Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. Born in Pensacola, he graduated from Troy State University in Alabama, where his muckraking work for the student paper prompted an agitated dean to label him "the most destructive force on campus." Since then he has covered a variety of newspaper beats and quite a few natural disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires and the Florida Legislature. Since 1998 he has reported on environmental issues for Florida's largest newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times. In 2004, he won the Waldo Proffitt Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism in Florida for revealing a secret plan by the state's business leaders to transfer water from sleepy North Florida to booming South Florida. The stories caused such an uproar that Gov. Jeb Bush scuttled the plan. Pittman shared the 2006 Waldo Proffitt Award for the series "Vanishing Wetlands" written with colleague Matthew Waite. The series, which found that federal and state wetland protection programs were a sham that enabled development to wipe out swamps and marshes, also won a national award, the Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting, from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Pittman and Waite shared a second Proffitt Award and a second Carmody Award in 2007 for a series called "When Dry is Wet" that exposed the flaws in the wetland mitigation banking industry. That led to their book, "Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss." "Manatee Insanity: Inside the War Over Florida's Most Famous Endangered Species" is Craig's second book for the University Press of Florida. He is currently at work on a third non-fiction book.