry Florida.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas read Rawlings’s classic before composing her own, The Everglades: River of Grass. Debuting in 1947, 12 years before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers launched its devastating takeover of the Everglades, River of Grass is a stirring homage to the country’s greatest freshwater wetland. Like Rawlings, Douglas was interested in how people shaped nature and nature them. At the same time, she drew on the insights of geological and biological science, establishing a standard for future books.
Mark Derr maintained that standard in Some Kind of Paradise, an unprecedented and timely comprehensive environmental history of Florida. In the two decades prior to its 1989 publication, the state passed some of the country’s most progressive environmental legislation, including model growth-management laws. Yet Florida’s population had nearly doubled, and reducing its continued expansion and impact on air, water, and wildlife habitat seemed an impossibility.
Building on Derr’s considerable foundation, and responding to growth’s continued assault on the environment, an industry in environmental books burst forth with the new millennium. Bill Belleville opened it with River of Lakes, an enchanting historical and modern-day passage down the St. Johns River. Since Douglas, 10 books about the River of Grass have appeared, including one by Archie Carr, a scientist who won literary awards and whose A Naturalist in Florida prompted E. O. Wilson to trumpet his “ambidextrous handling of human and natural history.”
Most rivers empty into an estuary, which have their own stories. A few have been told in The Wild Heart of Florida, a collection that brings together some of the state’s finest writers. One is Susan Cerulean, whose recent Coming to Pass is a gem about islands that lie between estuaries and the Gulf of Mexico.
Another collection, Paradise Lost?, peeked into the 21st century at environmental challenges old and continuing, from road building to hurricane forecasting and more. Two outstanding homegrown environmental journalists have taken a similar interest in longstanding encounters with nature. Cynthia Barnett’s graceful style in Mirage draws you into an authoritative history of Florida’s water resources. On growth and development, Craig Pittman and Matthew Waite offer the same in Paving Paradise, and Pittman has written page-turners about orchids and Florida’s beloved manatees.
Two books rounding out water’s historical odyssey are Water from Stone, a new study in the archaeology and conservation of Florida’s freshwater springs, and Ditch of Dreams, looking at the manic history of the Cross Florida Barge Canal. Marjorie Carr was the principal force behind stopping the canal’s completion. Her many achievements are spotlighted in a fine biography by Peggy MacDonald. Biographies of environmentalists connect the personal with the natural, as in An Everglades Providence, a sweeping view of the 108-year life of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and in Leslie Poole’s Saving Florida, which heralds the initiatives of women in protecting wildlife and wild places.
There is much yet in Florida’s environmental saga — birds, trees, fish, beaches, marshes, and mangroves — that belongs in books, but writers remain busy. In the meantime, the books listed here leave readers with many good choices to pull from shelves.
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.