The Florida Everglades: Like No Other Place in the World

While most agree that the Florida Everglades is not often a highly desired destination, there are many who would beg to differ. There is a small but vivacious and animated group of individuals whose passion revolves around the lifestyle that this magnificent ecosystem provides. As a child I was lucky enough to befriend several those whose culture revolves around this unique yet treacherous area, the Florida Everglades are infamous for alligator hunting season, incredible fishing, bird watching and air boat visits.

As a teenager I was lured to the Everglades by tales of adventure and danger I would experience in no other place in the world. Peers would show me pictures of beautiful fish, caught fresh and eaten that evening, tell stories of brave birds that would fight for bait, they would scream in laughter and frustration as they would recollect the many shrimp and shiners they had lost to opportunistic birds that could clear a bait bucket within minutes. I remember a handsome classmate coming to school in a sling and describing how the clean break was caused by a silly oversight when wrestling a five foot alligator, adding how lucky he had been to not had lost his arm entirely after wrestling the animal who had reverted into a “death roll,” a common way for alligators to render their victim(s) incapacitated by tearing at muscle and meat. I’d shiver at the legend of a 20 foot python that roams a local fishing hole and could easily overpower an adult man if caught off guard and in the water, my fears to be only further reinforced when, in the following year, a thirteen foot Burmese Python was found dead after trying to digest a six foot alligator! Friends would tease about a mammoth alligator named Jaws and how he often searched for “Newbies” to the Everglades, he would follow their airboat and wait for an opportune time to attempt to tear them out of it… “New blood attracts the biggest ones!”, they’d say. I pretended to not pay attention but I’ll admit now I always looked over my shoulder when I sat on the edge of that deafening airboat…

Though the Everglades do provide endless adventure and game for those brave enough to seek it, in the evening, right before the sun sets, the orange, red and yellow hews engulf the sky and the view seems almost unreal. I remember concluding that paints and markers could never replicate the true identity of a “color” and no one who has ever watched a summer sunset over the Florida Everglades would ever dare disagree.

Permaculture In Your Backyard!

Permaculture is the act of designing and producing human settlements and agricultural systems through farming strategies and crop and resource choices that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies around the world.Permaculture is revered for it’s emphasis on sustainable land use design the concept is based on ecological and biological principles, regularly using patterns that occur in nature as ideal examples in order to maximise effect and minimise work and the need for outside resources. The practice of permaculture strives to create stable, productive and self reliant ecosystems that provide crops and other valuable resources for human needs while at the same time integrating the land with its inhabitants without conflict. The ecological processes of plants, animals, their nutrient cycles, climatic factors and weather cycles are all variables that are accounted for when utilizing the technique.
Elements in a permaculture based system are viewed in relationship to other elements, where the outputs of one element become the inputs of another, otherwise stated; waste created by one plant, crop or resource becomes the food, shelter, fertilizer for another . Within a permaculture system, work is reduced, “wastes” become resources, productivity and yields increase, environments are restored and the resources provided to us are done so in the least most destructive manner upon the environment.
The theory behind the process is that, by training individuals to utilize local resources, encourage crop and plant/tree growth, those individuals can design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements, that decrease society's dependence on industrial systems of production and distribution that is fundamentally and systematically destroying Earth's valuable and irreplaceable ecosystems.
We have begun to utilize several of these permaculture based ideas in our own home as well as two other family homes within close proximity. As a family we have experimented with different types of fruit bearing trees and vegetable producing crops, we have attempted to see which crops grow well in the same proximity and which of these crops grow best during certain seasons.
We have found that crops that need shade and grow well in moist and predominantly sandy soil yield the most product when grown beneath larger fruit bearing trees such as plantains, papayas and avocado trees. Herbs such as rosemary and basil tend to flourish when grown alongside a sturdier larger plant or tree, most likely due to the protection the larger plant serves to the herbs in cooler parts of the season and shade it provides during summer. Also, all sorts of peppers tend to grow faster and produce more crops when they are grown together, regardless of the species, growing the peppers together sometimes causes cross-pollinating but the consequences are generally tasty and unique. Squash and cassava plants also flourish when grown in the same vicinity.
Our family has chosen to embrace the idea of home gardens and small scale farming, by each household farming a different crop and animal and supplying all other homes with the surplus of that resource we are all able to cut the cost of produce, chicken and lamb considerably. Though we are far from being completely self sustainable we could most definitely argue that a good 20% of our daily food consumption is raised/grown by one of the three households.

Last Child In The Jungle

Chicago Illinois has little to nothing to offer from the “outdoor” perspective. Skyscrapers line the streets and grass and the occasional maple is the extent of my encounters with environmental diversity. Field trips consisted of museums and historical visits but never a location that had any sort of ecological significance. Our science experiments would consist of growing an herb garden or observing a potato spread roots but never the classification of plants or animals, maybe in the inner city the idea of our environmental involvement is so far reached that a lesson on the topic would prove to be unconscionable to students. As an adult student, I now believe that education based of a concept and lifestyle so far removed from those you are teaching would be ineffective and seem meaningless. It’s disheartening to admit but as an adolescent, my school system did not, so much as introduce the concept of “environment”. Advising children on how to recycle does not constitute an acceptable level of instruction on the topic.

It is only when I moved to Florida that my environmental studies transformed into lessons of; species protection and revival, climate change and non renewable resources, destruction of rainforests and other woodland based ecosystems, alternative renewable resources, water and air pollution as well as erosion and the detrimental effects of mining and drilling. I had moved into the most rural (I can not stress this point enough) area of Collier County where panthers and bears still owned the land and the term “jungle” described the view from my bedroom window. I was not only able to recognize plants and animals I was taught about in class the day before but I was able to analyze and utilize concepts about how these plants and animals fit into their immediate environment, their state, their nation and what importance this animal had to the world as a whole, to Mother Nature. It wasn’t until I began to live in the world with animals that I could understand why we should save them. Ill never forget seeing a dolphin leap in the ocean for the first time, never be able to erase the memory of a panther hunting deer, never let go of the fear I felt when listening to the rattle of a diamondback or let go of the excitement of swimming with a pod of manatees.

It is only now that I can have a true passion for nature, understand our minimal and frankly useless contribution to it as humans and wonder in the awe of other seemingly “tiny” creatures that supersede our value to the world in the most shocking of ways.