Rebecca Renner is the author of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, which was named a most anticipated nonfiction book of 2023 by BookPage. Renner is also a contributor to National Geographic, and her writing has appeared The New York Times, Outside Magazine, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Stetson University, and she lives in her home state of Florida.
EB: How did you first begin writing about animals? Have animals always been a big part of your life? Based on the opening pages of Gator Country, I am guessing yes.
RR: Animals have always been there. If I wanted to write anything even remotely about myself, it was also about an animal. When my parents first got married, my mom was running a horse farm—she was a racehorse trainer… I mean, I rode a horse before I could ride a bicycle! Animals have just always been there to the point that I’ve often taken them for granted.
EB: Why alligators? Do you feel as strongly about other reptiles? Personally, I love reptiles—I have two pet tortoises.
RR: We had an alligator who lived in the lake in our backyard [in Florida]. When I was in high school, I used to read back there, next to the alligator, and our neighbors were afraid and wanted to call animal control, and I was like don’t you fucking dare call animal control on our alligator. We had named the alligator! We hung out together. The alligator always just watched me, like oh, that human is here again.
Alligators are so misunderstood. For most of my life, whenever I’ve run into one, they’ve just chilled. You really have to mess up in order to get bitten by an alligator. Very few people ever get attacked by them. The ones that do have usually done something to provoke the attack.
Honestly, though, the real reason I ended up writing a whole book about alligators was because I had pitched an editor a bunch of book ideas and that was the one that she liked the most. Gator Country was originally supposed to just be a magazine story, but it turned into a book. Actually, when the editor told me she was into it I hadn’t even gotten in touch with Jeff [Babauta, the officer who led the undercover investigation known as Operation Alligator Thief] yet. I’m often putting myself into corners in my career. [laughter] So she said yes, I love it, and I thought fuck my life. I have to get ahold of Jeff. But after I finally found him, I got even more interested in the story—here was this whole hero’s journey arc. For example, one chapter is called “The Call”—both because Jeff gets a literal phone call to ask him to take on this undercover investigation, and also because of the call to adventure in the hero’s journey.
EB: There is so much I loved about Gator Country, though one thing in particular was how present you were in the story—I loved reading about your saga to track down Jeff—and how your love for your home state shined through in every description of a person or a creature or a plant or a place. Did you know from the beginning you’d be a character in the book?
RR: Oh, I was pushing to not be part of the book at all. I wrote the book during the pandemic, and I was really struggling with my mental health. I had a long dissociative episode, when I couldn’t perceive myself as a person, let alone as a character. I was alive then, doing things to keep myself alive, but I don’t have a lot of memories from that period. So, I was really pulling to not be a character because I couldn’t even understand things like, Who am I? What am I doing here? But actually, I almost feel like writing myself into Gator Country helped me find myself again. I kept reminding myself: this person did these things. This person is me, and is not just a character on a page… I had to be undone in order to find myself again.
EB: I feel like a lot of your book is about rediscovery—of yourself and also of the place where you grew up. You have a beautiful line towards the end of the book about seeing the nature in Florida in a new way—How many orchids had I stepped over without a second look? I love that. How else has writing about non-humans changed your relationship to the natural world?
RR: Getting to know Jeff was part of it. One time during an interview we ended up in the middle of nowhere on this trail, and I asked him what a certain plant was called. He told me it was called sword-grass—that name is just so evocative––and then that snowballed into him pointing out and naming every plant and animal we could see. He stood there and labeled our entire surroundings, and I realized that this man was extraordinary in so many more ways than I anticipated. I think all books should be about people who are extraordinary in surprising ways.
My mom actually used to do the same thing, and I rebelled against it in childhood. Every time we’d go out, she’d ask me, What’s that flower? What’s that plant? And I’d be like, I don’t know, Mom, I don’t care! Stop making every outing a quiz! But after being with Jeff, it ignited in me this desire to label my world as well.
One of the things I learned about was the concept of plant blindness—which is when people can’t perceive plants because they don’t know the names of them. When someone walks out into the world they may notice, say, one singular tree, but not everything around it. But when we learn the names of things more specifically, they register more concretely in our heads, and that helps plant conservation. It’s easier to raise money to save “Pacific Redwoods” instead of just “trees.”
This all got me wondering about how many extraordinary things I had missed my whole life. I ended up researching places I had seen and had no idea I was literally stepping over endangered orchids as a child. Here I had been thinking my life was so boring and wishing I had grown up some place interesting, some place that mattered. And then, to realize that I was telling myself it didn’t matter because I didn’t know any better, was revolutionary to me. It’s still something I’m thinking about and delving into. It’s work that will never be finished.
EB: I totally get that. I feel like once you start to notice things, you notice how much you haven’t noticed, if that makes sense. The other thing, too, I think is that these species can’t speak for themselves—they have to rely on humans to speak up for them. You make this point in Gator Country, about how the alligators can’t press charges on their own behalf, and how when the alligator thieves were charged it was considered a “crime against God” because no one owns the wilderness. Can you talk a bit about the ethics about writing about nature, in particular what it is like to write about subjects whom you can’t interview directly?
RR: I think nature can speak for itself. The swamp especially speaks very loudly. Just because it’s not speaking English doesn’t mean it’s not speaking. I often feel like the history of the Everglades is the history of humans trying to control it and the Everglades saying, I don’t think so. The Everglades loves to eat anything that you put in its way that it doesn’t want there. So, yeah, nature does speak for itself. In writing about nature, I think my job is to listen to what it’s already saying and translate that for the people who don’t know how to listen for themselves.
EB: That’s a great way of putting it. I mean, so much of really good writing about non-humans is actually about the relationship between humans and non-humans. In particular, I love how you focused so much on the nuance and shades of gray that people exist in—there aren’t just “good guys” and “bad guys” when it comes to people. (I love your line about how, “Personally, I don’t trust stories about perfect people. Perfect means something is missing.” And I love how you showed how poachers—who are often seen as people without regard for the environment—actually love animals and nature the most. Definitely more than all the big developers.) How did you tackle how complex and contradictory people can be throughout your research and writing?
RR: I find that writers often swing to one extreme or another, either completely lionizing someone or taking out all of someone’s humanity so the person is all flaws. But I think everyone has redeeming qualities, which is something I learned from writing fiction. In some ways, fiction is a lot easier and, in some ways, it is a lot harder. I’ve also been working on a fantasy series for a long time… I guess the way I write everybody, in fiction or nonfiction, is that I want to explore their character until I find that glowing, redeeming quality. Because I think nearly everybody has it. That’s the way I want people to be able to see the world. That’s one of the reasons I write: reading is this wonderful opportunity to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. So, when somebody sees the world through my eyes, I want them to experience this empathy that I’ve worked hard to cultivate. My dad was like this, and Jeff too—they always see the best in people. I think the world needs more of that.
EB: I mean, you nailed that in the book. I think you did such a good job of showing all the different ways that both humans and non-humans need to exist.
RR: Some people who have read the book think I am making excuses for poachers––but the only way you can prevent people from committing crimes in the first place is to understand why they’re committing them and fix that. I don’t think you can choose between protecting people or protecting animals. When you choose animals, you choose neither. When you choose people, you choose neither. In order to protect both, you have to choose both.
EB: That reminds me of a line in your book that I loved: “When the wild faces ruin, so do we. We don’t just lose a metaphor. We don’t just lose a playground. We lose ourselves.”
Another line I loved is towards the end, where you say: “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.” Can you speak more about that?
RR: That’s one of the problems in conservation. The detractors of Operation Alligator Thief were like, why bother? Alligators are not endangered. But the operation was making sure they don’t become endangered. It’s preventative rather than restorative. But people don’t want to dig deep and figure out the root of the problem.
EB: Who are some other writers you admire who write about these similar issues—conservation, nature, non-humans, Florida?
RR: Craig Pittman does a great job writing about Florida. He did a fact-check analysis of [a certain popular book] about the Everglades and called out its bullshit.
I also love H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald and Into Thin Air by Jonathan Krakauer.
EB: Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?
RR: I have a cat. She’s lying on my bed right now, so I won’t go disturb her, but she’s very fluffy and adorable. I also had a dog who died while I was writing the book, which was sort of my mental health last straw.
EB: Oh, that’s so hard. I’m sorry. Losing a pet is always so hard, but I feel like losing a pet during the pandemic was especially brutal. The scene in the book when Jeff had to put down his dog Mack made me very emotional.
RR: Jeff cried when he read it, and I felt I had to apologize because I wrote it so soon after my dog died. I almost feel guilty because I know it’s a super-effective scene, but it also feels emotionally manipulative.
EB: Loving and losing animals is part of life. I mean, it was also such a big part of the alligator thief operation too… the part where Jeff feels upset that he has to sacrifice this group of baby alligators in order to hopefully save more later… Anyway, I really loved Gator Country and can’t wait to recommended it to everyone. My dad is going to love it.
RR: It’s a major dad book.