Jack E. Davis: An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

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For those with patience, Jack E. Davis’s An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, (The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia, 2009), can at times be a most rewarding read. At the same time, some readers’ patience may be tried because Davis, an Associate Professor at the University of Florida, has packed the book with levels of detail that do not always seem warranted for his treatment of Douglas’s long life and her central role in helping to save what is left of the Everglades. There is little doubt, as Davis makes clear, that Douglas was a remarkable woman. She, as much as, or more than most, was responsible for bringing attention to the beauty and uniqueness of lower Florida’s wetland ecosystem, and few worked harder than she to bring about their preservation. Douglas, a journalist, novelist and essayist, poet, social activist, environmentalist, and author of perhaps the seminal work on the Everglades, River of Grass, was by all accounts a force to be reckoned with. Without her passion and advocacy for the Everglades, it is hard to imagine that today there would be an Everglades in any meaningful sense of the term. The account Davis gives in An Everglades Providence is carefully documented. In his research Davis seems to have left no source pertaining to Douglas’s life unexamined. Davis’s biography is over 600 pages long, and this does not include over 120 pages of footnotes. Davis is so careful about his documentation that virtually every paragraph concludes with a footnote. Lovers of this scholarly attention to detail should be pleased. But this reviewer found that this close attention to detail is sometimes unnecessary. As I made my way into the book, I got the feeling that Davis was attempting too much at once, and that he may have been more successful by dividing the effort into several volumes, each with its own theme. Not only does