The Wilde Side

In many ways, education and conservation go hand in hand

Though Florida’s 1920s boom was followed quickly by a bust, it foreshadowed our modern-day growth

Like the Eye in the Sky at the Hard Rock Casino, wildlife is watching us all the time.

Stuff, like intestinal E. coli bacteria, is something we all have. To put a finer point on it, what we have is stuff; what other people have is junk.

Native people, traditional people like the Hopi who tell of couriers running in both directions across the Bering Straits, believe that they didn’t come from anywhere, that they were always here.

No matter where we hang our Stetsons, the subdivision we all share is the Atlantic coastal ridge, sometimes called the rim of the Everglades, a narrow strip of land elevated a little higher than a curb and platted with beach and dunes, turtle grass jungles, mangrove swamps, tidal mud flats, marshes, hammocks, prairies, pastures and piney flatlands. Like any Eden, our idyllic parcel is also favorable to the mythical apple, the poisoned fruit. (The apple, incidentally, is not just mythically toxic. Slice through its equator and you’ll find a pentagram of chambers, each holding a lustrous brown seed veined with cyanide.)