MEDIA & REVIEWS
Journey to the Edge of Eden
“This book is easy to overlook, as it carries no publishers imprint or ordering information. And yet it is a significant addition to the understanding of Collier County’s natural featured and institutions to study and protect its environment ….The author’s boundless enthusiasm for his evolving vocation shines and shimmers. His wonderful descriptions of the discovery process the education process and the natural phenomena are the heart of this loving memoir.
​
“Powerful as well are his descriptions of the people he works with ant the struggles of the various environmental organizations that sometimes compete, sometimes cooperate in pursuit of a shared mission” - philJASON, NaplesFloridaWeekly
“Gary Schmelz, in a Journey to the Edge of Eden takes us through a wonderful personal account of the conservation history of Southwest Florida. Journey… is one part personal memoir similar to the English naturalist Gerald Durrell and one part Florida conservation history. With hilarious stories of unintended naturalist misadventures and recounting conservation ‘as it happened,’ A Journey to the Edge of Eden is one of those rare books you read in a coffee shop and with gusto and pride while laughing along out loud at Gary Schmelz stories.
​
Gary Schmelz discusses at length the conservation history of how Florida conserved the Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp and Ten Thousand Island National Wildlife Refuge. He also interweaves a wonderful personal story of his relationship with his father and how his father impacted and supported Gary Schmelz’s passion for conservation.”
- Gabriel Thoumi, CFA, Mongabay.com
"A memoir of love, and some close calls, in the Everglades.
Gary Schmelz’s autobiographical “Journey to the Edge of Eden” (lulu.com) looks, from its cover, to be a sweetly somnambulant memoir of paddling the Everglades with test tubes for environmental research and a fishing pole for weekends with dad.
​
It’s not.
​
The book burbles from one crisis to the next like a hungry gator roaming a pond full of plastic swans. Schmelz own father was brutally beaten and strung up in a barn by a vicious foster parent, Schmelz weathered, more times than he wanted, the specter of being stranded in the deepest of the Glades in pitch dark. Doing after-hours research, he sabotaged his role as a window-dressing environmentalist for full-steam-ahead plans by Deltona Corp. to develop Marco Island.
​
Journey is a story coursing through two generations of love for nature. Schmelz recalls his father’s tutelage about the outdoors on the East Coast: We walked the Delaware shoreline and we’d find all kinds of things. To find out what these critters were my dad would then take me to the bookstore and we’d learn about them, he said.
​
In turn, Schmelz taught children in Immokalee who had never seen the Gulf of Mexico about it; a chapter both sad and funny recalls his experience with students who had to catch their food to have any dinner at night.
​
The book, …which is a tribute to Schmelz’s father, Henry, recalls the two of them studying nearly every inch of Tigertail Beach to know all of its creatures and attributes so that when Gary Schmelz brought his students on field trips he could explain anything they saw. His father was a willing unpaid research assistant, with a passion for nature: ‘He just loved getting out and doing things with me."
- Harriet Heithaus, Naples Daily News
The Gift
