The Everglades Collection
Dawn breaking over sawgrass prairie and dwarf cypress. Florida Everglades.
The Florida Everglades is among the most unique, and most endangered, ecosystems in North America. Hemmed in on all sides by rampant human population growth and development, deprived of the natural water flow that has sustained it for millennia, facing rising sea levels that threaten to drown its fresh waters in oceanic salinity, polluted by synthetic fertilizer and chemical runoff from Florida's heavily subsidized sugar industry, this subtropical wilderness is now effectively "on life support," as the National Park Service has aptly stated. The massive, expensive Everglades Restoration Project that has received so much attention is, in reality, more adapted to slaking the growing thirst of South Florida's human population than that of the Everglades it purports to restore. That is not to say that the restoration project is doing no good: but it is too little and, unless accelerated and modified, may be too late. In the meantime, the Florida sugar industry and conservative politicians use the project's existence as an excuse for doing nothing more of substance--a convenient pretense that the crisis is under control.
The photographs of The Everglades Collection help to document the biodiversity and beauty that still remain in the Everglades region, while shining additional light on the urgent threats that various economic and political interests would prefer to keep in the dark.
Everglades National Park encompasses only a small portion of the Everglades proper, so while most of the photographs here were taken within the boundaries of the park, they are labeled as originating simply in "the Florida Everglades." Also, it is impossible to biologically isolate the Everglades from the rest of South Florida; in particular, the geographic area included within Big Cypress National Preserve serves as a crucial biological reservoir for the Everglades, and vice versa. Many species that occur throughout the Everglades region depend upon some remaining contiguity between the Big Cypress swamps and the Everglades basin. Accordingly, while all photographs in the Everglades collection document Everglades species, some of the individual specimens were photographed in the region currently designated within Big Cypress National Preserve or other adjacent, protected areas.
Note that while I have attempted to give a sample somewhat representative of the full collection, the photographs displayed here are still a small sample of that larger body of work.
Joel Curzon.
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J.M.Curzon Photography
8895 Towne Centre Drive, 105-312
San Diego, California 92122
(406) 459-4688
email: host@jmcurzonphoto.com