The Everglades: An Environmental History, by David McCally, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida (1999). Reviewed by Jaap Vos

Abstract

I am one of those few lucky people who lives so close to the Everglades that I am able to visit them at least once a month. Living close to the Everglades makes you appreciate the sheer size of the Everglades, the diversity of habitats, the magnitude of wading birds during the breeding season, and the amazing differences between the wet season and the dry season. As someone who is deeply interested in the Everglades, I not only visit the Glades as often as I can, I also like to read anything that is published about the Everglades, which is probably why I was very excited to review David McCally's book The Everglades. The book starts out in a promising manner, with a description of the pre-drainage Everglades. In this part of his book, David McCally uses a chronological approach to explain the factors that contributed to the formation of the Everglades. The strength of this approach is that it clearly shows that the original Everglades are the product of the subtle interactions between a subtropical water regime, the unique rock substrate and the ever-present fires. McCally illustrates that because of these factors, the Everglades can only exist on a vast scale which provides resilience and minimizes the effects of natural events such as hurricanes, floods, fires and freezes (p. 26). What is probably most interesting in this section is that McCally shows how the Everglades went from being a "aquatic cornucopia to the backwater of a backwater" after Florida's indigenous Indians disappeared in the mid-Eighteenth Century (p. 57). According to McCally, indigenous Indians prospered in south Florida "because they understood the environmental setting and lived within its parameters" (p. 57), while the Spanish and later Americans regarded south Florida as wasteland that had to and could be transformed (p. 56). After McCally describes the origins of the Everglades in the first three chapters, he discusses the era of transformation that starts in the Nineteenth Century and continues until today. This section discusses successive attempts to drain the Everglades to make it suitable for agriculture: Ever since Florida came under American control in 1821, the climate of the southern peninsula encourages the Americans who settled the region to believe that it could support tropical agriculture, and the organic soils of the Everglades convinced early observers that the peninsula's interior would support luxuriant growths of such crops (p. 85). McCally continues to show us that the promise of fertile lands was false and that agriculture in the Everglades was, and is, much more complicated than originally thought. The entire section describes the "political chicanery, fraudulent engineering data, ... financial fast dealings" (p. 115) and the general lack of understanding of the intricacies of the Everglades system during this period. The story is interesting, and shows that until 1948, when the Army Corps of Engineers became involved, most of the drainage effort was not based on scientific research of the region but on speculation...

Identification of a Gallium-Containing Carbon Deposit Produced by Decomposition of Trimethyl Gallium

“…Details of the calculation method and the thermodynamic database used are described elsewhere. [9][10][11] The deposits, along with the GaN films, were characterized by several techniques including scanning electron microscopy ͑SEM͒, transmission electron microscopy ͑TEM͒, X-ray diffraction ͑XRD͒, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy ͑EDS͒, electron probe microanalysis ͑EPMA͒, Fourier transform infrared ͑FTIR͒ spectroscopy, and micro-Raman spectroscopy.…”