Green Empire: The St. Joe Company And the Remaking of Florida’s Panhandle

Since the Great Depression, the St. Joe Company (formerly the St. Joe Paper Company) has been Florida's largest landowner, a forestry and transportation conglomerate whose influence has been commensurate with its holdings. The company owns nearly one million acres, mainly in northwestern Florida, where undeveloped coastal and riverside landscapes boast some of the state's most scenic and ecologically diverse areas. For 60 years, the company focused on growing trees, turning them into paper, and managing its ancillary businesses. In the late 1990s, the company shifted directions: it sold its paper mill, changed its name, and launched a concerted drive to turn its natural-resource assets into greater profits. Today the St. Joe Company is a critical and fiscally powerful force in the real-estate development of northwest Florida, with access to the most influential people in government. Based on hundreds of sources--including company executives, board members, and investors, as well as outside observers--this factual and balanced history describes the St. Joe Company from the days of its founders to the workings and dealings of its present-day heirs. For anyone concerned with land use and growth management, particularly those with an interest in Florida's fragile wildlife and natural resources, Green Empire will illuminate the issues surrounding the relationship between one of the most ambitious players in Florida's real-estate market and the state's last frontier.

Kathryn Ziewitz is an environmental writer whose work has appeared in Sierra, Florida Naturalist, and High County News. She has served as director of the St. Andrews Project, a grassroots effort to revitalize a waterfront community in Panama City, and she is currently a high school teacher in Bay County, Florida.

June Wiaz has worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her most recent writing includes a chapter in The Book of the Everglades.