Before Rob Nixon started the Next Swell podcast, he read and fell in love with The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. On this episode, Rob Nixon speaks with the man who wrote it, Jack E. Davis, the author of the award-winning An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century. A professor of environmental history at the University of Florida, he grew up on the Gulf coast, and now lives in Florida and New Hampshire. Hailed as a "nonfiction epic . . . in the tradition of Jared Diamond’s best-seller 'Collapse,' and Simon Winchester’s 'Atlantic'" (Dallas Morning News), The Gulf is "by turns informative, lyrical, inspiring and chilling for anyone who cares about the future of 'America’s Sea'" (Wall Street Journal). Illuminating America’s political and economic relationship with the environment from the age of the conquistadors to the present, Davis demonstrates how the Gulf’s fruitful ecosystems and exceptional beauty empowered a growing nation.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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