Swamplife

<div>Little in North America is wilder than the Florida Everglades-a landscape of frightening reptiles exotic plants in profusion swarms of mosquitoes and unforgiving heat. And yet even from the early days of taming the wilderness with clearing and drainage the Everglades has been considered fragile unique and in need of restorative interventions. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork with hunters in the Everglades Laura A. Ogden explores the lives and labors of people animals and plants in this most delicate and tenacious ecosystem.</div> <div><br> Today the many visions of the Everglades-protectionist ecological commercial historical-have become a tangled web of contradictory practices and politics for conservation and for development. Yet within this entanglement the place of people remains highly ambivalent. It is the role of people in the Everglades that interests Ogden as she seeks to reclaim the landscape's long history as a place of human activity and in doing so discover what it means to be human through changing relations with other animals and plant life.</div> <div><br> Ogden tells this story through the lives of poor rural whites gladesmen epitomized in tales of the Everglades' most famous outlaws the Ashley Gang. With such legends and lore on one side and outsized efforts at drainage and development on the other <i>Swamplife</i> strikes a rare balance offering a unique insight into the hidden life of the Everglades-and into how an appreciation of oppositional culture and social class operates in our understanding of wilderness in the United States.</div>