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Losing It All to Sprawl: How
Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape by Bill Belleville (University Press of Florida, Hardcover
199 pp., $24.95) Reviewed by Lynne Barrett
Next to the travel writing there needs to
be a shelf for the literature of staying put. On it would be Thoreau's Walden, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings'
Cross Creek, and William Least Heat Moon's Prairy Erth, books whose writers confined their skills of
observation to one place while letting the mind range far. It can be a greater challenge, in this form, to construct narrative;
the writer needs to tease out the larger implications in small incidents, to sing the turns of the natural year, and to trace
the deeper story of land and time. Bill Belleville does all of this, but his Losing It All
to Sprawl has more story than most, as he sets the value of one place against the accelerating tragedy of what those
who favor it call "development." Belleville is
most known as the exploring author of River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River and Sunken Cities,
Sacred Cenotes, and Golden Sharks. But in this book he documents his decade in a house down unpaved Sewell
Road off S.R. 46 in Sanford, in an area once known for celery farming. When he gets there the neighborhood has lapsed from
its agricultural heyday and a ruined orchard has long been going back to woodland. Divorced and somewhat rootless, he gradually
falls in love as he learns the materials and meaning of his Cracker house, built pragmatically for the climate before air
conditioning: "The house was constructed
from dense, heavy, heart cypress, which provided its own measure of natural insulation, and it was up on concrete blocks to
allow air to circulate under it. Its elevation also kept it above the low ground, preparing it for that special Florida moment
when monsoonal summer rains overwhelm the earth's ability to absorb them. Its roof was metal so that it would reflect
the sun, and its generously wide gables and overhangs would shelter most of the windows from the overhead glow. Two giant
deciduous hardwoods also stood guard, proving more shade--a southern magnolia to the front and a water oak to the side between
the house and the garage. The structure was more rectangular than not, and most of its girth was arranged on a north-south
axis for good reason: Its exterior walls could absorb solar heat from a low winter sun while also avoiding the scorch when
the summer sun was high overhead." "For
good reason" is the thought that beats through this book. The logic and grace that the builders and owners of this house
and their neighbors brought to their lives, whose hard work and small pleasures Belleville comes to know, are set against
the many bad reasons of those taking their place—the fatuous belief in progress, the politicians who give away more
to developers than the development will bring in, the desperate agreement of those who want work, and behind them the long
sequence of mistakes that is the history of Florida's relationship to the land.
Even as Belleville is, like the area's gopher tortoises, finding his burrow, out on the nearby highway a new predator
is entering the territory, its cry the beeping of the back-up signals on huge bulldozers. A mall is to be built. And as it
arrives, everything changes. S.R. 46 doubles in width. Auto dealerships arrive and send up searchlights. "The sky has
been diluted by light, and constellations that must have been comforting for ages have disappeared," Belleville writes.
The gopher tortoises, displaced, seek new habitat. Homes are sold to a speculator who rents them to drifters, thus lowering
the value of the nearby homes which he is avid to buy. Belleville cast the same naturalist's eyes with which he studies
an owl or a rabbit on those who move in; he sees the temporary workers who come for quick money and drug themselves on the
proceeds, the neglected children, the rage of a thwarted moneymaker and the timidity of a homeless woman who camps nearby,
the idealism of those who fight and the pragmatic resignation of those who leave. For relief from the dismay of sad discoveries,
he takes us on escapes into protected (but still threatened) areas, where he takes joy in discovering a natural spring and
understanding the land as the Timacua and Mayaca and Seminoles saw it, as the contrast between the untouched and the despoiled
widens. Just as he reads the landscape, Belleville reads
the history of Florida. He often draws on Rawling's Cross Creek, his nearest literary neighbor, but he forages
through all sorts of materials. The book includes a bibliography that ranges from the first observers of Florida, like William
Bartram in the 18th century, to the geological bulletins and hydrology studies which document what's happening today.
At one point Belleville gets his hands on a rare copy of the out of print (since 1929) From Eden to Sahara by John
Kunkel Small, which predicts what will happen as Florida dries up and comes to match the earth's other places at this
latitude. At the same time, Belleville gathers the unwritten
history of his particular place from those who have lived there. Not all is nostalgia--while we get the pleasures of flowering
shrubs and bathing in the coquina pond, we also learn about the exploitation of workers and the bad choices which almost always
have to do with water, the once-abundant resource that led to overwatering which leached the nutrients from the soil, the
flooded celery fields vulnerable to fungus controlled by copper sulfate till it built up copper in the soil , the cutting
of slash pine woods to make way for crops which couldn't thrive on the poorly drained soil, till the land became more
desirable for development than any other use. As the doom of Belleville's
paradise got ever closer, I found myself silently urging him to DO something, the way one yells at the hero in a horror movie.
But of course that yearning for someone else to be the hero is what lets all of us stay passive. Belleville shows us those
who fight and the immense forces arrayed against them, but with sad grace he does merely the best he can for his bit of land,
and the most he can, in writing this book, to stir us all.
Lynne Barrett is the author of The Secret Names of Women and editor of The Florida Book
Review.
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Mirage:
Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. by Cynthia Barnett (University of
Michigan Press, Paperback, 248pp., $18.95) Reviewed by James Barrett-Morison Cynthia Barnett
begins her tale of Florida's water with the story of David and Vivian Atteberry, two Illinoians who retired to the Orlando
area. Within a year, their home began to crack and break apart – it was falling into a giant sinkhole.
They were forced to abandon ship (or house) and moved back to Illinois. Barnett expertly and effortlessly
transitions from the Atteberrys' tale to science, explaining how a lack of groundwater increases the rate of sinkhole
formation in southern and western Florida.
In Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.,
Barnett links characters and environmental history, looking at well-known players like Henry Flagler, Walt Disney and
Bob Graham, but also others we don't expect. I never knew that Harriet Beecher Stowe, after the Civil
War, moved to Florida and acted as an advertiser luring northeasterners to Florida, becoming effectively the originator of
the Florida snowbirds. Barnett can be scathing. Take, for example, her assessment of one
well-known Broward County community: “If there ever was a town that should not exist, it is Weston,
Florida. . . To get there, you can take Florida's Sawgrass Expressway, which wiped out sawgrass, or the Panther Parkway,
which devastated panther habitat. The city of 65,000 is flush up against the remaining Everglades.
If you stand at its edge with your back to the city, the vista is sawgrass, as far as the eye can see.
Turn around, and the view is clay-colored rooftops, as far as the eye can see.” Without
Barnett's humor, the book might be a dry tome about the horrible effects of a lack of water on Florida and the Eastern
United States. Instead, the book becomes fun, albeit in a twist-your-stomach kind of way. When discussing
the Everglades restoration plan signed into law in 2000, she asks a pivotal question: “How much water will go to lawn
sprinklers, and how much to spoonbills?” Turn the page, and you see: “AND THE WINNER
IS. . . THE LAWN SPRINKLERS” Who is to blame? Politicians,
even those who view themselves as environmentalists, are forced by the electorate to support both the environment and
growth in what Barnett calls the “Florida politician's Janus pose.” Developers and
businessmen share culpability, as does the Army Corps of Engineers, which has its own Janus pose: many
of its environmental projects seek to counter the effects of its other projects, like restoring beaches eroded by earlier
Corps actions. The Corps were placed in charge of wetlands permits in Florida, supposedly in order to help
protect the environment. But between 1999 and 2003, they granted more than 12,000 permits, and rejected
only one. Smaller-scale groups, like homeowners’ associations, are responsible too.
Barnett relates the story of Sol Koppel, whose attempt to xeriscape his lawn with native plants in order to conserve
water was shot down by his homeowners' association. What was his crime? “Not
having enough grass.” After the wars and inefficiencies of the first three-quarters of
the book, the last few chapters take a more positive turn, looking at possible solutions like conservation efforts and desalination
plants. These are difficult and expensive ways of quenching Florida's thirst. But the real refrain
is best summed up by schoolteacher Elizabeth Falcone at a Boca Raton water-conservation meeting: “The
bottom line is, too many people.” If present trends continue, Florida will grow by 21% and surpass
New York to become America's third-most populous state within fifteen years. Without these new arrivals,
Barnett argues, the water troubles would be much more manageable. But what will stop them? Even David
and Vivian Atteberry, who fell into the sinkhole, still dream of living in Florida. Is Mirage one chapter in a horror
story or a turning point? With books like Barnett’s, no one can plead ignorance.
James Barrett-Morison is a junior at Ransom Everglades School in Coconut Grove, Florida. He is also a contributing
editor at Florida Book Review.
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