Customer Reviews

Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades

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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."

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!

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)

From panthers to tree snails, author Levin has experienced Florida's Everglades as no other, and here is provided an artful survey of author Ted Levin's travels through the region. From issues surrounding its restoration efforts to history of wildlife and wildlife management efforts, Liquid Land is packed from cover to cover with eye-opening insights.

_Liquid Land_ by Ted Levin was a thoroughly engaging portrait of the Florida Everglades. A good mixture of natural and human history, politics, and travelogue the book was divided into three parts and was accompanied by photographs and several maps.

The first section laid out what the environment of this unique ecosystem is like. We learn that the Everglades is only the most distinctive feature of south Florida, part of a landscape of wetlands that once covered 14,000 square miles (6,000 miles of which was Everglades proper) and still includes rivers, lakes, pine flatwoods, inland and coastal swamps, tree islands (which support miniature forests of tropical hardwoods), mangrove jungles, and Florida Bay, all a region ruled by tropical seasons, wet and dry, with intermittent hammering by "big weather" (mainly hurricanes) and wildfires (interestingly fires play a major and needed role in the region`s ecology though fires that result from the lack of water due to human drainage have been devastating).

The Everglades itself is a region of shallow, slowly flowing water, called sheet flow, a singular feature of the region. It is an "absorbent plain of limestone rife with tropical greenery" (five different formations of limestone, none older than six million years), land that is "on the verge of water, water on the verge of land." It is not a dark and menacing swamp such as found in Hollywood films (though there are cypress swamps in the area) nor is it a river with visible banks, despite the area sometimes being called the "river of grass" after far and away its most visible plant, sawgrass, _Cladium jamaicense_, which is in fact not a grass at all but a sedge, a "lean, sharp vegetative blade", a plant that can grow 10 feet tall and once dominated 30% of the pre-drainage Everglades, over 1200 square miles; also it should be called rivers of grass, as there are two separate drainages. Even these areas, which might appear to the uninitiated as a monotonous, "endless run of fierce-edged sawgrass" has tremendous variety as it is a mosaic of sloughs, marshes, weed-choked lakes, cypress stands, hardwood tree islands, tidal rivers, and marl prairies (greasy, limy areas that are "shoe-sucking, tire-sliding...slippery earth through which the limestone pokes", an area known for gator holes, reptilian excavations crucial for many species during the dry season).

The second section was ten chapters devoted to the natural history of Everglades environments and species and also the people who study them. We learn that the Everglades is home to staggering numbers of mosquitoes (one study noted that two thousand mosquitoes per minute landed on white-shirted human volunteers and the park boasts 45 species), the bewildering variety of tree snails in the Everglades (58 variants exist, all apparently developed from a single beachhead established by individuals that floated over from Cuba 5000 years ago), and that the Everglades once supported the largest concentration of wading birds in North America, possibly the world (as recently as the 1930s a quarter of a million ibis, egret, heron, wood stork, and spoonbill would congregate on small fish and invertebrates trapped in shrinking pools on the marl prairies). Other chapters looked at such topics as the American alligator, American crocodile, Florida panther, snail kites, and the mangrove coast.

The third and final section looked at the many problems facing the Everglades. Unlike other national parks and wilderness areas in the United States, the Everglades lies at the bottom of its watershed and has been called by some the "the Park at the End of the Pipe." Easily America's most imperiled national park, novelist Joy Williams wrote that the Everglades is really an illusion, a wetland that exists only because of the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Much of the 20th century has seen state and federal governments simultaneously trying to destroy and save the Everglades, with the Army Corps of Engineers having the largest role, subdividing the Everglades into an agricultural district (the Everglades Agricultural Area, or EAA, dominated by "Big Sugar" and where every fourth teaspoon of sugar consumed in the U.S. is grown), three water conservation areas, and a national park, creating canals, levees, spillways, and straightening former meandering rivers in an effort to "tame" the landscape to suit the needs of flood control, construction, and agriculture and yet also later on trying to serve the needs of various endangered wildlife species (ironically, conservationists don`t always agree, as a restoration scheme that favors one animal species might be at the expense of broader-scale efforts to restore the entire wetland).

The author discussed the various competing interests in the region for land and water in South Florida, particularly agriculture, showing how the efforts to cultivate crops - mainly sugar - on marginal farmland has had disastrous consequences, often resulting in the park being deprived of water when it was most needed and flooded during the dry season as sugarcane cultivation is completely out of sync with South Florida`s natural cycles. These crops - particularly sugar - are often subsidized by the government (Levin discussed Big Sugar politics and personalities).

In addition to starving the region of water, phosphorus-rich runoff water from the EAA has favored the explosive growth of cattails at the expense of plants of a normally low-phosphorus environment (like sawgrass); more than 50,000 acres of cattails have spread at the expense of fish and wading birds.

There is much debate over which Everglades to restore, as to a large extent pre-drainage Everglades is only incompletely understood and different people have used the Everglades as it appeared in different decades as the benchmark with which success is measured. Generally a restored Everglades will have higher water quality, a reestablished overland connection between the various preserved portions of the Everglades under state and federal control, a restoration of peripheral, bordering wetlands, a return of more freshwater to Florida Bay, an improved water storage capacity, and a redirection of trillions of gallons of water lost to the sea without flooding farmland or cities.

I read River of Grass last fall and then read Liquid Land last winter. It was great. Easy to read and follow. Very informative.

I'm reading it for the second time now. You can't read it without coming away with genuine concern or affirming everything you have thought or been told about the state of our Everglades and how vital they are to the well-being of our Earth.