Customer Reviews

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You don't have to live in Florida or be all that interested in the environment to appreciate what Michael Grunwald has accomplished with this terrific book. The Swamp is a universal American tale, the struggle between man and nature, the power of pride and the price of hubris. It reads like a novel but the amazing part is how true it is. The Indian fighters and the ecologists, the developers and the politicians, the army engineers and the sugar industrialists make up an eclectic and compelling cast of characters, some idealistic, many foolish, all brought to life by Grunwald's vivid prose. But the Everglades are the main protagonist and a multifaceted one at that, forever surprising and enduring. No one has written a book that captures the development of America quite like this in many years. And if you do live in Florida or find the environment to be important, then you absolutely, positively must read this book.

This history of how first we dried out the Everglades and are now desperately trying to wet it down again to a reasonable facsimile of its former self reads like a thriller. Grunwald has a gift for simile ("It had the panoramic sweep of a desert, except flooded, or a tundra, except melted, or a wheat field, except wild.") and a good reporter's nose for the political boondoggling, pork bellying and backroom dealing that form the Everglades' prime crops, including what really happened in Florida in the 2000 election, over which I am still gasping. Grunwald is an advocate for restoration, no question, but his eye is clear, his pen is sharp and he takes no prisoners. A must read for anyone who likes well-crafted historical epics.

This is a book everyone in Florida, and all environmentalists, should read to understand what has happened, is happening, and what is likely to happen to the Everglades. Billions of state and federal tax dollars are being spent. Why and for what? Beautifully written and researched, those interested in history,politics and our eco-sytem will find it hard to put down. Why isn't Al Gore the President? What's the role and future of Big Sugar in Florida? Can an environmental disaster be avoided for South Florida or is it already too late?

Capt. Pete Quasius
President
Audubon of SW Florida

My job touches not so peripherally on Everglades National Park, one of the crown jewels of the U.S. national park system, so I was eager to read this highly recommended summary of the history of the Everglades by Washington Post report Mike Grunwald. Calling this book a summary doesn't do it justice - it's comprehensive without being overly long, it's an excellent read without being too journalistic, its coverage of the issue is broad without being too shallow, and it inflames while also moderating the reasons why, in 2006, the Everglades is still dying, because of our insatiable greed and need for more, more, more - water, land, money, power. I picked up this book a couple months back, connecting with the topic on a professional level, but then as I approached the end of the book, sad news from Florida brought me unexpectedly in personal contact with one of the millions of human stories that pervade the Everglades, Florida, and the politics of paradise, the subtitle of this book - the passing of my aunt, whose husband and sons were some of those folks who greatly enjoyed being swamp rats, hunting, fishing and airboating through the river of grass. Speaking with an uncle who remembers the wilderness that used to be the Everglades 40-50 years ago, we talked about the daily rains that used to come every afternoon, like clockwork, around 4-5pm each day in southern Florida. This book talks about silting of estuaries, muddy waters and phosphorous deposits in the great Lake Okeechobee, depleted water tables, red tides killing endangered or threatened charismatic species like the manatee and dolphins and how the Army Corps of Engineers has falled to figure out 'it's the environment, stupid.' As we walked under a beautiful blue sky, in a Palm Beach county cemetary that hasn't seen water in too long a time, my uncle remarked that the daily rains that I had reminisced about have been AWOL for the past four years. Something is still very wrong in The Swamp, and while this book spells out what it is, we should reflect on the avarice in our cold hearts that continues to plunder the only home we have, and be moved to renewed action to restore, as reasonably as possible given our wide footprint on the land, this dying jewel. For an excellent understanding of what's happened, and happening, to the Everglades, READ THIS BOOK.

There are no other Everglades in the World - South Florida Author Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998)

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic

Hinton, WV (HNN) - The Florida hurricane of 1928, which struck the hardest at Lake Okeechobee, killed 2,500 people, mostly poor blacks who drowned in the vegetable fields of the Everglades, writes Michael Grunwald in "The Swamp" (Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, illustrations, maps, [...]).

The death toll was second only to the Galveston, Texas hurricane of September 1900, when 8,000 to 10,000 died. The Okeechobee hurricane death toll was higher than that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, "another case of poor blacks in low-lying floodplains betrayed by inadequate dikes."

Subtitled "The Everglade, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise," "The Swamp" is an lively, entertaining and thoroughly researched book about humans attempting to take a perfect ecosystem - the Kissimmee River valley, Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades -- and trying to "improve" it.

We humans never seem to leave well enough alone, as the siting of New Orleans and the monstrous over development of South Florida amply demonstrate. I could add the development of a gigantic megalopolis in a place that gets about 14 inches of rain a year - greater Los Angeles - and the more recent out of control development of another city in a desert, Las Vegas. The real motto of Homo Americanus seems to be: "anything worth doing is worth overdoing - and then some."

A prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, Grunwald traces the history of the Everglades from its beginnings in the Ice Ages to its function as a natural "river of grass," as Marjory Stoneman Douglas dubbed it in her 1947 Rivers of America book (Those wonderful books enchanted me when I was in high school in the 1950s! Numbering 65, they rivaled the WPA guidebooks to the states in sheer readability) to thoroughly misguided attempts to drain the swamp that isn't a swamp. It really is a slow moving body of water than once covered much of southern Florida, providing a lush habitat for thousands of species of animals and plants and purifying the water through sawgrass (not really a grass) and limestone aquifers, Grunwald writes.

In some respects, the destruction of the Everglades was inspired by the draining of the swamp where Chicago now is, Grunwald suggests. In fact, one attempt to "improve" the Everglades came from a 1913 report produced by 65-year-old Isham Randolph, "one of America's best-respected hydraulic engineers." (Pages 160-61). Randolph had served on the Panama Canal board and had overseen the Chicago Drainage Canal, "a gargantuan project best remembered for reversing the flow of the Chicago River."

Almost all the attempts to destroy the Everglades were motivated by development, first of cattle ranching in the Kissimmee Valley, where the winding river was turned into a die-straight canal to keep the river from flooding the land; to draining areas south of Lake O to create gigantic sugar-growing fields. I've never understood the need for so much sugar - I never use it in my coffee or cereal -- but it produced multimillionaires who had terrific clout in Florida. One of them - in fact the father of the Everglades sugar industry, Grunwald writes -- was Ernest "Cap" Graham, father of the late Washington Post publisher Phil Graham, Miami Lakes developer Bill Graham and Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham.

The 1928 hurricane - they weren't named in those days - ended the Florida land boom for almost two decades, but it didn't stop plans by a variety of developers and Florida governors to dig canals, build dikes that would withstand hurricanes and generally destroy an ecosystem unique in all the world.

The Everglades National Park that was dedicated by President Harry Truman on Dec. 7, 1947 - a month after the publication of Douglas' "The Everglades: River of Grass." The park included only 1.3 million acres, excluding all of the upper Keys, Big Cypress and "everything else north of the Tamiami Trail, the coral reefs, the Turner River area, the marshes of northeast Shark Slough along the park's eastern boundary, and a 22,000-acre tract of farmland inside the park known as `The Hole in the Donut.'"

The newest Florida land boom was underway when the park was dedicated, spurred by the returning veterans of WW II who fell in love with Florida and the arrival of what one wag called "the newly wed and the nearly dead."

Huge suburbs sprawled out in Southeast Florida, from Dade County on the south to Broward County (Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood ) named after Florida Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who was a major swamp-draining advocate, north to Palm Beach County, whose growth was spurred by Henry Flagler, John D. Rockefeller's right-hand-man at Standard Oil.

Flagler built the Florida East Coast Railroad, inspired by his honeymoon with his second wife in St. Augustine. That's a true capitalist: Dreaming of railroads, monster resort hotels and cities like Palm Beach and West Palm Beach while on his honeymoon!

"The Swamp" is a great read for anyone interested in the politics of development. The second half of the book deals with attempts to preserve - even restore to something like its natural state -- much of this unique ecosystem.

Long before Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" spurred the modern environmental movement, Grunwald says, Aldo Leopold, a pioneer ecologist, wrote "A Sand County Almanac" which was published in 1949 shortly after his death (Pages 226-27). In his book Leopold persisted in "questioning the notion that nature existed to serve man, calling for a land ethic in which people would be responsible citizens of the earth rather than its conquerors."

Leopold (1887-1948), an Iowa native and a long-time Madison, Wis. Wisconsin resident, was a founder of the Wilderness Society in 1935 [...] and inspired Floridians like Ernest Lyons, editor of the Stuart News, who made a stirring ecology-based case against a massive flood control project by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Lyons warned against the "Hollandization" - referring to the land ethic of the Netherlands - of South Florida, arguing that the project would provide land reclamation for the few and destruction of natural wetlands that provided nature's better way of flood control (Page 227).

The Everglades may have even cost Al Gore the presidency in 2000, Grunwald suggests (Page 337-38ff). Gore's refusal to come out against the proposed Homestead airport that would have gobbled up a huge chunk of the Everglades resulted in environmental diehards turning away from a resolute supporter of ecology toward Ralph Nader. Gore lost Florida by 537 votes. "Nader received more than 96,000 votes, and some operatives attributed 10,000 of them to the airport issue. That was more than enough to elect a president who would support oil exploration in the arctic National Wildlife Refuge...and enrage environmentalists like no president since Ronald Reagan," Grunwald writes.

A prediction: "The Swamp" will be on everybody's short list for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. If I were voting, I'd give it both honors!

[...]

I have been a resident of Florida since 1971. I watched natural beaches disappear for sake of condos in Naples. The Everglades is a beautiful place-like no where else in the world.

This week I started reading The Swamp. Each time I pick up the book to read, I find myself stirred with emotions (anger, grief, sadness) about what was and is. It's personal and global. This decimation (development) has occurred in the last 50-75 years. And like the energizer bunny this march of destruction keeps on moving. Mr. Grunwald has put into words what I have been trying to understand since 1995.

Rain. When I first moved to Florida the summer rain would come off the Everglades every day in late afternoon. One could set their watches by it. Sweet, gentle and peaceful. This doesn't happen anymore...sometimes we don't get rain for weeks. When we do the thunder and intensity is anything but peaceful. I don't have to tell you about the hurricanes.

Sounds. In the movie the "Education of Little Tree" Granpa (James Cromwell) and Little Tree go out to the still in the early morning. Granpa hearing the birds through the mist as the dawning sun peeks over the mountains says `Listen to the Earth she's coming alive!" When I first moved to Fort Lauderdale I could hear the sounds of the birds and bugs at dawn and dusk coming alive. Today the noise of auto traffic and airplanes drowns the sound out. I can't hear the earth any more.

This book is a must read for those living in south Florida to learn more, more about what to do on a personal level, more about the legacy we have created and we are leaving for our children and their children.

This is one of those stories that if you couldn't laugh at it you would have to cry. This is the story of the everglades down through the years. It is in one sense the story of preservation vs. development as conducted throughout out country and even the world.

At first the Everglades was viewed as something to be cleaned up and the land put to 'good' use. A lot of 'progress' was made in this direction until people began to see the damage that they were doing. In December 2000 the federal government directed the Army Corp of Engineers to begin a program to undue the damage that they had done earlier. Of course this hasn't solved the problem as various factions fight over just what is to be done. (Now these same folk get to go restore the area in Louisiana damaged by Katrina -- another area where they contributed to the problem in the first place.)

This is a delightful book. The characters discussed are as strange as any from a novel. Except they are real. Perhaps the best single summary of the book is the closing three sentences: 'But most of all, the Everglades is a moral test. It will be a test of our willingness to restrain ourselves, to share the earth's resources with the other living things that moveth upon it, to live in harmony with nature. If we pass, we may deserve to keep the planet.'

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

Once dismissed as a dismal swamp fit only for alligators, snakes, flamingos and Indians, the Everglades has become a battle ground in Florida's continuing tension between development and conservation.

In "The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise," Michael Grunwald writes a well-researched and fluently written history of America's unique ecosystem. The United States bought Florida from Spain for $5 million. A hundred years later, nearly $8 billion was proposed for a comprehensive development and restoration plan for the Everglades that has yet to be completed.
Along the way, a cast of colorful characters influenced the story, including Henry Flagler, John D. Rockefeller's partner and the builder of the "impossible' railroad from Palm Beach to Key West; Spencer Holland, Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and environmental secretaries from several administrations.
There were villains: "Big Sugar" and other agricultural interests that wanted to dump (and still do) their wastes in the headwaters of the Everglades; the railroads, which consumed rights of way as political payoffs; and the "Plumers," - hunters who almost exterminated Florida's native birds so wealthy women could wear feathers in their hats. Andrew Jackson's administration fought three wars of attrition against the Seminoles in what was America's first Vietnam. And there were heroes and heroines: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who started out writing public relations pieces for developers and ended up in her `nineties and beyond as "The Mother of the Everglades"; and Ernest Coe, another visionary environmentalist.

The Everglades, and a proposed Jetport within it, influenced the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. It has pitted the powerful sugar industry against environmentalists, but also forged strange political alliances including that of lobbyists for U.S. Sugar and the Sierra Club. Grunwald, a political writer for the Washington Post, interviewed dozens of current and former political leaders to get an insider's picture of the wheeling, dealing, and chicanery that went into the 2000 Florida presidential election in which Al Gore, the Nobel Prize winning environmental champion, found himself on the wrong side of the environmental fence.

In summary, Grunwald has done a yeoman job in compiling this important book based on extensive journalistic and historical research.

-- 30 --
Postscript

"Florida buys Big Sugar" In the July 7, 2008 TIME Magazine, Michael Grunwald writes that the administration of Florida Governor Charlie Crist has made an offer to buy the US Sugar Corporation,including over 180,000 acres in the northern Everglades drainage area, for $1.75 Billion. Grunwald notes that what Crist's deal can do is "change the political ecosystem." He adds "by essentially bribing US Sugar out of business, Crist not only frees up its land but also eliminates an implacable obstacle to restoration."
(Hopefully, similar arrangements can be reached in other states where agribusiness threatens the economy --timber, railroads,chemicals, and so forth)

Beautifully written in wave after wave of unlocated metaphor, THE SWAMP by Michael Grunwald evokes both today's divided Everglades while casting back a fond if wary look at the original marsh 19th century "settlers" sought to tame with the aid of then up to date marvels of engineering.

The Army Corps of Engineers, under Herbert Hoover, finally got the Everglades halfway under control, but in the process of doing so, they nearly destroyed irrevocably the delicate, if rambunctious, ecosystem that made it healthy environmentally. In the span of thirty years millions of people swarmed into the recovered "Dutch-ized" landfills of southern Florida, a region larger than many European nations, and these people crucified the marsh on a cross of drought.

Thanks to activists like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who Grunwald tells us gave up sex in 1917 to concentrate on writing and direct political action, the relevant agencies of the Federal government eventually saw the widsom in reversing their pro-development policies. Today a concerted effort is being made to turn back the hands of time and get rid of some of the benighted improvements in the Everglades, letting nature take its own course. Wow, with the brouhaha over the Katrina levees and now this book, I am getting a very dim impression of the Army Corps, can't they do anything right?

Any interested in Florida politics in general or Florida environmental concerns in particular must read THE SWAMP: THE EVERGLADES, FLORIDA, AND THE POLITICS OF PARADISE. Once seen as a resource to be drained and used, the Everglades is now considered a national treasure, prompting a great environmental project to try to save it. THE SWAMP tells of its destruction and possible resurrection, but begins not with human intervention but with prehistory, from Ice Age to modern times. From interactions between the Army Corps of Engineers and natural disasters to how the Everglades deteriorated, Grunwald traces the visions, perspectives, and changing politics influencing the swamp's development and use.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch