Tampa Bay: The Story of an Estuary and Its People

This brisk environmental history shows how, for both bad and good, humans have interacted with Tampa Bay, Florida’s largest open water estuary. It was a “larder” for Indigenous peoples who hunted and fished there for millennia, but it would only take 150 years, from the late 19th to mid-20th century for the Bay to become a literal sewer. Bennett (history, Florida Atlantic Univ.; When Tobacco Was King) describes the 1880s discovery of the area’s phosphate deposits and its subsequent development as a port, with channel dredging and wharf building, as the first steps to adverse ecosystem change. Developers’ faith in bulldozers was unwavering during the 1950s, as vacationers and those seeking to relocate to these warm climes flocked south. Dredge and fill operations ravaged seagrass meadows and mangrove forests, while industrial effluents and domestic sewage flowed freely. Tampa Bay came back from the brink beginning in the 1970s, a time fueled by a new environmental awareness and the nascent science of ecology. Bennett’s account of how citizens, gutsy city officials, NGOs, and politicians collaborated to carry out positive environmental change offers real-world lessons for readers interested in coastal clean-up.