Gator Country Quotes

“Assuming we know everything robs the world of wonder.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Don’t do anything you aren’t willing to defend later. Ultimately, I realized the story of Operation Alligator Thief came full circle back to the reason I started telling stories in the first place. It had the same moral as the stories my family told on our dock all those years ago: Who you are in the dark is your truest self.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Every story worth telling orbits around a core of grief. Because what are stories if not memories made into myths?”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“But here "sense" was just another made-up rule that reality didn't have to follow.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“The yarns he spun showed me that every person, from the most educated to the least, holds a story close to their heart that tells them, and others, who they are. Places, especially ones as alive as the Everglades, are the same. If you listen closely, you can hear them.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“my car had one wheel in the junkyard and was quickly becoming what my father would have called a Willit, as in, Will it start?”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“This is not the place for the faint of heart. One of Peg’s neighbors nailed a sign to a tree that said it all: WHOA YANKEE TURN AROUND.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Wonder, I believe, is a necessary component of hope. Without hope, even our greatest efforts will fail. Writing this in the darkest of times, I have been reminded to see the world like Jeff, not only with a sense of wonder but with a sense of compassion as well. If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that finding a scapegoat is easy. Working to fix problems, like the economic issues that push most people into poaching in the first place, is hard. With hope, we can do the hard thing.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“You, too, can have your own little slice of paradise; all you have to do is destroy that paradise in the process. This kind of banal desire, and the greed that sold it, has been Florida’s true destruction. Developers pitted man versus nature, not as it had been before as a struggle for survival out in a harsh and remote wilderness, but as a struggle to uphold a false hierarchy of creation. Humans are more important than animals, they said. The soil is ours to scourge and conquer. Marketing has convinced us that trivial luxuries are more important than the natural world, as if we are not part of the natural world ourselves, as if our consumption is not a bid against our own interests, one in favor of concrete and routine against the unwieldy and awe-inspiring, monotony against biodiversity, pesticides against night music, the greed of a few against life itself on our planet. Dozens of species go extinct every day, with perhaps a million more under threat of extinction within our lifetime. Corporate greed tells us this doesn’t merit our attention. If you feel bad, cut back on your own, because it’s certainly not their fault. Such PR sleight of hand shifts the blame, feeds our guilt, inflames our anxiety, convinces us to consume more and more, until we give up caring, if we ever cared at all. Without thinking, we have become numb to the quiet collapse going on around us. Everything is connected. A species dying is a piece of our world dying. If the world dies, we die, too.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Environmentalists spoke out against plume hunting, and so, the very same year, Congress adopted the Lacey Act, the first wildlife protection law in US history. The original intent of the act was to criminalize poaching, specifically the sale of illegally captured animals and animal products across state lines.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“To Mac and Jonnie, telling stories like this was more important than ever. As the outside world shouted louder and louder, it had become nearly impossible for one voice to rise above the fray—until it did. To them, the world had room for plenty of stories. Trickster thieves, noble outlaws, curious writers, conflicted lawmen, alligators, and gator poachers—they could all fit. The secret was in the telling. So they had to let the right people in. 15 BACKUP”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“In other words, I had things backward. Centuries of enmity with humanity had taken their toll on the Everglades, and within their lifetimes, Mac and Jonnie had seen their world diminished in ways they struggled to put into words. The damage was already done, and if nobody cared, it would keep getting worse unseen in those remote reaches of the tropics. Stories made people care. Stories showed people from outside the Everglades that the place wasn’t a wasteland, that there was something down here—myriad things—worth saving. Not just for the animals, not just for the tourists, not just for the people who live here—for all of us. Curiosity will save the glades.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Later, I would learn that the reason the conches and other shells were thinning was twofold. Over the years, as the pH of the ocean has decreased by what would seem the tiniest of measures, shellfish have become increasingly sensitive to the water’s acidity. The acid isn’t dissolving their shells. Something more complicated is happening here. The rise of carbon dioxide in the ocean has made calcium more soluble, and so the biological mechanisms that shellfish have used to compose their shells for millions of years no longer function as they once did. The process of converting calcium into shell is now slower. Population dynamics are at play, too. Conches with thicker shells are older ones. If we’re only turning up young conches, it means something is happening to the others, likely increased predation or predation by another name, overfishing.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“those trying times for alligators, entire species of plants shifted place in the Everglades. Alligators are ecosystem engineers. But we don’t know the entire extent of their influence. If alligators ever faced extirpation or, worse, extinction, there was no telling what would happen to their habitats—and our planet—without them. Jeff’s grand-scheme purpose there was to make sure that we would never find out. So he carried this thought with him: He was saving the alligators—along with the sparrows, the panthers, the burrowing owls, the bears—and the constellation of this hopeful act stretched out from that little patch of plain and swamp into everywhere the water flowed, all the people who drank it, all the plants that sucked it up through their roots, all the oxygen that they exhaled—a little thing in the grand scheme could mean the entire world. He was saving the darkness, too, the enormity of the sky only possible because people like Jeff guarded the land from destructive human hands, keeping the channels of possibility open for the primordial wonder we feel, our smallness, our place in the universe, when we look into the stars.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Removing gators from the wild had to some extent taken the wild out of them, and with it went their natural imperatives. No need to hunt, as the food came to them. No need to reproduce, because why bother. It was like being a big fish in a tiny bowl. It had no space to grow—and no reason to do so, either.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Championing environmental causes by ignoring the people who live there, or worse, by working against them—wherever that may be—does not work, because to ignore the people is to ignore the land itself. They are the ones who have been listening to the land, many for a long time.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“stories. The wily trickster and his humorous resistance remind the downtrodden the world over that when you’re smart you still have power. Some things never change.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Fi. There was something extraordinary in the wonder I felt in hearing those enigmatic calls. I wanted to know everything, but I couldn’t let answers wash away my sense of wonder.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“This isn’t just primates, either. Comparative neurological studies have found that even though the brains of animals traditionally associated with intelligence, such as the higher orders of primates and dolphins, are structurally more similar to those of humans, in terms of emotional resemblance it’s dogs who are our closest kin. We are not anthropomorphizing our dogs when we say, for example, He missed me, as Jeff’s did when he had to leave them behind to go undercover. They really did seem joyful when they came to visit the farm. Dogs can grieve. Dogs really do love us.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“No one is the character we think they are. The truth confronts us only after we challenge our expectations. One”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“What we do when we’re faced with these impossible choices reveals who we really are.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“you couldn’t really be friends with someone who didn’t know who you were.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Without thinking, we have become numb to the quiet collapse going on around us.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Humans are more important than animals, they said. The soil is ours to scourge and conquer.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“The flames had dwindled so they rippled over the shapes of logs they had reduced to cinders, whitening the bark into scales not dissimilar to an alligator’s back. A frill of ash still glowing with a red rim of fire lifted from the bark and wafted skyward.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“the best way for humans to save the ecosystems we’ve mucked up is to leave. Yes, many parts of the wild are better off without us. But to get really unpoetic here, you can’t un-lick that ice cream cone.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“You do not have to prove you can wrangle an alligator. Just about anybody can open a legal alligator farm as long as they have the money and enough know-how to get by.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“In the corners of gator country, folk magic practitioners incorporate alligator claws and teeth into their rituals, which seems a more fitting end for these majestic beasts.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“It’s hard to imagine seeing a creature as both dragon and dinner, but in desperation, one is willing to eat just about anything, even seemingly mythical beasts.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

“Who you are in the dark is just who you are. Live like everything is out there in the sunshine.”
― Rebecca Renner, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades