Profiles the suffragist, feminist, and environmentalist who fought for the preservation and protection of the Everglades and won the battle that turned it into a national wilderness area.

As law enforcement officer and game manager for the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission, Lt. Tom Shirley was the law in one of the last true frontiers in the nation--the Florida Everglades. In Everglades Patrol, Shirley shares the stories from his beat--an ecosystem larger than the state of Rhode Island. His vivid narrative includes dangerous tales of hunting down rogue gladesmen and gators and airboat chases through the wetlands in search of illegal hunters and moonshiners. During his thirty-year career (1955-1985), Shirley saw the Glades go from frontier wilderness to "ruination" at the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers. He watched as dikes cut off the water flow and controlled floods submerged islands that had supported man and animals for 3,000 years, killing much of the wildlife he was sworn to protect.

Marjorie Harris Carr (1915-1997) is best known for leading the fight against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cross Florida Barge Canal. In this first full-length biography, Peggy Macdonald corrects many long-held misapprehensions about the self-described “housewife from Micanopy,” who struggled to balance career and family with her husband, Archie Carr, a pioneering conservation biologist. Born in Boston, Carr grew up in southwest Florida, exploring marshes and waterways and observing firsthand the impact of unchecked development on the state’s flora and fauna. Macdonald’s work depicts a determined woman and Phi Beta Kappa scholar who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in zoology only to see her career thwarted by institutionalized gender discrimination. Carr launched her conservation career in the 1950s while raising five children and eventually became one of the century’s leading environmental activists. A series of ecological catastrophes in the 1960s placed Florida in the vanguard of the burgeoning environmental revolution as the nation’s developing eco-consciousness ushered in a wave of revolutionary legislation. With Carr serving as one of the most effective leaders of a powerful contingent of citizen activists who opposed dredging a canal across the state, “Free the Ocklawaha” became a rallying cry for environmentalists throughout the country. Marjorie Harris Carr is an intimate look at this remarkable woman who dedicated her life to conserving Florida’s wildlife and wild places. It is also a revelation of how the grassroots battle to save a small but vitally important river in central Florida transformed the modern environmental movement.

Best Books of the Month: Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Gulf, a sweeping cultural and natural history of the bald eagle in America. The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction. Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves—monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents—The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.

Winner • Pulitzer Prize for History Winner • Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Finalist • National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction) A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, NPR, Library Journal, and gCaptain Booklist Editors’ Choice (History) Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence In this “cri de coeur about the Gulf’s environmental ruin” (New York Times), “Davis has written a beautiful homage to a neglected sea” (front page, New York Times Book Review). Hailed as a “nonfiction epic . . . in the tradition of Jared Diamond’s best-seller Collapse, and Simon Winchester’s Atlantic” (Dallas Morning News), Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf is “by turns informative, lyrical, inspiring and chilling for anyone who cares about the future of ‘America’s Sea’ ” (Wall Street Journal). Illuminating America’s political and economic relationship with the environment from the age of the conquistadors to the present, Davis demonstrates how the Gulf’s fruitful ecosystems and exceptional beauty empowered a growing nation. Filled with vivid, untold stories from the sportfish that launched Gulfside vacationing to Hollywood’s role in the country’s first offshore oil wells, this “vast and welltold story shows how we made the Gulf . . . [into] a ‘national sacrifice zone’ ” (Bill McKibben). The first and only study of its kind, The Gulf offers “a unique and illuminating history of the American Southern coast and sea as it should be written” (Edward O. Wilson).

"From the earliest descriptions of the state's natural beauty to the degradation of the Everglades, virtually every facet of Florida environment is included in Paradise Lost? Nor have the authors neglected the human side of the story, from William Bartram, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Archie Carr to various development boosters and bureaucrats. . . . A fine collection that will make an important contribution to environmental history generally and to the history of Florida in particular."--Timothy Silver, Appalachian State University "A magnificent contribution to Florida's environmental history and a fascinating analysis of 'paradise lost' in the land of the pink flamingos and Disney."--Carolyn Johnston, Eckerd College This collection of essays surveys the environmental history of the Sunshine State, from Spanish exploration to the present, and provides an organized, detailed overview of the reciprocal relationship between humans and Florida's unique peninsular ecology. It is divided into four thematic sections: explorers and naturalists; science, technology, and public policy; despoliation; and conservationists and environmentalists. The contributors describe the evolving environmental policies and practices of the state and federal governments and the dynamic interaction between the Florida environment and many social and cultural groups including the Spanish, English, Americans, southerners, northerners, men, and women. They have applied historical methodology and also drawn on the methodologies of the fields of political science, cultural anthropology, and sociology. Of obvious value to environmentalists and general readers interested in Florida's history, exploration, and development, the book will also serve as a solid introduction to the subject for undergraduates and graduate students. Jack E. Davis is associate professor of history at University of Florida. Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and director of the University Honors College at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.

Water has dominated images of the South throughout history, from Hernando de Soto's 1541 crossing of the Mississippi to tragic scenes of flooding throughout the Gulf South after Hurricane Katrina. But these images tell only half the story: as urban, industrial, and population growth create unprecedented demands on water in the South, the problems of pollution and water shortages grow ever more urgent. In Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance, Craig E. Colten addresses how the South -- in an environment fraught with uncertainty -- can navigate the twin risks of too much water and not enough. From the arrival of the first European settlers, the South's inhabitants have pursued a course of maximum exploitation and control of the area's plentiful waters, investing widely in wetland drainage and massive flood-control projects. Disputes over southern waterways go back nearly as far: obstruction of fish migration by mill dams prompted new policies to protect aquatic life as early as the colonial era. Colten argues that such conflicts, which have heightened dramatically since the explosive urbanization of the mid-twentieth century, will only become more frequent and intense, making the shift toward sustainable use a national imperative. In tracing the evolving uses and abuses of southern waters, Colten offers crucial insights into the complex historical geography of water throughout the region. A masterful analysis of the ways in which past generations harnessed and consumed water, Southern Waters also stands as a guide to adapting our water usage to cope with the looming shortage of this once-abundant resource.