Edge of the Everglades: Big Cypress National Preserve

Edge of the Everglades: Big Cypress National Preserve, a half-hour documentary, tells the story of the country’s first national preserve through interviews with leaders of the movement to protect the Big Cypress, as well as hunters, private camp owners, renowned Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher, and the Preserve's wildlife biologists. Historic photographs and vintage film highlight the early efforts to include the Big Cypress in Everglades National Park, the subsequent logging of the Big Cypress, and the grassroots struggle to stop the Everglades Jetport. Produced in fall of 2009 to air with Ken Burns' National Parks series.
Writer/Producer: Lynne Howard Frazer

Narrator: Peter Thomas 

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Venturing into the remote reaches of the Preserve, the documentary reveals the wild beauty of the western Everglades, and highlights the struggle to preserve this wet wilderness. Managing the diverse habitats of the Preserve includes controlled burns,  eradication of non-native melaleuca trees that threatened to overwhelm the entire swamp, and extensive wildlife research, including efforts to help one of the most endangered mammals in the world -- the Florida panther.

Edge of the Everglades also highlights the ongoing struggle to protect this fragile environment, while allowing oil drilling, private hunting camps, swamp buggies and airboats within the Preserve.
Award-winning narrator Peter Thomas movingly tells the story of the massive, mysterious, magnificent marshland that continues to inspire deep passions for one of the last great wild places of the world -- the Big Cypress Swamp.