Books by Jeff Ripple:

Excerpt
"I visit these woods for varied reasons, no one more significant than another. Sometimes I hike or write. Sometimes I sit on a favorite log and watch the morning light play in the trees and clouds. More often, I bring my wooden field camera and photograph. With the camera in my hands I creep along and listen to the forest. I intuit the dance of shadow and light, the pitch and form of trees, the texture of bark and grass and leaves. I wait for the forest to tell me in my gut what I will photograph. When it has spoken, when I settle the camera on the tripod and peer through the ground glass, I feel my body drawn through the lens and swallowed by the landscape before me. I become what I see.

Perhaps that is so with others who enter the forest9hikers, hunters, biologists, birders. I hope so, because it is they9us9who must speak for this forest, any forest, in the community and in government. Not everyone cares about endangered species or the sweet scent of a pinewoods at dawn. The spiritual qualities of a wildland and its inhabitants are often overshadowed by economics, the bottom line: "Tell me how much this forest is worth in dollars and cents." An international corps of economists, ecologists, and policy analysts did so, in terms of the earth's natural systems as a whole and the myriad ways they aid humankind, in the science journal Nature. Our whole benefits package, courtesy of Mother Earth, was valued at somewhere around 17 trillion dollars. Every year I see figures documenting how much birding, sport fishing, hiking, canoeing, and other recreational activities9and by extrapolation the wild regions in which these activities take place9are worth to local economies. These figures do benefit conservation, and I am grateful for them. But it shouldn't have to be that way. A place, a species, should be held most valuable for what it is9nothing more, nothing less.

....I am hard pressed to convey what Goethe State Forest means to me, at least concisely. My feelings dribble out through my photographs, as entries in my journal, in this essay. Alone, they are not particularly notable. But I have to wonder what would happen if every person in Florida took a moment to reflect on their favorite wild place, scribbled an address on an envelope, licked a stamp, and sent a picture, a poem, a letter, a leaf9anything at all9to the governor. Or to a senator or representative or anyone with the power to make decisions about wilderness in Florida. Just to let them know how they feel.

The flow of envelopes might be imperceptible at first, a trickle at best. But over days and weeks, it would increase, individual freshets of envelopes braiding into small creeks, tumbling toward larger streams, until finally they would meld into broad, swollen rivers, like the Suwannee or Apalachicola at flood stage, indomitable torrents of public expression advancing toward Tallahassee and Washington.

Imagine how sweet the scent of a pinewoods at dawn would be then."

© Jeff Ripple. Excerpted from "The Sweet Scent of Pinewoods at Dawn," The Wild Heart of Florida, University Press of Florida, 1999.

Manatees and Dugongs of the World

The Wild Heart of Florida9Florida Writers on Florida Wildlands

Florida: The Natural Wonders
	Southwest Florida's Wetland Wilderness: Big Cypress Swamp and the Ten Thousand Islands
Sea Turtles
	The Florida Keys: The Natural Wonders of an Island Paradise
Big Cypress Swamp and the Ten Thousand Islands Eastern America's Last Great Wilderness