“Beauty and the beasts: there you have the Everglades in a nutshell. Imagine evenings reddened by flights of spoonbills while knots of gators huff and slither in the ooze. Hold in your mind’s eye vast swaths of saw grass, of cypress, and of mangrove carpeting the earth, each one punctuated by its own kind of exquisite detail, an orchid here, a tree snail there, the bands of color on the snail shell offering a palette that nothing from Delft or Limoges can match. Part of the beauty of this quite literally extra-ordinary place is the beauty of its creatures’ adaptation, the delicate web of interdependencies that bind the parts to the singular whole. The more delicate the threads, however, the more easily they are ruptured.”
— From Everglades: The Beautiful Rebuke   william debuys