BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner
Gator Country is an in-depth look at the revolutionary transformation of Florida before and after Europeans turned this unique ecosystem upside down.
I personally witnessed it happen beginning in 1945 when the population was three million. My wife and I lived there for 22 years until the mid-1990s, and we wrote four books describing the monumental change while first living and cruising the waters, then engaged in ownership of income properties, and commercial shrimp fishing. We witnessed the change through two Arab oil embargoes and explosive population growth.
I found the book excellent; a great and informative read.
EXCERPTS
I would troll the creek for them, hoping to find the same magnificent gator that first lit up my imagination. But gators didn’t only pop up in the backyard ponds of my childhood. They took up residence everywhere in popular culture. In cartoons such as All Dogs Go to Heaven, fat and zany alligators provided comic relief. Although alligators can be dangerous, there is something in the way they move about the world, and especially in the way we react to them, that is inclined toward the slapstick.
Even in my hometown near Daytona Beach, it’s there. Just south, the Indian River Lagoon is embroiled in a decades-long fight to clean up Florida’s waterways. Once one of the most biodiverse estuaries in the Northern Hemisphere, boasting as many as forty-three hundred species of plants and animals, the lagoon is now dying. Nutrients from runoff have twisted the water composition. Algae took over, sparking a chain reaction that led to the most brutal manatee mortality event on record. More manatees died in the first three months of 2021 than in any other full year. Our love affair with lawns and golf courses is to blame. I was just as much part of the problem as any of my neighbors. It’s so easy to forget that our actions, no matter how small they seem, have environmental consequences. We defy nature, bending it to our will. That impulse is so prevalent in Western civilization that most of us have stopped noticing it at all. Nowhere is that animosity so clear as in the Everglades. For centuries, settlers have ripped up, paved, and drained the glades, and now we wonder why those ecosystems seem so irreparably broken that they’re poisoning us as we have done to them.
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