Eighteen of Florida s best-loved writers here share with you their affection for Florida s wild side--the beautiful heart of a state under siege from development.
Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White, Al Burt, Patrick Smith, the late Archie Carr, and others evoke a Florida thick with pinewoods, alligators, and palmetto scrub; ribboned by miles of coast and dune; blessed with backcountry lakes, rivers, creeks, and springs. Strip malls and concrete cannot tame this wild Florida, but they can kill it. These essays offer passionate argument why that should not be allowed to happen.
Coming...

First explored by naturalist William Bartram in the 1760s, the St. Johns River stretches 310 miles along Florida's east coast, making it the longest river in the state. The first "highway" through the once wild interior of Florida, the St. Johns may appear ordinary, but within its banks are some of the most fascinating natural phenomena and historic mysteries in the state. The river, no longer the commercial resource it once was, is now largely ignored by Florida's residents and visitors alike.

In the first contemporary book about this American Heritage River, Bill Belleville describes...

In "Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes, and Golden Sharks" nature and travel writer Bill Belleville takes us through Florida, the Caribbean, and Latin America in quest of the distinctive, the wondrous, the threatened, and the undiscovered. His wanderings take him to the once prosperous, now submerged pirate city of Port Royal, Jamaica, and to an offshore Florida reef just in time for a night dive to witness the seldom-seen spawning of the coral.

In the Dominican Republic, Belleville dives with archaeologists in search of pre-Columbian Taino artifacts, long lost in the dark depths of a sacred...

Geography, politics, and other factors have allowed Cuba to preserve the region's most pristine coast and offshore marine environment. "Deep Cuba" recounts Bill Belleville's month-long journey around the island in the company of American and Cuban marine biologists and a Discovery Channel film crew. It was the first, and so far only, United States submersible research expedition in Cuban waters. From coral reefs to mangrove swamps to a submerged volcanic mountain, the voyagers encountered sublimely wild places unseen before by anyone from the United States--or even by many...