Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History by Nathaniel Osborn (review)

Rejecting the declensionist narratives pitting humanity against a pristine environment that often characterize environmental histories, Nathaniel Osborn deftly explores the ecological history of Florida’s Indian River Lagoon—a water system along Florida’s Treasure Coast once teeming with wildlife but now plagued by algae blooms and lesioned fish. Osborn describes the lagoon as “a complex system that has at various times been conducive and hostile to animal and plant health” (p. 3). Central to his story is the interaction of humanity with this ecosystem from the pre-Columbian era to the present. This environment engendered conflict between Native Americans and Europeans and, eventually, boosters and settlers. The Indian River ecosystem provided as often as it took away, and Osborn’s central point is that humanity does not stand apart from nature. Humans are not external destroyers of pristine systems but are part of, and contribute to, nature’s roiling instability.

As Osborn explains in chapter 2, the waterway has always been unpredictable. The lagoon’s location at the boundary between salt water and the inland watershed, as well as between Florida’s subtropical and the South’s temperate climate, has historically led to massive plant and animal die-offs due to wide swings in salinity and temperature. In a departure from fellow Floridian historians such as David McCally and Jack E. Davis, who have suggested that restoration efforts could return Florida’s waterways to some Edenic state, Osborn shows that no original state existed to which one could restore the Indian River Lagoon. As an interstitial ecosystem, the waterway has shifted and changed, with and without the interference of humanity, over centuries.

Osborn does not lose sight of the ecological impact of humanity, however, whose movement from a transitory to a sedentary lifestyle and concomitant population growth amplified the lagoon’s instability. In his treatment of the region’s industrial and commercial development in chapters 3 and 4, Osborn situates these historical developments as internal to the system rather than as external influences, arguing that Anglo settlers’ ambitions to exploit the region’s fantastic aviaries and fisheries influenced the lagoon as much as the settlers themselves were influenced by the environment. Perversely, it was precisely settlers’ attempts to stabilize the inherently unstable hydrologic system that sapped it of its health. Ultimately, the story takes a tragic turn in chapter 5, when rapid postwar growth, spurred by air conditioning and insect control, hastened the lagoon’s deterioration and dramatically altered its nature through residential construction and gentrification. With an eye toward the region’s several failed remediation projects, Osborn concludes with some difficult and rather fatalistic questions about how and whether humanity can fix a permanently transitional ecological body. Somewhat dismally, he offers no clear solution.

Indian River Lagoon: An Environmental History makes interventions that are well established within the field of environmental history, and though they bear repeating for Florida, Osborn’s work is generally light on historiography—he does not note the important work of William Cronon or William M. Denevan on the myth of pristine nature, for instance. Nevertheless, Osborn’s work speaks to current political discussions in Florida; his prose is accessible to nonspecialists; and his claims are firmly established through governmental reports, contemporary periodicals, published primary sources, and the substantive use of secondary literature. Osborn also does an admirable job pulling together insights from a variety of disciplines, namely, archaeology, geography, and environmental science.

At just over two hundred pages, Indian River Lagoon does not dwell on any one topic for long, but it is nonetheless a clear, succinct look at the mutability of Florida’s wetlands that should be of interest to a general educated public and be particularly well suited for use in undergraduate classrooms.