The Everglades

The Everglades survived because no one ever fully conquered it.

In The Everglades: Swamp, Survival, and the Fight for Wild Florida, James R. Wexler traces the remarkable history of a landscape that has been Indigenous homeland, Seminole and Miccosukee refuge, frontier workplace, hunting ground, reclamation project, tourist destination, protected wilderness, and engineered water system.

Long before Florida's cities and highways, Native peoples built lives around the region's rivers, marshes, coasts, and tree islands. Later, Seminole communities used the wetlands to resist removal, while hunters, fishermen, farmers, and Gladesmen sought livelihoods in a place outsiders often considered useless. Then came plume hunters, land speculators, dredges, canals, roads, hurricanes, flood-control projects, national parks, airboats, alligators, and invasive pythons.

Wexler follows the people who tried to profit from the Everglades, transform it, preserve it, and repair the ecological consequences of earlier development. The result is not a simple story of villains and heroes, but a sweeping account of competing needs, changing values, and unintended consequences.

The Everglades is neither untouched wilderness nor conquered swamp. It is a living, contested landscape whose future still depends upon the choices people make about water, wildlife, and what remains wild.