Douglas

The way Douglas describes the everglades makes me really want to travel there. Even the ways people described it negatively, “…vast, miasmic swamps, poisonous lagoons, huge dismal marshes without outlet, a rotting, shallow, inland sea, or labyrinths of dark trees hung and looped about with snakes and dripping mosses , malignant with tropical fevers and malarias, evil to the white man,” it’s just BEGGING to be explored! It just blows my mind that this wonder of nature, with no equal on the planet, is just sitting in our back yard!

I’ve never been there before, but I want to go as soon as I can. I’ve heard a lot about invasive snakes damaging the ecosystem and that some people are actually hunting the snakes. THAT would be one hell of a summer! I’d love to do that for a month just to see what it would be like. I can’t say I have the same passion as the author, but I sure would love to spend some time there (certainly not permanently).

http://news.ifas.ufl.edu/2006/06/judas-snakes-help-researchers-removes-pythons-from-the-everglades/

I heard an interesting story from one of my engineering professors recently regarding the everglades. I'm not certain if it's true or not. I trust that it is, however I've not done any significant, in-depth research on the matter. Apperently during either WW2 or the cold war, the US navy was annoyed that they had to travel all the way around the florida peninsula to get from 1 side to the other for training purposes. So they proposed the digging of a canal, similar to the Pannama Canal, that cuts through the state for more easy travel for their ships. Well, they dug the canal, and were just about ready to bust open the flood gates to fill it with water, when someone from the US Army Corps of Engineers came running in to stop them. If they were to create this canal. It would have caused seawater to flow south into the everglades and completely destroy the ecosystem. I don't know if that story is true or not, but it's scary nonetheless.

The way this author describes the Everglades makes me feel like I was there. It's an eerie paradox the way she calls the everglades "unchangeable changing."

Overall I'd say this is the most enjoyable reading of the three we've had so far. It's not preachy, it's descriptive. It's not repudiative, it's beautiful.