The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea

Jack E. Davis writes an environmental history of the Gulf of Mexico that begins with its geological formation and carries the story to the present day, treating the Gulf itself, its fish, birds, marshes and barrier islands, as a subject with its own history rather than a backdrop to human activity along its shores. Davis follows the people who have used and shaped the Gulf across centuries, from Native fishing communities and Spanish explorers through the rise of Gulf Coast tourism and the shrimping and fishing industries that, by his account, make the Gulf more productive in fish and shellfish each year than the south and mid Atlantic combined.

The book gives sustained attention to the Gulf's transformation by the oil industry over the twentieth century, when offshore drilling rigs multiplied along the coast until they stood by the hundreds in Gulf waters and supported a workforce that reshaped the region's economy. Davis follows that industrial growth into the present, through disasters including the 1979 Ixtoc I blowout and the far larger 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, and traces how agricultural runoff from the Mississippi River watershed has fed an oxygen starved dead zone that spreads across thousands of square miles of the northern Gulf, and that in 2017, the year the book appeared, reached a record eight thousand seven hundred seventy six square miles.

Davis writes sweeping environmental history built for a general audience, moving between deep time and current headlines without losing sight of the wildlife and communities at stake. Reading the book means coming away with a Gulf that feels less like scenery and more like a living system worth protecting, and it suits a reader who wants nature writing joined to hard economic and political history rather than kept separate from it.