Description: This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. Prior to the park's creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland--and thus a region in need of protective status. While these new ideas foreshadowed the later emergence of modern environmentalism, tourism and the economic desires of Florida's business and political elites also impacted the park's future. These groups saw the Everglades' unique biology and ecology as a foundation on which to build a tourism empire. Yet, even after the park's creation, conservative landowners successfully fought to limit the park and saw it as a threat to their own economic freedoms. The battle to save the swamp's biodiversity continues, and Everglades Park stands at the center of ongoing restoration efforts.
Brief description: Chris Wilhelm is associate professor of history at the College of Coastal Georgia. His research has appeared in the Journal of Southern History and the Florida Historical Quarterly. He lives in Brunswick, Georgia.