Searching for Paradise in the Florida Everglades

Abstract

This article explores the process by which the cultural history of Royal Palm Hammock, the most visited site within Everglades National Park, Florida, informs the landscape's natural history. To understand this process, I analyze the scientific literature, including naturalists' fieldwork reports, surveys, fieldnotes and other archival material spanning the late 1800s to the mid-1930s, as well as ethnographic interviews conducted with local Everglades hunters who depended upon this landscape during the latter part of this era. As I demonstrate, local people, serving as guides and informants, critically contributed to the production of ecological knowledge about Royal Palm Hammock, though the evidence of these contributions has been distorted by the natural history literature's negative stereotypes of local landscape practices.