Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from Its Friends, Foes, and Florida

by W. Hodding Carter IV

When the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan went into effect during the Clinton administration, Florida's great grassy wilderness garnered a host of national attention -- and has since become a breeding ground for environmental dispute. What does it take to "save" a forest? How can it be preserved?

Enter W. Hodding Carter. For an Outside magazine feature he's agreed to paddle the ninety-nine-mile waterway in Everglades National Park to examine the landscape from all angles -- physical, political, cultural, and very personal -- and get to the rock-bottom heart of the story. Stolen Water is the outgrowth of Carter's journey.

Through investigative research, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with key players in the conservation controversy, Carter offers a rare portrait of a national treasure. Utterly important, and at times downright hilarious, Stolen Water is a classic American adventure tale, and an environmental parable for our time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 2004

About the author

A native of Greenville, Mississippi, W. Hodding Carter attended Kenyon College and spent two years in Kenya with the Peace Corps. He has written for several national magazines, including Esquire, Smithsonian, Newsweek, and Outside. He lives with his family in Rockport, Maine.

Reviews

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts off so poorly I almost didn’t read it at all. The first chapter is irrelevant and includes the worst of the author’s humor. It gets much better.

The rest of the book is a mishmash of memoir, history, politics, and ecology, much of it excellent, much of little interest to me, but easy to skim through. It’s a relatively easy way to learn what has been done to the Everglades. I came away feeling it is unlikely that the Everglades (that is, southern Florida) will ever do more than go from one problematic “solution” to another.

[Allison Hepler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book to read while you are in Florida. It's all about the Everglades, and the environmental and political and economic woes of the region. In the midst of it are canoe trips, bushwhacking, hanging out with manatees, and swimming with mermaids. Typical Hodding Carter, entertaining and a little history.

[Rudi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful, sarcastic, cynical, and devilishly witty at times, Carter skewers developers, the government and agribusiness in this 2004 travel narrative detailing South Florida's ruinous and intractable environmental problems. Carter takes on everything: He journeys willfully without provisions through brutally inhospitable mangrove estuaries, making himself and his companions miserable in the process. He deftly and humorously exposes the greed and political gridlock that continue to harm to the Sunshine State's fragile ecosystem, naming names where he can. Refreshingly, he pulls no punches despite getting a couple things wrong (Hamilton Disston's death was not a suicide, for example.) Despite some very minor flaws, "Stolen Water" is a funny, scathing and informative primer for anyone interested in Florida's brutally exploited natural wonders.