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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