The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea by Jack E. Davis

The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea by Jack E. Davis 

FIVE STARS

The Gulf of Mexico is the second most contaminated body of water in the world. This dubious distinction was hard earned by The United States and Mexico. The number one, Baltic Sea, by contrast has ten countries to cast that nefarious blame on.
This cutting edge up-to-the-minute compendium of contamination of the Gulf should be read in order to get a grip on today's frivolous consumption of petroleum and indiscriminate over use of agricultural chemicals.

Excerpts:
Crippling pressures of European disease and aggressive encroachment drew natives into a commercial enterprise absent from aboriginal cultures before contact. They became supply-side hunters in a Faustian exchange, devastating animal populations and the wilderness ecosystem that had sustained their people for thousands of years. Hunting the woods near empty, they racked up huge debts to traders. Worse, they began starving in places once of plenty. Squeezed by British Carolinians pushing west and Gulf coasters pushing north, defaulting their land to British creditors, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and others moved down into the Florida peninsula in search of food and skins. The British lumped them into an undifferentiated collective they called Seminole.


America on a manifest destiny roll;
Pivotal moment in American expansion goes something like this: in the land deal of the century made with Napoleon Bonaparte and the French, Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the nation, opening the way for his countrymen to march across the continent unimpeded, a few Indian wars and snowy mountain passes notwithstanding. This is true. But settlement and trade in new western lands had greater chance of success with secure access to the sea. What made the deal especially enticing was New Orleans and the control of the Mississippi River, with the Gulf of Mexico as its vestibule.
Woodrow Wilson would ask Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. The great conflict in Europe was the first war run on oil; eighty percent of that used by Allied powers came from US fields.


1953, AND THE POSTWAR ECONOMY WAS in a recession, but the slump would not last a year. Americans were feeling prosperous, and the consumer engine was revved up. They were purchasing homes and having lots of kids, booming the birth rate to an all-time high. They were buying cars, big cars with big engines, ten-to-fifteen-miles-to-the-gallon cars but that was okay. The decade’s drivers were more interested in horsepower and zero-to-sixty acceleration than fuel efficiency, and gas was cheap. For twenty cents a gallon, they were hauling all those boomer kids around, commuting to work from the suburbs (if the car owners were white), and steering blissfully toward summer vacations. Every week on prime-time television, the popular Dinah Shore sang, “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”