Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58703 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-28
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Washington Post reporter Grunwald brings the zeal of his profession—and the skill that won him a Society of Environmental Journalists Award in 2003—to this enthralling story of "the river of grass" that starry-eyed social engineers and greedy developers have diverted, drained and exploited for more than a century. In 1838, fewer than 50 white people lived in south Florida, and the Everglades was seen as a vast and useless bog. By the turn of this century, more than seven million people lived there (and 40 million tourists visited annually). Escalating demands of new residents after WWII were sapping the Everglades of its water and decimating the shrinking swamp's wildlife. But in a remarkable political and environmental turnaround, chronicled here with a Washington insider's savvy, Republicans and Democrats came together in 2000 to launch the largest ecosystem restoration project in America's history. This detailed account doesn't shortchange the environmental story—including an account of the senseless fowl hunts that provoked abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1877 broadside "Protect the Birds." But Grunwald's emphasis on the role politics played in first despoiling and now reclaiming the Everglades gives this important book remarkable heft. 18 pages of b&w photos; 7 maps. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In recent years, writers have devoted a lot of ink to the tortured history of south Florida's Everglades. But no one has nailed that story as effectively, as hauntingly and as dramatically as Michael Grunwald does in The Swamp, a brilliant work of research and reportage about the evolution of a reviled bog into America's -- if not the world's -- most valuable wetland.

Grunwald, a prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, explains that the true, original Everglades were not a swamp in any botanically correct sense of the word but rather a marsh, "a vast sheet of shallow water spread across a seemingly infinite prairie of serrated sawgrass," often called the River of Grass. But Grunwald's sweep is bigger than that. It embraces the entire south Florida hydrosystem, a 100-mile long funnel that seeps from the Kissimmee lakes near Orlando, spills into Lake Okeechobee, then overflows through the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp to the mangroves of Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. At least that's the way it used to be. Now, despite recent efforts to undo some of the engineered damage inflicted on it over the past 150 years, the swamp remains imperiled. "Half the Everglades is gone," Grunwald writes. "The other half is an ecological mess. Wading birds no longer darken the skies above it." Okeechobee is choking on algal blooms. Sprawl continues to nibble the edge of the Big Cypress. Unsustainable communities "are at risk from the next killer hurricane -- and the one after that."

Risk has been south Florida's leitmotif since Europeans first pushed their way into its wild interior. The region was certainly risky for the Seminole Indians, who barely escaped annihilation by the U.S. Army in the 1830s. Unconquered, a few hundred managed to hang on in the Big Cypress. Later in the 19th century, risk shifted to the great flocks of wading birds -- spoonbills, flamingos, herons and egrets -- whose plumage was thought better adorning milady's stylish hats. Before laws brought that slaughter to a halt, one report fixed the kill at 5 million birds a year.

The most enduring risks were framed by the dreamers and schemers who believed that the Everglades must be drained to make the country fit for settlement and cultivation. Grunwald chronicles each successive (though not always successful) effort to dry out the swamp and describes the devastating hurricanes of 1926 and 1928, which uncorked the backed-up waters of Lake Okeechobee, drowning nearly 3,000 people (mostly poor blacks -- a foretaste of Hurricane Katrina) and prompting the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a four-story concrete dike around the lake, thus stifling much of the flow to the Everglades.

Grunwald is at his best in dissecting the political wars that rattled the region after Everglades National Park was established at the toe of the hydrosystem in 1947 -- which meant that upstream city folks and cattlemen and sugar growers got first dibs on releases of fresh water while the park had to settle for the leftovers, now tainted with pesticides and fertilizers. Meanwhile, the Corps of Engineers, presiding over "the largest earth-moving effort since the Panama Canal," crisscrossed the peninsula with hundreds of miles of levees and canals designed not so much to save human lives as to boost the Sunshine State's economy.

A reader might become numb from Grunwald's stacking of the details were it not for his skill at profiling the characters who, by the late 1960s, were trying to turn the flow of events back Nature's way. Among them: activist-writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas, grand dame of the River of Grass; and Nathaniel Pryor Reed, the "blue-blooded outdoorsman" whose 6-foot-5-inch frame "evoked a great blue heron" and whose eloquence convinced two pro-development Republican politicians, Florida Gov. Claude Kirk Jr. and U.S. Interior Secretary Walter Hickel, to scuttle Dade County's plan to build the world's largest jetport just a coconut-throw north of Everglades National Park.

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew leveled Homestead Air Force Base, located between Everglades and Biscayne national parks. Afterward, Dade County's high rollers, including some who had lost out on that earlier jetport scheme, said this would be a fine place to build a big commercial airport -- never mind that the result would darken both parks' skies with 600 flights a day. The Clinton administration juggled that one for several years even as it cobbled together a $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and billed it as the most expensive and extensive environmental initiative in history. Calculated to undo much of the damage inflicted on the 'glades over the years, the restoration plan was unveiled by Vice President Al Gore in West Palm Beach in 1998. Environmentalists cheered.

But few Florida enviros cheered for Gore in 2000. The greenest presidential candidate in American history declined to renounce the Homestead jetport and was punished for it. According to Grunwald, of the 96,000 votes received by Ralph Nader in Florida that November, some 10,000 were probably attributable to Gore's waffling on the airport. And the final irony? Four days before Clinton turned over the Oval Office to the anti-green George W. Bush, Clinton's administration announced that the Homestead deal was dead in the water -- what little there was left of it.

Reviewed by John G. Mitchell
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The Swamp emerged from a four-part series that Grunwald wrote for the Washington Post in 2002, which focused on the $8 billion plan to restore the Everglades. From there, Grunwald fleshed out the Everglades's contested history. Critics laud The Swamp as an informative, beautifully researched and written tale that links social, political, and environmental history to current events. Many commented on Grunwald's finesse in describing the dreamers and schemers who sold Florida swampland, the engineers who tried to buck nature's forces. A few thought that Grunwald paid too little attention to current controversies, did not adequately explain today's Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, and assumed a condition of ecological purity to pre-European contact Florida. These are minor complaints; Grunwald's unbiased story will provoke outrage over our squandered "river of grass."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

"There is only one Everglades"
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
By Michael Grunwald

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 a war 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 --

Great Combination of FL History and Entertainment
Grunwald is a captivating author. The Swamp takes time to digest because it is rich in history but it's well worth it. It's interesting to see how history repeats itself.

A lively and thorough history of how we ruined the Everglades
This book provides a history of south Florida since European settlement, with the emphasis on the problems of swamp drainage in the former Everglades and the struggle to preserve a small part of the ecosystem in national parks and wildlife refuges. Grunwald has done a good job of research, and unlike many journalists he reads extensively in addition to interviewing people. The book is both informative and a lively read despite its length.

Grunwald's story revolves around draining lands for agriculture and for (sub)urban development in South Florida. The history of Everglades National Park, which occupies only a small part of the Everglades ecosystem, provides a secondary theme.

Grunwald starts, and ends, with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan of 2000, an $8 billion project that ostensibly would save the Everglades. The CERP is ultimately supposed to increase water flows to the national park, but this comes at significant ecological cost. To obtain passage, supporters of CERP had to front-load the economic benefits while postponing the environmental benefits for five decades. The economic benefits include enough new water for six million new residents, continued sugar subsidies, and support for continued urban development.

Grunwald doesn't take a position on the CERP but makes clear why it was politically feasible while more serious plans would not have been. Whether half (or a fourth) of a loaf is better than none in this case is an open question.

Ironically, CERP was signed during the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election. As it turns out, Al Gore was a major supporter of the bill though many environmentalists opposed it as inadequate. Those environmentalists voted for Nader instead, which swung Florida to George W. Bush. Thus, the story in this book is not just important for Florida and the Everglades but for the next eight years of American politics as well.

Grunwald tells the whole story well. Highly recommended.