Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades [Hardcover]

Ted Levin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2003

Consider just two of the countless facts about the damage we have done to the Everglades: Half of its original 14,000-square-mile expanse is gone, and saving what is left will cost at least $8.4 billion. Alluding to destruction on a scale we can barely grasp, figures like these can at once stir and immobilize us. In Liquid Land, Ted Levin guides us past the dire headlines and into the magnificent swamp itself, where we come face-to-face with the plants, animals, and landscapes that remain and that will survive only if we protect them.

Levin has traveled extensively through the Everglades, often in the company of such dedicated individuals as Archie Jones, the conchologist who for fifty years has been studying and rescuing tree snails, or Frank Mazzotti, with whom Levin spent two weeks in the field monitoring American crocodiles. Through Levin's adventures we come to know intimately a place where water was meant to flow as a broad, shallow "sheet" and where minuscule changes in elevation yield a dramatic change in the diversity of life, from manatees and mangroves on the coast to panthers and orchids in the interior.

Throughout, Levin profiles the various parties who have tried to master, protect, or coexist with the Everglades--from the agribusiness concerns known collectively as Big Sugar to Friends of the Everglades to a small community west of Miami, nameless but for the designation "8.5 Square Mile Area." As we float, sometimes slog, alongside Levin through hammocks, keys, and sloughs, we see firsthand how drainage and development have led to water pollution and salinity fluctuations, a disruption of the swamp's wet/dry seasonal cycle, an explosion in the mosquito population, and a weakened response of the ecosystem to drought, fire, hurricanes, and invasive species.

Liquid Land captures the Everglades' essential beauty and mystery as it explores ongoing restoration efforts. Our success or failure will have an impact on environmental policy around the world, Levin believes. As the preservationist rallying cry goes, "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we get to keep the planet."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1948, the Army Corps of Engineers launched a project to deal with flooding in Florida's Everglades by building a system of canals, levees and spillways. Misunderstanding the complexities of the ecosystem they were trying to control, the engineers drained the Everglades. In this knowledgeable and carefully researched overview, Levin, a naturalist, writer and photographer, recounts the many negative effects this drainage has had on wildlife and plant life. Half of the original Everglades area has been converted to housing and farmland; the wilderness's ability to recover from natural disasters such as hurricanes has been compromised by human error. Levin, who covered the area by foot, boat and plane, successfully evokes the Everglades of yesterday and today, and details the possibilities that exist for its future. He mentions that $8 billion has been allocated for a Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), which is intended to reverse the decline and restore the wetlands by recapturing water flushed out to sea and redirecting it back without flooding corporate farms and cities. Drawing on extensive research, the author describes the interest groups, corporations and citizens who conflict with one another over the CERP project. A small group of homeowners, for example, composed chiefly of Cuban exiles, will be forced to move because they live on marshland that may be flooded. In this informative and timely account, Levin offers an accessible, engaging narrative of what environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas called "the river of grass." B&w illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

It is not without a certain degree of irony that the Everglades, long held as one of the toughest and most inhospitable environments on earth, has become one of its most threatened and fragile. Originally encompassing more than 14,000 square miles, today nearly half this incomparable wilderness is gone and the remainder is at serious risk, the result of nature's ravages and humanity's encroachment. Not everyone, from Florida residents to elected officials, casual visitors to committed activists, agrees on what can, or should, be done to reverse this trend. As an unprecedented restoration project gets underway, Levin travels through the Everglades, reacquainting himself with its unique past, evaluating its unsettled present, and assessing its uncertain future. Writing with poetic sensitivity and pragmatic sensibility, Levin uncovers the Everglades' secrets and rediscovers its treasures, balancing sympathy for even the most bothersome mosquito and fearsome alligator with a realistic appreciation not only for what is possible but also for what is necessary to save this beautiful and ecologically essential environment. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (September 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820325120
• ISBN-13: 978-0820325125
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,121,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Waltermire was trained as a biologist as well as an artist and is the curator of exhibits at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winner of the 2004 Burroughs Award, August 3, 2004

By 

R. T. Highsmith (Madison, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades (Hardcover)

This book just won author Ted Levin the 2004 John Burroughs Award for natural history writing, putting him in the company of such wonderful writers as David Quammen (Song of the Dodo), Carl Safina (Eye of the Albatross), Rachel Carson (The Sea Around Us), John McPhee (Control of Nature), Bernd Heinrich (Mind of the Raven), and others.

For me, this book is the new Everglades natural history classic, and will go on my bookshelf next to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas' "The Everglades: River of Grass."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Everglades: a Metaphor for a Land Abused, July 7, 2004

By 

David B Richman (Mesilla Park, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades (Hardcover)

The Florida peninsula was at one time, depending on how you looked at it, a collection of pestilential swamps and frightening dark hardwood hammocks and pine woodlands, or a remarkable paradise of biodiverse and uniquely intertwined ecosystems. I tend to view the peninsula that was as the latter and I am saddened by, for example, the loss of tropical hardwood hammock to the ever growing asphalt and concrete jungle that is called greater Miami.

Indeed, of the many splendors of the "Sunshine State" the Everglades is one of the most remarkable. Made famous by Marjory Stoneman Douglas (who lived to reach 100 years of age), it has at least as much allure as the "Big Scrub" of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. I have seen both, but by the time I saw them they were both much diminished from what they were even fifty years before.

Ted Levin eloquently tells the story of the Everglades, its near destruction and attempted restoration in "Liquid Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades." It is not a pretty story as it involves many misguided ideas about the "grassy waters." These led to the building of miles of canals and dikes and one of the most messed up attempts to tame the untamable in the history of the United States. Whether the Army Corps of Engineers can restore the Glades to their original splendor is questionable, as they don't even really know what the Everglades were like prior to the end of the 19th Century. Nobody bothered to record it! After all it was worthless swamp and jungle to the developers like Napoleon Bonaparte Broward.

Levin records this sad history of an underappreciated wilderness reduced to, as Levin says, the artificialness of Disney World by the pumps that try to restore "normal" flows of water. Besieged by often totally inappropriate development, the Everglades still survive in a much reduced form. This world was also well described, as well as illustrated by beautiful and haunting photographs as it was in the early 1970s, by Archie Carr in "The Everglades" (Time-Life Books).

A monumental "tribute" to the short-sightedness and unbelievable hubris of the human species, the story of the Everglades is also one of hope, however slight. Archie Carr always tried to look on the bright side of the issue and I think we have to do so as much as we can (while not sugar- coating the destruction that has occurred in the past and is still going on today). While a mere shadow of what once was, there are still some areas like Corkscrew Swamp and (if you are very adventurous) the Fakahatchee Strand that are very much worth seeing- especially if you can appreciate swamps.

Read Ted Levin's book if you care about the special wild places of this planet!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Getting into the Glades, March 18, 2009

By 

C. Pittman (St. Pete, Fla) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades (Paperback)

Ted Levin knows the way to bring a landscape alive for readers is not with the mushy pseudo-lyricism that plagues nature writing, but with simple, precise description. Recounting an airboat ride, he reports: "Sawgrass snaps back in my face. Green tree frogs, anoles, countless jumping spiders, orb weavers, ants, beetles and weevils land in my lap. Dragonflies cling to my hair. I hide my face from the slapping, stinging wall of greenery that passes before me."

The best parts of Levin's tale, like this one, take readers into places that will never be part of the national park's tourist tram ride. Tagging along with biologists capturing snail kites or counting endangered crocodiles, he shows what makes the River of Grass so different from every other place on Earth, and why it's in danger of disappearing forever.

But Levin's book has some odd omissions. There is no mention of political figures like Bob Graham and Jeb Bush. He never brings up one of the most controversial aspects of the Everglades restoration plan, in which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will allow mining companies to wipe out hundreds of acres of wetlands over the next 30 years so it can then turn the mines into reservoirs.

For a full rundown on the mining issue, and a comprehensive look at Florida's current environmental woes, check out Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss (Florida History and Culture)