An Environmental History of Northeast Florida.

An Environmental History of Northeast Florida. By James J. Miller. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 1998. Pp. xvi, 223. $49.95, ISBN 0-8130-1600-2.)

The scope of environmental history often appears daunting to other historians. Early works in the field covered regions as large as the South Atlantic states over several centuries. But in recent years environmental scholars have paradoxically tightened their focus to subregions and expanded their perspective to include major climatic changes. State archaeologist James J. Miller, following both of these trends, turns his attention in An Environmental History of Northeast Florida to 5,000 square miles on the coastal plain and examines the St. Johns River drainage since the last Ice Age. Miller walks the reader through major geologic forces, as well as archaeological research, with the illustrated assistance of forty-two maps. The arrival of the first people to live on the St. John's River (5,000 years ago) coincided with a climate that supported freshwater snails. Here the author sometimes chronicles agriculture and significant changes in social organization, however, without reference to the environment. From the archaeological perspective, the Spanish discoveries of the sixteenth century took place because Europeans "arrived with a highly developed social hierarchy" and developed two crucial technologies, namely, "weapons and seafaring" (p. 89).

Miller incorporates the records of four nations and contrasts their land-use practices. Not only did each Spanish entrada infect the Tocobaga, Timucuan, and Apalachee Indians with disease, but their plants and animals (particularly pigs) significantly recreated the landscape. The Spanish fort at St. Augustine existed primarily to protect Atlantic shipping lanes, so that in two centuries the Spanish massacred their French rivals and subjugated the native population but did not even build a passable road through the region. The British land grant system (1763-1784) allowed more extensive exploitation through indigo cultivation and timber harvest, but by the time the region was returned to Spain, the new governor described it as suffering from "extreme decadence" (p. 145). Because of the continued battles with the Seminoles and the Civil War, the U.S. did not consume the vast stands of pine forest until the late nineteenth century, when railroads arrived and a timber boom descended. For at least five hundred years this narrow strip of land has been altered largely by international or at least outside forces. This book therefore challenges the notion that we can restore a balanced, halcyon environment in northeast Florida, since the history of the region "does not reveal even a typical or standard landscape" (p. 190), and "the current environment is as much European as it is Floridian" (p. 191).

The author correctly points out in his conclusion that, by stopping short of 1945, his book misses the greatest changes to the Florida landscape, wrought by modern developers and the combined forces of global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, and oceanic pollution. Until similar attention is given to this modern period, the study cannot completely address planning issues. But Miller does render an idea useful to both historians and planners: clearly, human beings "must foresee and accommodate rather than react in surprise to change" (p. 198).

MARGARET LYNN BROWN Brevard College