Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape

By Bill Belleville

Book Overview

One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2006

Florida Book Award, Florida Nonfiction, Bronze Medalist

Al Burt Award for Florida Journalism

Losing It All to Sprawl is the poignant chronicle of award-winning nature writer Bill Belleville and how he came to understand and love his historic farmhouse and neighborhood, even as it was all wiped out from under him.

As tractors and backhoes encircle Belleville and his community, displacing everything Belleville has called home for the past fifteen years, he tells a story that is much older--10,000 years older. The saga stretches back to the Timucua and the Mayaca living in harmony with Florida's environment; conquistadors in the "land of flowers"; turn-of-the-century tourists "modernizing" the state; the original Cracker families who lived in Belleville's farmhouse. The millennia-long transformation is starkly contrasted by the unbridled growth and development consuming Belleville's home and, ultimately, his very sense of place.

In Losing It All to Sprawl, Belleville accounts for the impacts--social, political, natural, personal--that a community in the crosshairs of unsustainable growth must ultimately bear, but he also offers Floridians, and anyone facing the blight of urban confusion, the hope that can be found in the rediscovery and appreciation of our natural landscapes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813035023
• ISBN13: 9780813035024
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Nostalgic look at old Florida and what has been lost.

As a native Floridian, I have bemoaned the loss of the state I remember. Shopping malls and amusement parks have replaced much of what I think of as Florida. This book speaks to these feelings and should be read by anyone concerned about the rampant growth of our society which seems bent on destroying any sense of the past. At least we can glimpse what was once there through this well written and heartfelt book.

Not a blade of grass left.

My grandma says "there won't be a blade of grass left." Belleville explains why. A personal story of man who finds the true Florida, a people who scratched out a living in the early days and survived many hurricanes, only to be swept away today by developers. Highly recommended reading for anyone who is fighting urban sprawl.

Offers Floridians and others hope for appreciating nature

Bill Belleville is a documentary filmmaker and author specializing in conservation: how work has appeared extensively in magazines, has been anthologized in collections, and he's written many books, but LOSING IT ALL TO SPRAWL: HOW PROGRESS ATE MY CRACKER LANDSCAPE hits closer to home than many of his other books. Bill Belleville writes of his historic Cracker farmhouse and old neighborhood of central Florida even as it's being wiped out: any who have visited the area in the last few years will readily acknowledge the truths and observations in LOSING IT ALL TO SPRAWL. In addition to documenting the underlying social, political and economic forces at work in promoting sprawl, Belleville offers Floridians and others hope for appreciating nature. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

What price, progress?

Fifteen years the author lived in a 'cracker' house at the end of a dirt road and shared the solitude enjoyed by former occupants for more than seventy years. It was a perfect hide-away for a freelance environmental writer and film maker, where privacy was respected, where nature was sufficient unto itself and its creatures, and where the only compromises with modernity were indoor plumbing and electricity. Even the window unit air conditioner was redundant in a house designed in simpler times, well shaded and with natural cross ventilation. One day the shrill back-up signal of earth-moving equipment shattered the tranquility, a nails-on-blackboard, unsettling sound that forewarned of loss of innocence to come. A new mega-mall is planned nearby, and already the landscape is denuded and sculpted to accommodate the thousands of cars, SUV's and service vehicles that would respond. "If you build it, they will come." (With apologies to W. P. Kinsella.) Bill Belleville is an award-winning writer, the author of River of Lakes, A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River, Deep Cuba and Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes and Golden Sharks. His film making credits include an Emmy award for Wekiva: Legacy or Loss. It was Belleville's cracker house and his story, and the story of those who lived there before. But in a larger sense it is my story and yours, all of us who have witnessed the sacrifice of the playgrounds of childhood and the sanctuaries of memory at the altar of 'progress.' But we don't have to write it. Bill Belleville has done it for us with the same beauty and poignancy that marked his earlier works, but this time with righteous anger born of loss. A wonderful, compelling, intensely personal book that reminds the rest of us of what we, too, have lost, and leaves us asking "What price, progress?"