Thing you could ever do. Watch after words sunday night at nine eastern p. M. On cspan twos book tv two good afternoon. No one likes to sit in the front row but there are one, two, six, seven seats in the front row. Come out and see. I want to begin by thanking Peggy Mcdonald and all of those who have worked to make the madison, such a terrific source of support for gainesville authors and their book. Peggy, thank you so much. [applause] some of the best nonfiction writing allows us to see something we thought we knew well in an entirely different way. This has been the power of my friend, jack davis career as an environmental historian who examines the past not through the spy glasses of the sailors but through the curves of the land, the running of the tide in the rush of the wind and rain. This is also the power of jacks new book were here to celebrate, the gulf the making of an american city. The clear light of nature tells a truer story than the cloudy minds of men. Nature has been and i quote participants emphasis and catalyst. It was the riches that made nations wealthy and powerful and over which their armies fought. It was the wildness our ancestors insisted on taming. The scourge that left them despairing in the blessing that kept them alive. Introducing jack in the golf is a challenge as he prays for this book is deep. Ive thrown all of that out. Instead since he plans to talk about some of the revelation in his book, i thought i would share a few revelations about jack. Last fall the two of us led about two dozen students on an overnight field trip to seahorse key, and uninhabited gulf Barrier Island. Sensitive to the consciousness of the students in my nature writing class and his environmental history class, and the number of vegetarians and vegans among them, i declared the weekend vegetarian. I asked everyone to make a veggie dish for our potluck dinner. When we all went to prepare our dishes in an Old Lighthouse kitchen on saturday night, jack uncovered his to reveal meatloaf [laughter] jack and i have been writing friends for ten years. Almost every morning around 5 0s to test out insight, to find just the right word or metaphor, or to restore each others confidence after a rejection letter or two long silence from editors in new york. But only now will jack note how annoyed i was by that meatloaf. [laughter] four, as we all do, with the people we value and as the best writers do with their subjects, i had to open my mind to the complexity that my friend of the environmental historian does not fit into a politically correct green note on. Let me dispel a few other myths about jack. He has a reputation among students for being severe, especially when it comes to grammar. Woe is the one who uses a passive voice, who punctuates outside quotation marks, or uses that where a who should be. [laughter] im glad you caught my joke. But once they take his class, the students discover their professor sensitivity. Particularly when the weather is nice and he takes them outside. He likes to ask about an enormous time your clean hall that Scientists Say is one of the oldest wreaths in the region , a rare survivor mid 92 acres of forest just right. Jack is also known for his exercise and diet regime, working out six days a week and eating little more than, you guessed it, meats, vegetables, and fruit. The real story here is more complex. Discovering it literally requires rifling through his desk drawers. The fitness guru consumes an astonishing amount of chocolate. [laughter] jacks entire top right desk drawer is dedicated to dark chocolate bars, all 85 cocoa. He nibbles squares of them while he writes in the wee hours, when the rest of us are drinking coffee. Richer than the chocolate are the stories jack revealed in this beautiful book. Before he shares a few of them, i should properly introduce him as a us professor who researches , writes and teaches not only on the environment but also race, feminism, florida, sustainability and ports. As the author, editor or coeditor of six other books including his awardwinning biography, of Marjorie Stoneman douglas, called an everglades providence and best of all is father to his fabulous daughter, willa. You can raise your hand willa. Well applaud you. [applause] so, what happens with the meatloaf at the vegetarian potluck . First, several ravenous students exclaimed, thank god as Commission Point or gay, professor davis. Then his dish was wiped clean before any of the others. I give you the talented, miss but been and the always insightful jack davis,. Good afternoon. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] the late great writer harry cruz , used to say living in gainesville was smack in the middle of the state because he could get up in the morning and drive an hour east and watch the sunrise behind the Atlantic Ocean then he could turn around and come back to gainesville and write a story for playboy or esquire and if that didnt work out, have a cocktail and lunch. Of course, harry cruz it wasnt just one cocktail, two or three. Then hed get back into his car and drive west in our twoseater key and watch the sunset into the gulf of mexico. Having spent most of my life on the gulf of mexico, ive seen countless gulf sunsets. They make it hard for me to live landlocked here in gainesville. With all that said, missing the gulf of mexico is the Gainesville Community and thats you guys. I thank you for coming out. Such a beautiful day. Thank you for sacrificing your day to spend your time locked inside for walls. I almost didnt come back. [laughter] i also want to thank anybody who has written a book and theres number of people who have written wonderful books in this room, everybody whos written a book, knows its not a solitary endeavor. There are many people involved. There are several of those here. Friends, family, librarians who are also friends, students, former students and these things are just really cannot come to be without the help of so many folks. I also want to thank Peggy Mcdonald for doing such a wonderful job with this museum but also with organizing this event and publicizing the hell out of it. I know youre tired of her Facebook Messages but i appreciated each and every one of them. Of course, i have to think cynthia barnett, she suggested that she have this writing relationship. Its been a wonderful one for me its changed my profession and cynthia is a good friend but also shes a wonderful professional partner. She works as hard as anybody to promote this event, as well, shes my local publicist, ive i like to say. Yet, we have this fantastic relationship and if theres any part in this book that shines, you can be sure that cynthia had a role in it. She read every word of this means your script in draft, many words, more than once, multiple, multiple times and she listened to my angst. So, thank you, cynthia. I want to begin by sharing a few facts about the gulf of mexico. You may not know but the gulf of mexico is the largest gulf and the tenth largest body of water in the world. Yet, geographers consider the gulf of mexico as a mere part of the Atlantic Ocean. I think this is a rip off to the gulf of mexico. Gulf actually began informing long before the atlantic was a puddle of water. Technically, this makes the gulf of mexico the big sibling to the larger fee. We all know about the gulf beautiful beaches but did you know when youre walking on the beaches, youre walking on mountains . This beautiful quartz sand that we have in florida and other parts of the gulf originated as erosion from the appellation mountains. At one time were as high as the himalayan mountains. The beaches were not the reason for or the original reason for the gulf tourism. It was a fish, tarpon, back in the 19th century launch that is today the gulf multi business billiondollar tourist rate. Were familiar what the gulf dead zone can reach the size of connecticut, depending upon conditions but i bet you didnt know theres a direct connection to the gulf dead zone in the commercial sponsors of saturday morning cartoons. If you want to know more about that, you have to read my book. [laughter] we know that gulf is a magnet for hurricanes. Its been the site of the daedalus hurricane in us history , they galveston storm of 1900 which 800010000 lights. The costliest hurricane which was Hurricane Katrina in 2005 which racked up 108 million in damages and took nearly 1900 lights. I would of course be shamed in the presence of cynthia barnett, author of that wonderful book, rain, if i didnt Say Something about rain on the gulf. If the radio city in the us is on the gulf of mexico. Does anyone know what the city is . Whats the rainiest city on the gulf . Its in the northern golf gulf. Mobile. What did you say, willa . Did you really . Thats my daughter, shes not telling the truth. All right, smartypants. How many inches . 63 inches. The impact of storms would be much greater if not for Barrier Islands that circle the gulf of mexico. The longest Barrier Island in the world is padre island at a hundred 13 miles is in texas. Tabasco sauce was invented on eight louisiana island, avery island, and florida has an island that is distinguished for having the greatest population density on the gulf of mexico in florida. Nearly 5000 people. Square mile. Anybody have any idea, kathy, my dear friend from my teenage days , we grew up together in pinellas county. Any idea . Treasure island. Treasure island and Dallas County has nearly 5000 people. At the other end of the spectrum is sanibel island. 400 people. Square mile. Why would you go live on Treasure Island . [laughter] Barrier Islands and more than 100 rivers that run through the gulf are responsible or help make gulf one of the richest extremes environments in the world. There are more than 200 estuaries in the gulf of mexico. A quarter of all estuaries in the United States. You have Barrier Islands on one side and freshwater coming down and mixing in with the saltwater which makes the estuary but you have a Barrier Island that helps contain that salt and freshwater mix. Also, among those estuaries are coastal marshes. Nearly half of all coastal marshes in the United States are on the gulf of mexico. Most of those in louisiana but a good portion of them just west of here in the florida big bend. Another form of estuary is a mangrove forest. Florida is home to the majority of its countries mangroves. These marvelous estuaries had made the golf missionary, the commercial fish wary, more productive than those of the east coast combined. Eightyfive, 80 odd of the domestic shrimp come from the gulf of mexico. Forty some odd of the oysters come from the gulf of mexico. Anyone whos fished off shore in the gulf of mexico knows you can go 3040 miles out whos done that . How does the water go . Yeah, 40 miles out but how many 75, you never see more than ten or 15 feet deep that far out. There you go. You can run aground out there if you dont watch out, as he said. Why is that . Because of the Continental Shelf the Continental Shelf reaches in some places along the gulf 90 miles out. At the end of the shelf when the water was thousands of years ago when the water was much lower, the end of the Continental Shelf was the beach. People lived out there. Florida was no Sunshine State there, there was cold and windswept. They lived out there with mastodons in giant ground sloth s and giant armadillos, the kind we run over on the streets these days. Very different place. This book is about the 10000 year relationship between the gulf of mexico and people. Both golf siders and those who were connected to the gulf of barley way places. One fact i didnt mention is the result of the relationship between people and the environment is that the Worst Oil Spill in the us history occurred in the gulf of mexico. That of course was the 2010 bp disaster. Which, by the way, is not the worst environmental disaster at the golf gulf has suffered. Not even close. We can talk about that during q a if youd like. I began research on this book before the bp oil spill and initially, i didnt know how to put the history of the gulf of mexico together. I couldnt find the story that i thought should be told. Then the floating oil platform that none of us had heard of, exploded 40 miles out from louisiana. In april of 2010 and 11 people were tragically killed while many of us were reading in bed, oblivious to what was going on. Perhaps, ready to turn out the lights and maybe even thinking about the next day, being earth day. The very day that the people deepwater horizon sank into the gulf of mexico. For 87 nightmarish days that spring and summer, the spill dominated the news headline. No more put fish or birds escape this oil tied then could we humans. Without realizing it, the spill consumed the golf identity. It took it over. As gettysburg a borough in pennsylvania became the most famous president ial address in history, the oil spill, the gulf became the Worst Oil Spill in history. Even today, 70 years later, if you google gulf of mexico, just those three words, the oil spill will pop up to the top of the selection. So, the thing about the disaster is the disaster should not, define a place. A single event in a persons place doesnt define that person. So with this thought in mind, i now had a central objective that i could start with in writing this book. That was to reclaim the gulf identity. Its fuller, truer identity separate from the oil spill. Equally important, just as in a biography of a person, you write the biography from that persons life, my point of view had to come from the gulf. In other words, i wanted to bring readers into the story through the gulf of mexico. I also wanted gulf to take center stage. That meant standing before or at the very least, human subjects in human history. I wanted readers to see gulf as an agent as a force that shaped the huge and unfit human expense i believe nature does. The way i decided to bring this to the reesers was to organize chapters around natural characteristics of the gulf of mexico. Geography, climate, fish, birds, islands, estuaries, rivers, beaches and yes, oil. As i wasnt writing the book, two things happened that surprised me. One i increasingly realized that the origins of the book, the motion as well as the intellectual origins of the book , dated to my childhood and years of growing up in the gulf of mexico first in the fort up and handle and then down on the peninsula. I didnt know back then but my experience from catching a fish to hunkering down during a hurricane were preparing me for writing a biography of the gulf of mexico. Nobody had written a history of the gulf of mexico. I thought it was a privilege to be able to do this, to write about what i considered this wonderful feet. The other thing that happened was that when i was writing, the history open to me anyway that it seemed that it wanted to be written. Fiction writers often talk about the characters and stories taking over the writing, showing the author the way through until the end of the book. Thats what was happening to me in writing nonfiction in a way that did not happen with my previous books. Every day i sat down to write after i had my dark chocolate. [laughter] or while im having my dark chocolate, every day i sat down to write and every day brought a new discovery. It revealed new connections within the story with this boundless web, much like the web of life in nature, boundless web standing landscapes and time in between people and places, as i moved along through this web, i was using not only what i found and read in the documents but also what i heard, saw, smiled, touched, and even tasted as you taste the salt air. In my own experiences with the gulf, past and present, i wanted the sensory memories to come through in my writing. To inspire the writing but i also wanted to carry the writing , to shape, to guide it. When i looked through the documents which of course are the conventional materials of the historian, i try to get in touch, best i could, with the sensory experiences of the human , historical subjects i encountered. The various native people, the french, the spanish, the new englanders, the chicagoans, the new yorkers, as well as the gulf the gulf siders, alabama, mississippi, louisiana, and of course texas. As this larger story started emerging and as it was showing itself to me, it turned me in the direction of both nature writing and historical narrative. So i incorporated both in the book. I tried to weave the two together. I want to share examples of each in my readings today. Those of you who already have a copy of the book, if you feel like following along im going to start on page 185, which is Chapter Eight on birds. At dusk in april on the far southern shore of argentina, a bird standing in the surf ready to follow his instinct. Its a small bird, less than 2 ounces, larger than a couple slices of bread. Its a beacon straight and narrow and dark with a hint of orange. A flute that peeps and squeaks. Its belly is white and on top replacing winter grey plumage is snowy lovers waist with brown once. Pivoting the ted on a barely discernible neck for final preening, the bird reveals more white above the base of its tail. The white rum sandpiper has been in patagonia since december gorging on marine and vertebrates. Its reserved will that will consume to fuel, the sandpiper will rise on a 17inch wingspan nearly three times its body language. It orients its direction by the stars and draw us toward a destination it species has known for millennia. This bird is one of the pockets my graders in the world. By the time all is said and done , it will have flown 7000 miles staying aloft for up to 16 hours a stretch. The entire length of south america passes below for the first stop in venezuela. At the rest and replenishment, it begins traveling under starlet feeling with his companion each a mere foot apart beating wings over the western caribbean and the yucatan and without stopping, across the the gulf. When the sandpipers make landfall between texas and louisiana, they drop into a spitfire dive straight toward earth, steel in information and touch down gently at waters edge. For a week they will feed at the surf