Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape

One of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2006

Florida Book Award, Florida Nonfiction, Bronze Medalist

Al Burt Award for Florida Journalism

Losing It All to Sprawl is the poignant chronicle of award-winning nature writer Bill Belleville and how he came to understand and love his historic farmhouse and neighborhood, even as it was all wiped out from under him.

As tractors and backhoes encircle Belleville and his community, displacing everything Belleville has called home for the past fifteen years, he tells a story that is much older—10,000 years older. The saga stretches back to the Timucua and the Mayaca living in harmony with Florida’s environment; conquistadors in the “land of flowers”; turn-of-the-century tourists “modernizing” the state; the original Cracker families who lived in Belleville’s farmhouse. The millennia-long transformation is starkly contrasted by the unbridled growth and development consuming Belleville’s home and, ultimately, his very sense of place.

In Losing It All to Sprawl, Belleville accounts for the impacts—social, political, natural, personal—that a community in the crosshairs of unsustainable growth must ultimately bear, but he also offers Floridians, and anyone facing the blight of urban confusion, the hope that can be found in the rediscovery and appreciation of our natural landscapes.

Bill Belleville (1945–2020) was a documentary filmmaker and the author of several books, including Salvaging the Real Florida: Lost and Found in the State of Dreams; The Peace of Blue: Water Journeys; and River of Lakes: A Journey on Florida’s St. Johns River.