Draining Paradise: A Tour of Salt Creek in St. Petersburg, Florida

Introduction—Salt Creek and City Nature

To place Salt Creek geographically, imagine the state of Florida. Zoom in to the west central coast,¹This multi-media essay has developed over a long period of time and thanks are due to my home university's Center for Civic Engagement, the Frank E. Duckwall Foundation, the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, and most of all, to my students. Thanks to my comrades at Friends of Salt Creek; my church community at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church (at Salt Creek's headwaters), who have taught me to see my adopted hometown in a new light; to Allen Tullos and anonymous readers for Southern Spaces; to Julie Armstrong, Jack Davis, Ray Arsenault, Amanda Hagood, Ray Roa, Chris Meindl, and Jacqueline Hubbard, Esq. then go to St. Petersburg, a midsized city—the second largest in the Tampa Bay area. St. Pete holds down the bottom of Pinellas County, a peninsula upon a peninsula, bracketed by Tampa Bay to the east and the Gulf of Mexico to the west. Water is everywhere.

St. Petersburg has always been two things: a resort town and a product of the segregated South. Known affectionately as the Sunshine City, St. Pete claims the Guinness World Record for sunshine (as a can of local craft beer will tell you, 768 consecutive days). This winter haven boomed in the early twentieth century. White vacationers and retirees flocked here for the weather, often to relax on the green benches (hence the beer) that once lined Central Avenue, the city's main thoroughfare and longtime racial divide. African Americans first migrated here to build the railroad and work the tourist economy, building tight communities over time.

Off the tourist map, Salt Creek remains absent from view, for reasons both geographic and social. Because the water flows in a northeast direction, starting from the middle of Pinellas County then into Tampa Bay, the creek falls off the orderly cadastral map. Avenues go East-West and the streets North-South, while Salt Creek cuts a diagonal course. Most of the creek's banks are culverted, so its "nature" does not adhere to conventional labels of leisurely consumption. Racial divides further hide this fragmented waterway, and the environmental merges with the Sunshine City's flickering, all-too-easily-denied Jim Crow past.

Today only a handful of locals can trace Salt Creek's full course. The best way is to start at the mouth, Bayboro Harbor, just south of the city's previously moribund but now skyrocketing downtown. As one journeys southwest, going upstream, the creek services a working port (properties now eyed for luxury housing). The creek passes under a mangrove cover and empty lots, owned mostly by absentee speculators. The city's sizeable population of street people, who use its shielded banks for shelter, are the principal stakeholders here. Under Fourth Street, a major north-south corridor, Salt Creek opens into mangrove-shrouded Bartlett Pond. Beyond the pond, it crosses under Twenty-Second Avenue South, also a major thoroughfare, before vanishing into a culvert through Harbordale, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Pinellas County. Dammed at the north-south running Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Street (or Ninth Street, to old timers), the channel opens into Lake Maggiore, historically an estuarine body of water, now maintained as fresh. Beyond the lake, finally, Salt Creek splits into several other unnamed sources.

Recovering an urban waterway is no easy task, as it requires travel across both time and space. This tour, "Draining Paradise," attempts to render visible our everyday—yet hidden—lives, where water meets land. Because Salt Creek pays no heed to squared-off boundaries or cornered streets, and because property claims trump natural processes, it suffers neglect. In a city founded upon leisure—moreover, with a disenfranchised working class needed to produce that leisure—what counts as "nature" inevitably falls along social, economic, and racial lines. A continuing legacy of inequity shapes environmental priorities. Yet Salt Creek's history is complicated. Water quality intersects with social structures, though not in any simple or straightforward way. The words and conventions we use to describe natural beauty fill in few gaps, nor do current models of environmental justice fully apply. This aquatic system passes through several different neighborhoods—white and Black, rich and poor, protected and industrialized, through parts of town in clear neglect and others in good health. The social constructs fragment the hydrology until a citizenry can no longer see itself in nature. So how do we teach ourselves to see the parts as one whole? Can we come together as a community by cognitively remapping a forgotten stream? If so, what terms do we use? What's the storyline for a creek that has become a ditch?

I first stumbled upon my problem quite by accident, as an extension of my job as an English professor at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus. I came to USF as a part-time instructor, tasked with developing a course called "Rivers of Florida." For several semesters, I ventured with students in canoes and kayaks onto the state's many spectacular wild and scenic rivers—traveling hours for peak nature experiences amid awesome alligators, long legged wading birds, and floodplains filled with cypress—waving trails of Spanish moss over the slick obsidian water. Despite the beauty of our surroundings, student essays from the "Rivers" classes were mostly pedestrian paeans to the "real Florida" and laments for a vanishing nature. Tired of burning class time and fossil fuels, and bored with cliché writing, I turned to nature close to home—Salt Creek, whose mouth empties right onto our campus.

With little initial support, I threw myself into a curriculum that built nature around the city. The project came to consume my work as teacher, writer-researcher, citizen, and activist. The early stages were marked by confusion and indifference. The problem, from a pedagogical standpoint, starts with semantics. What happens when a stream or creek becomes a culvert or ditch? Why do those words matter? We urban dwellers, who seek out nature close to home, are linguistically bereft: there is no term to describe the successful interface of natural and built environs. Outside cities, we have any number of categories for describing natural landscapes. The "wilderness" and "preserve" define parks, without people; the "georgic" or "bucolic" covers farmland; a "pastoral" is where classical shepherds tended their flock while reflecting upon the corruption in Rome, and today denotes cherished spaces of imagined innocence—like a baseball diamond or the Andy Griffith Show. But nature in the city presents an absence. To address this problem, I set up a classroom model. I founded a fictional group, "Friends of Salt Creek," built a website, and started exploring with my students.²For a timeline see Friends of Salt Creek, Accessed April 11, 2023, https://friendsofsaltcreek.org/; for an example on how the critical terminology overlooks city nature, see survey in Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2012), which is organized around a series of chapter-keywords (pollution, wilderness, apocalypse, dwelling, animal, earth), but no urban terms. Like a generation of environmental humanists, I first recognized the shortcomings of advocacy strategies and literary conventions after reading the edited collection by William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); more recently, I discuss cultural categories of nature writing, and the challenges of teaching city nature, see "City Creeks: Lessons in Sustainable Environmental Discourse from a Florida Boom Town," Spaces in-between: Cultural and Political Perspectives on Environmental Discourse, ed. Mark Luccarelli and Sigurd Bergmann (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2015), 88–101. Using searchable newspaper articles and government documents, we cobbled together a storyline. 

The next step was to theorize. Environmental writer Jenny Price details "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA," a classic re-examination of the least "natural" of all places, the Los Angeles River. On the East coast, meanwhile, landscape architect Ann Whiston Spirn has combined activism, teaching and writing in a recovery of Mill Creek, a buried stream that threads through West Philadelphia before feeding the Schuylkill. These models and others provided a conceptual groundwork. Over time, I accumulated equivalents. A trip to New York City took me to the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site where Walt Whitman once ate oysters. I learned how tourists in London will lay out ten pounds each (five for kids) to slip down the culverted Fleet River, now a covered source but a notorious ditch from the reigns of Queens Elizabeth to Victoria. A sixteenth-century mock epic by Ben Jonson, "On the Famous Voyage," recounts a journey up the filthy Fleet: the open sewer runs foul with "grease, and hair of meazled [leprous] dogs; / The heads, houghs [hocks], entrailes, and hides of hogs."³Jenny Price, "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA" (Part 1), Believer 33 (April 1, 2006); Anne Whiston Spirn, "Restoring Mill Creek: Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice and City Planning and Design," Landscape Research 30, no. 3 (2005): 395–413; Ben Jonson, "On the Famous Voyage," in Complete Poetry, ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. (New York: NYU Press, 1963), 72. The same waterway carries away the cannibalistic offal of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, "the demon barber of Fleet Street."  

Patterns came together. Urban waterways offer a Realometer, as Thoreau wrote, places where you stand right to face the facts.⁴Henry David Thoreau describes the "Realometer," distinguished from the "Nilometer" (a gauge to measure the mythologized Nile), in the penultimate paragraph of the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," from Walden, or A Life in the Woods (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1854). Our city creeks mark charismatic, if uncomfortable points of context between activism and disaster fetish, economics and racial inequity, lost memory and recovery, cool-credibility, and very real marginalization. The more I traveled my own channelized waterway, the more analogs I discovered. Friends and colleagues started volunteering their own favorites. The Chicago River (a graduate school buddy reminds me) previously served as a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. A stunningly illustrated article in the New York Times charts the harrowing impact of sea level rise on this area.⁵Dan Egan, "A Climate Crisis Haunts Chicago's Future. A Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake," New York Times, July 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/07/climate/chicago-river-lake-michigan.html. A colleague who graduated from Columbia's school of journalism reminded me that vestiges of Minetta Brook flow under Minetta Street in Greenwich Village. My writing partner for a series of #Creekshed essays in our local alt-weekly, Amanda Hagood, sent vacation photos of Ala Wai Canal in Honolulu. Another traveling colleague, a classicist, Facebook messaged me a photo of the vestigial Eridanos, Greece—the literal path to Hades—which runs through Athens' Monastiraki Metro stop. The community relations person on my campus insisted I walk the C&O canal on my next trip to to Washington, D.C. And while researching an academic memoir about her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, my colleague and partner Julie Armstrong traced the entirety of Village Creek—a polluted stream that drains both industrial sites and a neighborhood park where she played as a child.⁶See Thomas Hallock and Amanda Haygood, "#Creekshed Story Map," May 5, 2022, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/b664d097ee3e408c8eacf5a424075af8; for more information on the Ala Wai canal, a lagoon off Waikiki that displaced wetlands used by island Natives for fishing and agriculture in Waikiki, see Sophie Cocke, "Ala Wai Canal: Hawaii's Biggest Mistake?," Honolulu Civil Beat, May 20, 2013, https://www.civilbeat.org/2013/05/ala-wai-canal-hawaiis-biggest-mistake/; a display of Minetta Brook, which used to run through the lobby of a hotel-apartment, is no longer operable, though reference can be found at "Minetta Green," NYC Parks, Access April 11, 2023, www.nycgovparks.org/parks/minetta-green/history; Village Creek Environmental Human & Environmental Justice Society, Accessed April 11, 2023, https://villagecreeksociety.org; Julie Buckner Armstrong, "Two Days along Village Creek," Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History and Home (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023). East Lake was the white working-class neighborhood where Julie grew up. Through the post-civil right's era, it was mostly African American. Because of its increasingly coveted real estate, it became a focal point for the A&E program Flipping Down South.

Why this passion? And why is this work necessary? The recovery of an urban waterway can feel like a very vexed homecoming. Even though social history and economics have shaped our aquatic environs, current land use practices erase the very past that brings value, coherence, justice, and yes, even happiness to our communities. City creeks have a particular way of taking one both to the edges and into the heart of where we now live. We are habituated, as geographer Yi-Fu Tuan reminds us, to link memory and place. Tuan's term, "topophilia," is a well-known coinage for the memories that accrue across space. A crack in the sidewalk carries us back emotionally; a whiff of wisteria fosters connection, and one hopes, concern for a given locale.⁷Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Though simple on the surface, the concept is tough to pin down; topophilia, Tuan reminds us, is not just patriotism, childlike nostalgia, or the marketing copy on a beer can. It means coming to grips with both the pleasures and the problematic.

Take the green bench, which is the name of my local brew of choice, but also a hurtful symbolism. As noted in a recent study of systematic racism in the city, green benches lined the main thoroughfare of Central Avenue from 1916 to 1960. For white residents, these benches were a "symbol of hospitality and place to socialize" on a pleasant winter afternoon; for African Americans, not being allowed to sit there served as an "everyday reminder" of humiliating segregation.⁸Tuan, Topophilia; Ruthmae Sears et al, "Building Bridges & Racial Equity in St. Petersburg Florida" (Tampa: University of South Florida, 2021), 52. City creeks, likewise, sit uneasily in our idea of nature. They do not offer simple recreation or respite. The active search for broken connections instead takes us beneath the placid surface of a city's daily life.

As a white northern transplant, I have learned how a recovered past opens channels for seeing a difficult present. Every metropolitan area holds its own hydrologic history, buried or forgotten. What I offer in this short trip is a lesson in how cities render nature invisible; how what we count as nature is either valued or subject to abuse, and how those decisions follow social lines; and how past, present, and future landscapes intersect. To cross into our fragmented waterways, I must add, requires humility. The divisions rendered in our shaping of the natural world remain. And so the fundamental challenge: to come together, as one community, cleaning our rivers and streams, while at least recognizing—if not starting to heal—the rifts between us.

Bayboro Harbor

Start at Bayboro Harbor, at the campus where I teach. Faculty, staff and students can rent a kayak, paddleboard, sailboat, or canoe at the waterfront office, and here, I typically begin my nature writing classes. Once called "Fiddler's Paradise," for the crabs foraging in the surrounding mangrove and spartina, this former bayou is where Tampa Bay meets Booker and Salt Creeks—two of the major drainage systems for lower Pinellas. The Gulf Coast of Florida has been home to a series of loosely-defined, overlapping cultures, more local polities than "tribes"; these include "archaic" groups, the Weeden Island culture (300CE–1000CE), followed by the Safety Harbor culture (900CE–1500CE), then Tocobaga (the residents of Tampa Bay who most likely met Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century). Florida's first people fished and gathered crustaceans. The refuse from this bounty formed middens and mounds, many of which appear on early postcards from the city. As St. Petersburg boomed through the twentieth century, during the early years of car culture, these shell mounds were looted for road fill. The Indian works, reminders of a successful synthesis of built and natural environs, remain buried under a hospital's out-parcels and parking garages.⁹Robert J. Austin, "'Its Origin Steeped in Mystery': The Sorry Saga of St. Petersburg's Shell Mound Park," The Florida Anthropologist 73, no. 2 (June 2020): 113–39; the ongoing status of Native remains, held at the Smithsonian and elsewhere, including (until recently) my university's anthropology department is reviewed in "Notice of Inventory Completion: Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL," National Archives Federal Register, Sep. 27, 2011; and Gene Demby and Kumari Devarajan, "Skeletons in the Closet," NPR Code Switch, Oct. 13, 2021, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1045518876.

Salt Creek, meanwhile, tells the classic Florida story of transformation and rapine. The waterway formerly known as "Salt Run" drains lower-lying land, never particularly suited for human habitation. Starting in 1908, a group called the Bayboro Investment Company (supported by local boosters, fat with congressional pork) oversaw the harbor's dredging, which continued for several years. Imposing steam-fueled engines churned the roots, sand and gravel over bulwarks, carving a fifteen-foot channel from the shallow bayou, transforming the "marshy waste" into "valuable lands." Both Salt and Booker Creeks were straightened and deepened for the purposes of top-down economic interests: to connect with a rail depot one mile to the north, plus harborage for "pleasure yachts." Where there had been "naught but a marsh, inhabited by undesirable tenants" the St. Petersburg Evening Independent boasted, soon would "arise a beautified landscape occupied by happy homes of mankind." Four years later, with more federal funding, the city cleared frontage for a harbor and marina.¹⁰"The Bayboro Improvements," St. Petersburg (FL) Evening Independent, March 26, 1908, 1; "Deep Water Harbor Ordinance Up Tonight," St. Petersburg (FL) Daily Times, Aug. 14, 1912, 1.

The creek's industrialization had begun. In 1913 the dredgers worked their way further up the channel, yoking the tidal "Salt Run" to Florida's violently enforced economic and social order. As standard histories recount, the area boomed through the first decades of the twentieth century, with a soggy landscape shaped to property developers who then marketed an affordable paradise for white tourists and transplants; this same paradise needed a labor force, and segregation shaped the landscape as much as the pleasures of outdoor leisure. An invisible line along Central had already divided the city into north (white) and south (African American) sides. African Americans moved to St. Petersburg in search of work and the city council sharpened boundaries where people of color could live. A 1931 charter amendment sought "to establish and set apart in said city separate residential limits or districts for White and negro residents." This redlining, impossible to enforce and revised many times, imprinted the city's demographics permanently, shaping everything from voter registration to school funding and supermarket locations.

Has the creek been subject to the same racial violence as Black bodies? It depends on who you ask, though this much is true: segregation in St. Petersburg remains unfinished business. Redlining language remained in the city charter until 1963; through the Jim Crow era, three lynchings were reported in Pinellas County (low for bloody Florida); and various groups such as Pinellas Remembers (which successfully placed an Equal Justice Initiative marker at the site of a 1914 lynching) continue the important, uphill work of healing. Environmental and social histories undoubtedly intertwine—the question is "how?"

From its early boom years, access to nature came through a front and back door. North of Central Avenue, tourists enjoy Instagram-worthy waterfront parks, showcasing urban amenities alongside Tampa Bay. Today, these parks receive the overwhelming bulk of public funding and remain fiercely guarded by a proud citizenry. The adjacent working waterfront to the south was slated for industry, and set on a course for exploitation. Starting in the 1920s, city leaders commissioned engineering studies, supported business and secured federal money to construct an "industrial harbor." Salt Creek housed oil storage tanks (inevitable spills to follow) and just upstream, a dairy and flash-freeze seafood plants. As industry left in the 1970s, the creek would serve as a site for drugs and illegal sex and squatters, and now, for fast food and a Salvation Army support center. Locals recognize the creek (if at all) from a sharply-arched bridge over Third Street known as "Thrill Hill," or as the place where a sleeping homeless woman tumbled off a seawall and lost her arm to an alligator.

Such are the long string of anecdotes—the stories of drug runners and petty crime, childhood kicks, vagrancy and chicken thieves—that populate the creek's history.¹¹City Council minutes were printed in St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Feb. 14, 1931, 2–3; see also "Open Waters in Salt Creek" St. Petersburg (FL) Times, June 16, 1921, 10. Most recently, the city revised building codes to accommodate Miami developers, who schemed to build high-density housing on the flood plain. That bubble having burst, the area remains scraped.¹²"Report of Port Exports Announced by Commission," St. Petersburg (FL) Evening Independent, Sept. 16, 1926, 7; "Dairy Concern Adds to Plant on Salt Creek," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Jan. 1, 1937; "Yacht Basin Boats Face Clampdown," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Feb. 3, 1960; "Salt Creek Squatters Trouble City Again," St. Petersburg (FL) Independent, Aug. 28, 1961; Jack Alexander, "Drug Raids Nab 11," St. Petersburg (FL) Independent, May 18, 1968.

Salt Creek activists suffer fatigue, even disillusionment, from fighting the combined forces of city hall, Jim Crow's intractable legacy, and poor decisions rationalized by free market economics. Two episodes from the past century illustrate the challenges of turning back the tide. The creek's path traces a low-lying area, or swale. In any other scenario, land this vulnerable to flooding would be set aside for parks and greenspace. Every good planner that has studied a topo map has, in fact, reached that conclusion. In the 1920s John Nolen, the preeminent city planner of his generation, prepared St. Petersburg Today, St. Petersburg Tomorrow—a design that would be considered progressive if it were adopted even now.¹³John Nolen, City Planning Report: St. Petersburg Today, St. Petersburg Tomorrow (St. Petersburg, FL: St. Petersburg City Planning Board, 1923), https://friendsofsaltcreek.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/St-Petersburg-Today-St-Petersburg-Tomorrow-1923-Nolen-Plan-1.pdf; St. Petersburg Conceptual Plan (City of St. Petersburg, FL, May 1974), https://friendsofsaltcreek.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Conceptual-Plan-St.-Petersburg-1974.pdf: 31–32. Nolen suggested a parkway, using Salt Creek to connect gulf to bay with a chain of green "around the lower end of the peninsula." Voters rejected the Nolen plan, however, citing the imposition on private property rights as well as Nolen's reluctance to tighten emerging redline laws. One could blame this shortsightedness on the times. Nolen worked in the shadow of the Rosewood massacre, but fifty years later, the city reached the same conclusion.

Dusting off many of John Nolen's ideas, a 1974 Conceptual Plan also proposed a "green open space network," which included the "natural swale" between Tampa and Boca Ciega Bay. In short, a park along the Salt Creek channel.¹⁴R. Bruce Stephenson, Visions of Eden: Environmentalism, Urban Planning, and City Building in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900–1915 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 65. Neither proposal, almost fifty years apart, made the leap to policy. A common good for the city (sustainable development, equitable access to open space) will lose to private, mostly white interests every time.

In the creek, I confront my own ambivalence towards Florida. I revel in the completely undeserved, over-the-top natural beauty. I also feel overmatched by the state's ugly, obdurate social history. When my own patience runs out, I drop a kayak near the mouth and make a favorite circuit. I enter by the harbor, paddle through the marina, then under the bridges at Third and Fourth Streets, into a hidden wilderness. Past the last dredge line, not far beyond the old trolley bridge, ice cream plant or seafood fast-freeze facility, the docks and crumbling piers give way to a mangrove tangle. Under Thrill Hill, Salt Creek is both wilder and more polluted. The paradox is striking, even in its own way, charismatic. The overlooked canopy serves as a bird sanctuary, where long legged waders roost and nest. Styrofoam and plastic bottles meld with mangrove prop roots. Fecal bacteria levels spike well past acceptable levels. We are still trying to figure out the cause—excrement from the street population, which the city pushed from parks in the tourist center to the poorer southside; guano, which accumulates in the concrete channel because seawalls and dam upstream block the tidal flow; or maybe broken sewer lines.

My route takes me roughly halfway to Lake Maggiore, mostly by industrialized lots left abandoned for speculation. Past the Dollar General and McDonalds, I push through the choking mangroves, then slip under another low-slung bridge at Eighteenth Avenue South. From here the creek opens into Bartlett Pond, a small aperture all but choked off due to overgrowth. I have seen snook roil below the black, murky surface. I've also seen a prize game fish, floating ominously on the surface of the muck. Osprey watch from their nests in the light posts by the athletic fields. Were it not for the hum of traffic, I could be in the 10,000 Islands of the Everglades. Instead I have found Nature in the heart of a city.

This is not where one expects to find a kayak. Citing water quality, Parks and Rec officials have ignored my suggestions to install a put-in off Bartlett Pond. So I engineer my own exit, grabbing the sewer line off a bridge on the opposite side, nudging a gunwale to the shoreline, and throwing my fifty-seven-year-old self onto the muddy bank. From Bartlett Park, I portage back across Fourth Street, past a gas station at the busy intersection of Fourth Street and Twenty-Second Avenue South, back to my once gay and racially-mixed, increasingly gentrified neighborhood. This circuit is not easy, scenic, accessible, or even encouraged. But I find the paddle into every day nature restorative. Wilderness has been erroneously thought of as an escape, rather than as engagement with the here and now. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau mused, wandering the clearcuts around Concord. The best wilderness is always close to home.¹⁵Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," The Atlantic, June 1862, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/.

Bartlett Pond

At Bartlett Park, tucked behind Twenty-Second Avenue and Fourth Street, Salt Creek opens into a muddy pool. This little pond adjoins two of St. Petersburg's main thoroughfares, but badly eutrophied and surrounded by mangroves, rarely merits a second look. My wife Julie has lived three blocks away and driven past Bartlett Park for twenty years, but did not know there was actually water behind the brush. A little fishing dock used to provide access on the east side, away from the street and from the park's interior. Vandals, or maybe the homeless on a cold night, burned the outer decking. Repairs to the dock then came slowly and were poorly done. After I called to complain, the parks department blocked off the charred sections, shortening the entire structure.

Environmental racism takes many forms—big and small, from legislation to microaggressions. A perspective at water level renders visible the "slow violence" of local policy, to use Rob Nixon's memorable phrase: the damage "that occurs gradually and out of sight … dispersed across time and space [and] typically not viewed as violence at all." Leisure may not register as a health concern. At least on the surface. But in this city, defined by slow violence, differences in life expectancy across race are measured by decades.¹⁶Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2; Sears et al., "Building Bridges," 123. Hypertension kills, green spaces heal.

St. Petersburg and Pinellas County pride themselves on their parks, yet the allocation of amenities follows a classic script in inequity. A Pinellas County park map is literally a reverse image of racial demographics. Docks served by the county's white residents include ADA-compliant handrails, fish cleaning stations, and overhead shelters to protect visitors from the harsh sun or sudden rain. Residents in south St. Pete's poorer Black neighborhood instead get this charred shell, over an overgrown pond my spouse never even knew existed—where health officials deemed the water unsafe to fish or swim.

Economics and social history shape the landscape, but because the history is forgotten and on-the-ground-economics vanish into everyday life, that landscape is tough to read. Bartlett Park embodies this contradiction. Behind the stump of a dock, tennis balls thwock back and forth at the St. Petersburg Tennis Center. Founded in 1926, the municipal courts are a vestige from the early twentieth century, when the neighborhood afforded vacation cottages for winter residents and renting tourists. The court's location seems anomalous, though like every other chapter of the city's history, it can be explained through the local lodestars of leisure and race. The center serves as a throwback to St. Petersburg's peak years as a populist paradise, when white northerners suffering from cold found relief in the mild climate, bay breezes, the foliage, and sport.

The same boom drew African Americans, mostly from across the South, who came here to work a growing service economy. The zoning measures set out to keep the Black population both accessible and cordoned off; these measures, from the middle third of the past century, limited where Blacks could work, live, and travel after dark. African Americans forged communities in neighborhoods that still resound in local lore—the Deuces, Pepper Town, Gas Plant, Campbell Park, Methodist Town. After the waning of de facto segregation, in the early 1970s, once tight communities fanned out across the southern side of the city.¹⁷Rosalie Peck and Jon Wilson, St. Petersburg's African American Neighborhoods (Charleston: History Press, 2008), 15–18; Sears et al., "Building Bridges," 108. Black families settled in formerly white neighborhoods on the south side of town, including Bartlett Park. White people moved out, abandoning the neighborhoods, then decades later returned to the same sections—displacing Black families who have now lived there for at least a generation.

The contradictions and shifting dynamics across time and space make Salt Creek difficult to explain. Lime green tennis balls lob over the chain link fence, down the sidewalk, and into the watershed. Environment and community relations cannot seem to find the same page. I struggle personally with my own blindness, fumbling with good intentions. After several years of my teaching along this waterway, graduate students culled together a self-produced book called Salt Creek Journal. During an Earth Day celebration at Bartlett Park, I palmed a copy of the paperback to my city council representative. She actually read the book, then convinced me to form a real group with the same name as the pedagogical fiction—Friends of Salt Creek. For several years, pulled into service, I led the group. We defined goals, calling ourselves a community group centered around nature, not so much preservationist. We met small, consistent successes. Foundation money flowed our way, though before we were logistically prepared to take on projects; we had a grant before we had a bank account. For clean ups, environmental groups like Tampa Bay Watch and the Tampa Bay Estuary Program (who do admirable work advocating for marine health) bring enthusiastic white volunteers from outside, though our constant reminder has been to build from within the neighborhood. The local Keep America Beautiful office wants to drop in cypress trees without asking people who live there.

Conventional narratives of environmental justice, Ellen Griffin Spears observes, have "left out many constituencies—women, workers, indigenous populations, people of color, immigrants—and as a result left out the social justice roots of environmental reform." And so we see the broader trends unfold in local arenas. White environmentalists are not "looking at the community," observes Jacqueline Hubbard, an African American attorney whose family has owned a lakeside home in the area for decades; the result "is a lack of communication and trust."¹⁸Ellen Griffith Spears, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2020), 4; In my informal interview with Jacqueline Hubbard (Sept. 2, 2022), she mentioned the importance of environmentalists reaching out to churches and groups with well-established records in civil rights; my hope as the author of this article, an online tour, is to have a ready-made program for community presentation.

In retrospect, the lesson feels obvious: restoring the environment starts with community. The questions must always start with, "for whom?" For whom are we working? With whom and why? Bartlett Pond brings fault lines into stark relief. After a long period of asking, the city secured external funds to dredge the eutrophied pond. The mostly white Friends of Salt Creek continue to test waters around the park, hoping to locate the sources of fecal bacteria. But why now? Will the dredging serve the neighborhood's current, mostly Black residents? What will dredging a pond mean for those experiencing homelessness? Is "improvement" merely a bellwether of high-end development downstream? And how does one fight back cynicism? During a May Day clean up, an African American fraternity, the Sigma Betas, led a tree-planting effort that involved local teenage boys. When construction in the park cut off an irrigation line, however, the newly planted trees dried up and died. This story is nothing new. Landscape theorist Anne Whiston Spirn recounts similar frustrations with Philadelphia's Mill Creek. She describes how she led eighth graders along the creek's buried course, then asked the teenagers to develop a landscape plan. The students (more familiar with the realities of the streets than an Ivy League professor) refused to believe any plan they implemented would be suggested. "It won't happen," a student told her; "Someone will wreck it."¹⁹Spirn, "Restoring Mill Creek," 404. How do you explain to teenage boys in St. Petersburg, likewise, that the city failed to water plants they put in the ground?

Advocacy puts well intentioned theory to the test. We have to pull out the Thoreauvian "realometer." In our rhetoric and scholarly discourse, one might wax optimistic about bringing together environmental and social justice, building what my local Sierra Club chapter calls a "Black-Green" alliance. But in practice, we learn the hard way, starting by acknowledging the depth of the rift of our divides. We can get the grants but we cannot exact meaningful change. As a white-led group, Friends of Salt Creek seems to have a offered a strategic wedge for easy volunteerism; our group checked the box for "underserved community." Over summer 2021, we drew from a Tampa Bay Estuary Program grant to support an artist in residence program at the local community center. Four artists (two white, two African American) met under a central pavilion, working most closely with kids. The children here are predominantly Black, with many coming from foster homes. White kids go to tennis camp, steps away, taking after-school lessons for $200 per week. Kids from the adjacent Frank Pierce Center are not accustomed to access. The pavilion where we met backs onto the chain-link fences of the neatly rolled courts. At one point, a child passed a gate left open, usually locked, leading to the public court. "Wait," the child asked, "can we go in there?"

The same could be said for the pond. Our entry points to nature are shaped by economics, power, and race. The points of access disclose social boundaries. Where equivalent parks offered sheltered docks and piers, the only dock here is a burnt out stub. The city clears and maintains lakes in other parts of the city, opening code-compliant "windows" through the mangrove; here, the water remains hidden—out of sight and degraded.

This is no accident. Past Bartlett Park, through a hidden gap in the mangroves, Salt Creek cuts diagonally, continuing to run southeast, through one of the poorer parts of the city. Neighborhoods along the creek tumble precipitously from coastal-slash-suburban to impoverished. Median household incomes drop in predictable blocks, as one moves from waterfront from properties along Tampa Bay and west into the city: $78,875 in the mostly white Old Southeast neighborhood, to $44,474 in the Bartlett Park area, to $12,096 in the more African American Harbordale section. A closer analysis provides a much more nuanced intersection of economics and race, not captured by simple caricature, though a trend exists. The city-data website reflects what anyone who lives in St. Petersburg already knows: economics fall along sharp racial lines, effecting in turn, health, access to fresh food, experiences with education and law enforcement, the possibilities of upward mobility, and of course, green space.²⁰"St. Petersburg Florida: Income map, Earnings map, and Wages data," City-Data, Accessed March 31, 2023, https://www.city-data.com/income/income-St.-Petersburg-Florida.html. Structural racism study; see also Sears et al., "Building Bridges," 203-08.

Racial demographics and water quality intersect. At the end of legalized Jim Crow, as African Americans moved into the Harbordale neighborhood, the city let water quality sink. Low oxygen levels during the 1960s resulted in fish kills. Locals likened the smell at low tide to a badly operating sewage plant, the newspaper reported; outsiders (not residents) used the creek as an unlicensed trash pit. The rust colored water tested at almost eight times accepted levels for coliform bacteria. The city was no longer calling this waterway a stream or creek; in newspapers and press conferences the creek was now a "drainage area," or worse, a "ditch."²¹Willard Cox, "Tests Show [Red] 'Tide' Not Cause of Kills," The Evening Independent, July 6, 1965; "A Fishy Smell at Salt Creek," The Evening Independent, May 2, 1966; "Salt Creek Flow Sickly," The Evening Independent, Sept. 14, 1973; Bill Marden, "Trash, Tide A Problem," The Evening Independent, July 16, 1971. Racism did not cause environmental abuse; water quality was abysmal throughout Tampa Bay. A generation of activists, overwhelmingly white, have "saved the bay"—dramatically improving estuarine health. The poorer areas drained by Salt Creek, following script, are the last to see remediation.

Lake Maggiore

Semantics shape stewardship. At MLK (formerly Ninth, a major north-south street), a dam divides Salt Creek from Lake Maggiore. I am now in the middle-bottom part of the Pinellas Peninsula, on what used to be "Salt Lake," an estuarine habitat typical for coastal Florida. The name changed, however, alongside usage. In the 1920s real estate promoters began pitching new developments around a shallow, still tidal estuarine habitat. A fanciful origin story in the St. Petersburg Times provided the much-needed fiction. The newspaper, upholding real estate interests, staked a dubious claim that "Salt Lake" was discovered by Italian buccaneers, who called it "Maggiore" after a similar body of water on the Swiss-Italian border. In an act of rhetorical desalination, the hucksters presented the Italian as the earlier toponym; the sailors had first found fresh water, though mistakenly, the label "Salt Lake" stuck on later maps. Fiction and finances thus conspired to justify a dam. The Times cited a "peculiar condition" (or what the rest of us call tides) that allowed saltwater species to intrude from the bay. In 1930 a more permanent dam was built, making "Maggiore a freshwater lake for bass fishing." It would remain as such, until no one could recall when the brackish lake was part of an estuarine tidal run. By the 1980s the alligators were so pervasive that water skiers chased them off the slalom course. Neither bass nor gators belong in "Salt Lake," of course, as freshwater species have found their invasive niche in this badly translated Alpine lago.²²"Lake Maggiore Believed to be Named by Pirate—To Be a Beautiful Section," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, April 5, 1925; "Lake Maggiore Dam Proposed," St. Petersburg (FL) Independent, Sept. 25, 1930. I am indebted to Jack E. Davis, who grew up on Lake Maggiore and who read a draft of this essay, for the observation about water skiing.

The folly, this not-just-semantic amnesia, has been expensive. Newspapers chronicle a twenty or thirty year cycle of restoration and waste. Eutrophication, fish kill, dredge Crisis, quick fix, repeat. In 1940, ten years after construction of the new dam, the city's Evening Independent would report:

City sanitation crews were burying hundreds of pounds of dead mullet and trout along the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore where they washed up after being killed by what [is] believed to be excessive vegetation gases in the shallow waters of the lake.

The newspaper described a horrific scene. Fish up to two feet long, panting in the grass; sanitation workers removing the rotting carcasses; the city vowing to install a screen to keep saltwater species out of the now-freshwater lake. Again, in 1963, the state game commission concludes that ecologically, the lake has become "old and not conducive to bass reproduction." Fish kills returned in 1968 and 1970, when the city detected chloride, a negatively charged ion that indicated "somehow salt water was getting into" Maggiore. In 1991, the headlines repeat: "Lake Maggiore Sick from Pollution," this time from high concentrations of run-off nitrogen and phosphorous. The following year, sanitation workers hauled off three-hundred pounds of dead menhaden (a coastal and estuarine species), snook, redfish, and yellow fin. Starting in 2004, the city spent two years scraping 1.3 million tons of sediment from the lake bottom. Trucks ran sixteen hours a day, five days a week, transferring the muck to a sod farm and developing area in the swampier part of the county's north end. After high levels of arsenic were detected in the soil, however, the city found itself in a sticky legal battle with the developer who used the fill, eventually settling with a million dollar contamination claim.²³"Tons of Fish Die in Lake Maggiore," The Evening Independent Aug. 1, 1940; "Lake Maggiore: Fight Against Aging," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, June 25, 1971; Sue Landry, "Lake Maggiore Sick from Pollution," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Jan. 16, 1991; "Natural, Normal Fish Kill Hits Lake," St. Petersburg (FL) Times, Nov. 2, 1992; Waveney Ann Moore, "Contaminated Soil to Cost St. Petersburg $1 million, 15 Years after Dredging Project," Tampa Bay (FL) Times, April 12, 2019; Southwest Florida Water Management District, "Final Phase of Lake Maggiore Restoration Project in Full Swing," Water Matters, May–June 2005, https://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/blog/watermatters-magazine/11/final-phase-lake-maggiore-restoration-project-full-swing. Despite the added cost, toxicity, and history of repeating problems, officials declared victory. "This project attempts to set back the clock on a long history of water quality problems at Lake Maggiore," the Southwest Florida Water Management District (Swiftmud) triumphantly claimed. The irony is deafening. A plan has been set in place, with no heed for the existing pattern of waste. If the clock was "set back," as Swiftmud boasts, then only for the same problems to repeat.²⁴Water Matters, "Final Phase."

The lake remains awash in contradiction, mismanaged and lexically confused. The dam along MLK seeks to split salt and fresh water. Circle south, past some houses, by a ­­fire station, and a mostly abandoned park. Spin further southwest and much of the land is sheltered by a beloved sanctuary, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve. Along the same tract, adjacent to the preserve, a city dump turns over mulch. At the base of Twenty-Second Street, historically the central corridor for St. Petersburg's African American population, sits a park. The north section fronts Maggiore Shores, originally a white neighborhood, then middle-to-upper-class Black, and today, increasingly white again. Each of the stakeholders holds a claim to the park—some smaller, some larger. Mostly white environmentalists aligned with Boyd Hill argue for removing the dam and restoring the ebb and flow of "Salt Lake." Older home owners in the Maggiore Shores neighborhood (to the north) want cattails around the edges cleared to improve their view; the current water management plan keeps salinity down and serves as flood protection. The only unifying factor is the cattails circling the lake, indicating low water quality. The common denominator is eutrophication; the argument is how to solve the problem. Renamed with a faux history, mispronounced, and managed against its natural flow, this once-tidal lake suffers from being something it is not.

Willow Marsh

On the south shore of the same Lake Maggiore, Salt Creek changes names (again). Then it disappears (again). The precise point of disappearance, ironically, occurs in a beloved nature park, Boyd Hill Nature Preserve, at one of the finest visual prospects in the entire city. A boardwalk on the Willow Marsh Trail faces North, towards downtown. Off in the distance, beyond the lake, cumulus clouds tower over one another, dramatically framing a vast blue horizon and restless skyline. Anhinga roost in a nearby island, and below, any number of species of ducks, moorhen and long-legged waders nudge through spatterdock and duckweed. Common sights are marsh rabbits and alligators, the mother gator often with her yellow-striped young brood. The visitor's map to the preserve marks this particular boardwalk as part of the Willow Marsh Trail, which presumably would make this area "Willow Marsh." Technically, the water forms part of a Salt Creek branch. Trail maps to the preserve, however, do not even mark a stream.

City nature has no place in a "nature preserve." At a point where an urban waterway should be most visible, even celebrated, the comedy of hide-and-seek intensifies. A waterway (now flowing due South) switches names. By the semantically confused lake, it disappears from the map altogether. Why? Because discursive "Nature" and the natural hydrology do not align. Near the Boyd Hill visitors center, hikers have unknowingly crossed Salt Creek. It is the little brook that trickles past an outdoor classroom, by the raptor rehabilitation center, and eventually reaches back to the edge of the nature preserve, where it runs under a chain link fence. Here, the creek becomes a culvert. And with subtle semantic shift, stewardship declines.

The aquatic thread snaps. We lose the connection. In a wealthy suburban neighborhood, the headwaters of Salt Creek runs through a maze of backyard overgrowth, accessible only with permission. To trace the creek now is to trespass. Care falls to individual whim or the conscience of private owners. One particularly zealous environmentalist has dutifully planted native cypress in the bottom, hoping to stabilize the sandy banks and restore habitat; elsewhere, the low-lying area remains mostly a jungle of invasive taro and wild ginger. Further south, where the planner John Nolen proposed a green corridor along the area's natural swale, the St. Petersburg Country Club has engineered the creek's headwaters into a series of water hazards for its golf course. Landscapers mow up to the edges of the artificial ponds along the golf course's back nine.

The hydrology has become impossible to visualize as one piece. Because the waterway is fragmented, no one connects the link from fourteenth fairway to Tampa Bay. Grass clippings run straight into the ditch, Lake Maggiore, into Salt Creek, and eventually into our beloved bay—feeding algae and toxic blooms that have undermined our quality of life, ruined countless fishing trips, and cost the state dearly in tourist revenue.²⁵ The Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council set the loss of tourism revenue for a 2018 red tide bloom at $130.6 million; see The Ripple Effects of Florida Red Tide, (Pinellas Park, FL: Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council, 2019), https://tbrpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-Economic-Ripple-Effects-of-Florida-Red-Tide_unsigned.pdf; A more thorough study set the loss for the same bloom at double the cost, $317 million, see João-Pedro Ferreira, et al. "Impact of Red Tide in Peer-to-Peer Accommodations: A Multi-Regional Input-Output Model," Tourism Economics, March 1, 2022, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548166211068276. The neglected stream passes over a dingy concrete weir, amounting to little more than a one-stroke penalty for golfers and repository for lost Titleists.

Again, the aquatic thread splits. There are actually two larger branches feeding Lake Maggiore, the second no easier to trace. In its western course, the stream feeds a lake from a city tract along Dell Holmes Park. From here, it runs due West down a channel, where it parallels a public golf driving range. Canoes and kayaks rarely paddle this channel. The alligators are unusually large. One could go missing here altogether. If I am to put in at Lake Maggiore, I double check my life preserver.

The unnamed, culverted west branch cuts anonymously across public land. I can paddle upstream, with a city mulch processing plant to the left, and a drop-off site for brush to the right. The stream parallels the east-west running Twenty-Sixth Avenue South. Chain-link divides the landfill and private property, in this case two of the more prosperous historically Black churches in the city—St. Augustine's Episcopal and McCabe United Methodist. The location of these churches, or more accurately their relocation, figures into the last half century of city history. Both congregations served Jim Crow neighborhoods closer to the center of town, the middle class Campbell Park and poorer Gas Plant communities. Both neighborhoods were razed in the 1970s and 80s. Following a national trend, in which federal roads targeted Black areas, Interstate i-175 cut the Campbell Park neighborhood in half, running straight over homes where pillars of the African American community lived.

Ten years later, as if by design, the city razed the Gas Plant in the name of urban renewal, leveling a neighborhood to construct a domed stadium. The Tampa Bay Rays (Raze?) now play in the dome, Tropicana Field. But the team's owners (buttressed by city government and a newspaper that depends upon sports for daily copy) declare the thirty-year-old dome obsolete. Once again, the area awaits real estate redevelopment, with little probable return for the people displaced under the banner of "urban renewal" and promises to "get it right." St. Augustine's Episcopal relocated during the 1970s, moving from property now near the interstate, away from a community that has since scattered, and rebuilding on the rich soil of a former nursery near the head of Salt Creek's long swale.

Lake Eli

Where the creek ends remains an open question. According to an environmentalist friend who lives along the south shores of Lake Maggiore, the creek was historically sheet flow, tracing without record or immediate course through pine flatwoods. If I push a kayak further west, past Lake Eli, I trace the drainage ditch, almost to the churches that run along Twenty-Sixth Avenue. Just north of an arrow-straight culvert alongside the parking lot of McCabe United Methodist, the stream unceremoniously ends. The culvert takes a sharp turn at the boundary of church and city land, then runs north, along a straight ditch to north-south running Twenty-Sixth Street. On the other side of the street, Salt Creek finally disappears into underground maze of sewers. And from there, who knows?

Conclusion—Fragmented Headwaters

McCabe's presence at the headwaters embodies a painful chapter of St. Petersburg's history. The congregation of this century old church coalesced around segregated areas, along the eastern edge of the Gas Plant neighborhood. The congregants built the former church themselves, laying their spiritual home on the Black side of a segregation boundary. The interstate and dome destroyed the old structure, and today, the site is now a nondescript concrete parking garage. The current pastor, Reverend Jana Perkins-Hall, speaks clearly of the betrayal:

Black people got together, during that particular time of economic disenfranchisement, pooled their resources and physically built, brick by brick, this place of worship. They were there for fifty years before they were relocated . . . For what?

Perkins-Hall, though not a native, speaks powerfully on behalf of her parishioners: "So what kind of message does that send — spiritually, emotionally, psychologically — to the people who worked for free? That now, in place of a community they called home, is a parking garage?" There is no historical marker, even though stories continue to tell, "that this was once a place of sacred worship." The dislocation remains an unacknowledged erasure. A more visible reminder would at least acknowledge the hurt.²⁶Jana Perkins-Hall spoke at a community forum about Booker Creek and the Tropicana Field site redevelopment, held at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus on Feb. 15, 2019; see, Anna Maria Lineburger, Kelly Kennedy, and Dyllan Furness, ed., Voices of Booker Creek (St. Petersburg: University of South Florida, 2020), 29–30. Just as the teenage boy said to the Penn professor Anne Whiston Spirn: "someone will wreck it."

McCabe United Methodist Church

At McCabe, the unbaptized remnants of Salt Creek disappear into a sewer line, across from the church, at the corner of Twenty-Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street. It is smack-dab in the middle Pinellas County, just east of the low sand ridge (a relic dune) that divides the peninsula. How and where the waters ran before development remains a question. Early histories and even the occasional map suggest that the outer reaches of Salt Creek mingled with a bayou to the west, possibly trading headwaters from both the swamp and bay' this memory of an earlier hydrology, however, remains repressed.²⁷Walter Fuller, St. Petersburg and Its People (St. Petersburg: Great Outdoors Publishing Co., 1972), 5. The creek might have run straight across, serving as a liquid connector now lost.

Cities that bury their habitats sacrifice a bit of collective soul. Environmentalists in Los Angeles lament the failure to recognize the human, natural, and even cinematic history of the concretized Los Angeles River. Tourists are drawn to the Fleet River. New Yorkers still want to see the waters that bubbled under Minetta Street in lower Manhattan, and my archaeologist-art history friend clearly felt a connection when she stumbled onto the Eriadnos. With sea level rise, social scientists attend to the psychic costs of disappearing landscapes, citing what they call solastagia or "environmental grief."²⁸Ellis Neville and Ashlee Cunsolo. "Hope and Mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding Ecological Grief," The Conversation, April 4, 2018, https://theconversation.com/hope-and-mourning-in-the-anthropocene-understanding-ecological-grief-88630; Gren Albrecht et al., "Solastagia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change," Australasian psychiatry: Bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 15 (2007); Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, "Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss," Nature Climate Change 8 no. 3 (2018): 275–281; L.P. Galway , T. Beery, K. Jones-Casey, K. Tasala "Mapping the Solastalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study." Internal Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16:15 (July 2019). The social-historical context adds another layer. My partner Julie walked Birmingham's Village Creek in an effort to connect place and current-day race relations in this iconic civil rights setting. When I trace Salt Creek, I too seek this connection.

Hydrologic systems carry us into our history. They uncover buried pasts, helping us to explain unhealthy divides. Despite Florida's myths of paradise, we remain disconnected from the natural world, from the past that has built itself around us, from one another. Environmentalism needs community, and we best find community in a city's liquid heart. We need to know where the waters run.

About the Author

Thomas Hallock received his PhD from New York University. He is the author of From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749–1826 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and the co-editor of Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmilian, 2008), William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters and Unpublished Manuscripts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), and Travels on the St. Johns River: John and William Bartram (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2016). He recently published a series of travel and place-based essays that explain why he loves teaching the American literature survey, A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022).

• fEnvironmental Studies
• fLong Read
• fGeography
• fTravel and Tourism
• fRace Relations