The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
Michael Grunwald
Language: English
Pages: 480
ISBN: 0743251075
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Everglades was once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it.
The Swamp is the stunning story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades, the saga of man's abuse of nature in southern Florida and his unprecedented efforts to make amends. Michael Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, takes readers on a riveting journey from the Ice Ages to the present, illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America's most beguiling but least understood patches of land.
The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and “reclaim” it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished.
Now America wants its swamp back. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. And this book is a cautionary tale for that era. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.
be revived. “It was a sad mistake to tamper with the Kissimmee originally, but now that she is what she is, our view is to make the most of it,” Florida Sportsman editorialized. “Simply stated, man can easily destroy, but can recreate only with immense difficulty, if at all.” Jones had to settle for a compromise bill that failed to define “restoration” and assigned yet another commission to study what to do next. Cattle lobbyists then deleted its funding. But Marshall was unusually cheerful about
frustrating, but Gore always knew that for some Ivory Soap environmentalists, as he put it, “Ninety-nine and forty-four-hundredths percent pure was never good enough.” He was more irritated at Mayor Penelas, who was reelected in September, then took off for a vacation in Spain, contributing nothing to Gore’s campaign or his fight for a recount. After the votes were counted on Election Day, Gore trailed Bush by 537 votes in Florida. Nader received more than 96,000 votes, and some operatives
America’s responsibility to make amends to Mother Nature. “We worked together to save a national treasure,” Smith said. “It didn’t get a lot of ink in what’s going on today, but it’s very, very important.” The power of the Everglades lay in its example. The twentieth century had been an era of mess-making; the twenty-first century could be a time to clean up the messes. And not just the toxic petrochemical messes that had set rivers on fire and thinned the shells of bald eagles during the
Florida, 1993); Joe Knetsch, Florida’s Seminole Wars, 1817–1858 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003); John Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1987); Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Penguin, 2001); Brent Richards Weisman, Unconquered People: Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Indians (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999); John K. Mahon and Brent R. Weisman, “Florida’s Seminole and
near Cape Sable. Birds were big business, and competition was fierce. Cuthbert used the proceeds of his hunt to buy half of Marco Island, which became some of America’s priciest real estate. Cuthbert’s crewman was murdered by a rival plumer for refusing to divulge the rookery’s location. Florida’s most notorious plumer, Jean Chevelier—a curmudgeonly Frenchman who shot out the St. Petersburg area’s rookeries, then relocated to the Ten Thousand Islands—gathered 11,000 skins in a single season.