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The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
“Brilliant.” —The Washington Post Book World * “Magnificent.” —The Palm Beach Post * “Rich in history yet urgently relevant to current events.” —The New Republic The Everglades in southern Florida were once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it.The Swamp is the stunning story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades, the saga of man's abuse of nature in southern Florida and his unprecedented efforts to make amends. Michael Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, takes readers on a riveting journey from the Ice Ages to the present, illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America's most beguiling but least understood patches of land. The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and “reclaim” it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished. Now America wants its swamp back. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. And this book is a cautionary tale for that era. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.
480 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 28, 2006
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November 22, 2018
"There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them; their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of the their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass." Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass, 1947
In 2006, Michael Grunwald wrote this four hundred page history called The Swamp: Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. This story moves along from the start. We learn that the Everglades is very young geologically, rising out of the sea a few feet when the interglacial melt occurred 100,000 years ago. We also learn that the Everglades terrain is sloped so gradually that it can take weeks for water to flow the length of the Everglades.
We learn about the Calusa Indians and their ancestors who thrived in the Everglades for thousands of years. The first south Florida invader, Ponce de Leon, in 1521, was killed by the Calusa. For the next two hundred and fifty years, the Calusa with their base in the Everglades held off incursions by the Spaniards who had effectively given up on the conquest. When Florida was sold to the British in 1763, the Calusa had by that time nearly died out due to European diseases.
We learn about the three Seminole wars that occurred after the United States purchased Florida in 1819. Initially the purchase for five million dollars was to counter efforts by slaves to escape to sanctuary south of the border and to prevent Seminoles from raiding towns and plantations along the border. Since the Seminoles were former Creek Indians and often had slaves of their own, it was a strange dynamic. Over the course of decades, the Everglades and its quagmire would provide vital protection for the Seminoles against the genocidal actions of Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott and the U.S. military. Eventually the Seminoles were reduced to a few hundred individuals. After the Civil War the government didn’t feel it politically expedient to lose soldiers and militia in the swamp and left the Seminoles alone.
Over the next seventy five years, developers and government agencies spent many millions of dollars failing to drain the swamp and unable to tame the Everglades. During this period, many birds native to the Everglades went extinct when hunters killed them by the thousands for plumes for fashionable hats. Other mammals and wildlife became threatened. Conservationists began to take notice.
After several monstrous hurricanes in the 1920’s, Fort Lauderdale and Miami's population centers exploded and based on new money and prospects; a new series of canals were dug, a massive dike was built near Lake Okeechobee diverting the water flow and the east-west Tamiami highway was laid out walling off the Northern Everglades from the Everglades that we know today. The construction reduced the area of the wetlands by half and this was the motivation that environmentalists needed because everyone could see how radically the area had changed and droughts became a problem. Led by journalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and her popular book on the Everglades, the alarm was raised to save the remaining portion of the Everglades and its unique birds, other wildlife and flora. These efforts resulted in Everglades National Park being enacted into law by Harry Truman in 1947.
The last section of the book deals with repairing the Everglades including efforts to boot the Army Corps of Engineers out, dealing with the effects of pesticides from ranching and all of the politics around development schemes. Discussion centers around the fight to restore and save the Everglades continues. There is discussion of the aquifers drying up as the major threat. The surrounding cities are depleting the fresh water trapped in the limestone. Because this book was written in 2006, there is not really any mention of the biggest long term threat to the Everglades: global warming and sea rise.
Overall the writing was excellent and Grunwald delivered exactly what he outlined in the introduction. This chronological history of the Everglades was very educational and held my interest until the last three chapters. The narrative lost its punch at that point focusing less on the interesting aspects of nature, wars, and engineering but rather on coalitions and tug of war politics. I think with some tweaks this could have been a five star book but nevertheless it is still a very good read.
4 Stars
In 2006, Michael Grunwald wrote this four hundred page history called The Swamp: Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. This story moves along from the start. We learn that the Everglades is very young geologically, rising out of the sea a few feet when the interglacial melt occurred 100,000 years ago. We also learn that the Everglades terrain is sloped so gradually that it can take weeks for water to flow the length of the Everglades.
We learn about the Calusa Indians and their ancestors who thrived in the Everglades for thousands of years. The first south Florida invader, Ponce de Leon, in 1521, was killed by the Calusa. For the next two hundred and fifty years, the Calusa with their base in the Everglades held off incursions by the Spaniards who had effectively given up on the conquest. When Florida was sold to the British in 1763, the Calusa had by that time nearly died out due to European diseases.
We learn about the three Seminole wars that occurred after the United States purchased Florida in 1819. Initially the purchase for five million dollars was to counter efforts by slaves to escape to sanctuary south of the border and to prevent Seminoles from raiding towns and plantations along the border. Since the Seminoles were former Creek Indians and often had slaves of their own, it was a strange dynamic. Over the course of decades, the Everglades and its quagmire would provide vital protection for the Seminoles against the genocidal actions of Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott and the U.S. military. Eventually the Seminoles were reduced to a few hundred individuals. After the Civil War the government didn’t feel it politically expedient to lose soldiers and militia in the swamp and left the Seminoles alone.
Over the next seventy five years, developers and government agencies spent many millions of dollars failing to drain the swamp and unable to tame the Everglades. During this period, many birds native to the Everglades went extinct when hunters killed them by the thousands for plumes for fashionable hats. Other mammals and wildlife became threatened. Conservationists began to take notice.
After several monstrous hurricanes in the 1920’s, Fort Lauderdale and Miami's population centers exploded and based on new money and prospects; a new series of canals were dug, a massive dike was built near Lake Okeechobee diverting the water flow and the east-west Tamiami highway was laid out walling off the Northern Everglades from the Everglades that we know today. The construction reduced the area of the wetlands by half and this was the motivation that environmentalists needed because everyone could see how radically the area had changed and droughts became a problem. Led by journalist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and her popular book on the Everglades, the alarm was raised to save the remaining portion of the Everglades and its unique birds, other wildlife and flora. These efforts resulted in Everglades National Park being enacted into law by Harry Truman in 1947.
The last section of the book deals with repairing the Everglades including efforts to boot the Army Corps of Engineers out, dealing with the effects of pesticides from ranching and all of the politics around development schemes. Discussion centers around the fight to restore and save the Everglades continues. There is discussion of the aquifers drying up as the major threat. The surrounding cities are depleting the fresh water trapped in the limestone. Because this book was written in 2006, there is not really any mention of the biggest long term threat to the Everglades: global warming and sea rise.
Overall the writing was excellent and Grunwald delivered exactly what he outlined in the introduction. This chronological history of the Everglades was very educational and held my interest until the last three chapters. The narrative lost its punch at that point focusing less on the interesting aspects of nature, wars, and engineering but rather on coalitions and tug of war politics. I think with some tweaks this could have been a five star book but nevertheless it is still a very good read.
4 Stars
January 18, 2022
“Swamp” seems like a grossly inadequate term with which to describe the Florida Everglades. Anyone who has looked out upon the vast expanse of the sawgrass flatlands, while the birds sing from invisible places, knows that the Everglades are much, much more than a swamp. Yet the Everglades have often been described as a swamp – most often, by ambitious men who have wanted to drain and pave the Everglades out of existence for their own economic benefit. And that danger continues to threaten the Everglades even today, as Michael Grunwald makes clear in his book The Swamp.
Grunwald, a Washington Post reporter situated in Miami, begins his study of The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (the book’s subtitle) with an in medias res look at the December 11, 2000, signing of a $7.8 billion Everglades relief bill. This moment of bipartisanship, in the midst of the Bush vs. Gore election battle, brought to the Clinton White House some strange political bedfellows – including Florida Governor Jeb Bush, “staring out at the Rose Garden with the air of a quarterback who had stumbled into the opposing locker room near the end of the Super Bowl” (p. 2). Yet this seeming moment of triumph did not mark an end to the threats facing the Everglades.
Throughout too much of Florida’s two centuries of U.S. sovereignty, as Grunwald makes clear, Americans’ attitude toward the Everglades was quite clear, and distinctly unfriendly: “Americans believed it was their destiny to drain this ‘God-forsaken’ swamp, to ‘reclaim’ it from mosquitoes and rattlesnakes, to ‘improve’ it into a subtropical paradise of bountiful crops and booming communities. Wetlands were considered wastelands, and ‘draining the swamp’ was a metaphor for solving festering problems” (p. 4).
Moving from the time of earlier conflicts and injustices – “Indian removal” and the Seminole Wars, slavery and the Civil War – to more modern efforts to “develop” Florida, Grunwald always has his eye on the shapes that Florida development would take in later years. When considering Hamilton Disston’s futile late-19th-century efforts to drain over 10 million acres of Everglades marshland, for example, Grunwald points out that some of the Disston land sold at auction after the developer’s death in 1896 “eventually ended up in the hands of his distant relatives in the D’Isney family – or, as they were known in America, the Disneys” (p. 97).
The lack of planning that so often characterized Everglades development sometimes eventuated in tragedy, as when the Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 struck areas populated by impoverished and vulnerable farm laborers. “The Okeechobee hurricane killed 2,500 people, mostly poor blacks who drowned in the vegetable fields of the Everglades. It was the second-deadliest disaster in American history, exceeded only by the Galveston hurricane of 1900; it was much deadlier than Hurricane Katrina’s drowning of New Orleans in 2005” (pp. 193-94). The disaster inspired a crucial scene in, and gave the title to, Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and the federal response, the building of the Hoover Dike that cut the lake off from the Everglades, introduced a period of drought to the once-flooded land, and made clear that each human effort to “control” the Everglades would carry its own unintended consequences.
Heroic figures are few in the messy saga of Everglades preservation; but one truly heroic figure is Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the Miami Herald journalist and author whose efforts on behalf of the Glades not only produced a great book, The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), but also helped contribute to the dedication of Everglades National Park in that same year. Casual observers might have been forgiven for assuming that the “Everglades problem” had been solved.
Yet more perceptive observers, like Douglas herself, knew that the fight to preserve the Everglades had not ended with the establishment of the national park; it had only entered a new phase, as the pressures of agricultural and real-estate development continued to encroach upon the “river of grass.” Forty years after the national park came into existence, in a 1980’s era when the Reagan administration’s “pro-business” policies posed new threats to the existence of the Glades, Douglas was still fighting. “[W]hen Marjory Stoneman Douglas – now in her nineties, and legally blind – called for restrictions on development in the east Everglades at a public hearing, landowners booed and yelled at her to go back to Russia. ‘I’ve got all night, and I’m used to the heat,’ Douglas shot back” (p. 274).
Other figures, even those who express concern for Everglades preservation, are depicted as facing the pressures posed by powerful economic interests. When Bob Graham became Governor of Florida in 1978, he launched an ambitious “Save Our Everglades” program that was widely praised in Florida and across the nation; as a U.S. Senator for Florida years later, by contrast, he emphasized “cooperation” with the sugar industry that has always held outsized power and influence in Florida politics. Grunwald quotes Graham’s assessment that “Florida sugar cane fields are an integral component of the Everglades ecosystem” and then sums up Graham’s attitude thus: “He might as well have called the Exxon Valdez an integral component of the Prince William Sound ecosystem” (p. 289).
Grunwald ends The Swamp by looking at current restoration efforts in the Everglades watershed – efforts that continue to face challenges from Big Sugar, from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that still seems to think it can achieve seamless management of the entire River of Grass, and from the ongoing manic pace of urban and suburban development across South Florida. In the wake of the 2000 Everglades preservation bill, Grunwald writes, “the Everglades is becoming a restoration model for damaged ecosystems around the globe” (p. 367); but the question of long-term political will to save the Glades remains open.
I read The Swamp on a trip to Florida. From my standpoint in downtown Tampa, close to historic Ybor City and the hockey arena where the Tampa Bay Lightning play, I knew that I could, if I wished, take a drive down the Tamiami Trail into the Glades. Yet I knew that if I did so, I would be driving a poorly planned and hastily built road that contributed to flooding throughout the Glades – one of many sad examples of human-caused harm to this unique and irreplaceable ecosystem.
In an era of climate change and rising sea levels, one can only hope, as Grunwald suggests in an afterword, that Floridians will see that controlled, sustainable growth that works in harmony with the Glades ecosystem is in their own best interest. “Floridians and Americans,” Grunwald concludes, “have failed the test of the Everglades for most of the last century. But they still haven’t taken the final exam” (p. 375). The Swamp is a powerful statement of concern for the preservation of the Florida Everglades.
Grunwald, a Washington Post reporter situated in Miami, begins his study of The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (the book’s subtitle) with an in medias res look at the December 11, 2000, signing of a $7.8 billion Everglades relief bill. This moment of bipartisanship, in the midst of the Bush vs. Gore election battle, brought to the Clinton White House some strange political bedfellows – including Florida Governor Jeb Bush, “staring out at the Rose Garden with the air of a quarterback who had stumbled into the opposing locker room near the end of the Super Bowl” (p. 2). Yet this seeming moment of triumph did not mark an end to the threats facing the Everglades.
Throughout too much of Florida’s two centuries of U.S. sovereignty, as Grunwald makes clear, Americans’ attitude toward the Everglades was quite clear, and distinctly unfriendly: “Americans believed it was their destiny to drain this ‘God-forsaken’ swamp, to ‘reclaim’ it from mosquitoes and rattlesnakes, to ‘improve’ it into a subtropical paradise of bountiful crops and booming communities. Wetlands were considered wastelands, and ‘draining the swamp’ was a metaphor for solving festering problems” (p. 4).
Moving from the time of earlier conflicts and injustices – “Indian removal” and the Seminole Wars, slavery and the Civil War – to more modern efforts to “develop” Florida, Grunwald always has his eye on the shapes that Florida development would take in later years. When considering Hamilton Disston’s futile late-19th-century efforts to drain over 10 million acres of Everglades marshland, for example, Grunwald points out that some of the Disston land sold at auction after the developer’s death in 1896 “eventually ended up in the hands of his distant relatives in the D’Isney family – or, as they were known in America, the Disneys” (p. 97).
The lack of planning that so often characterized Everglades development sometimes eventuated in tragedy, as when the Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 struck areas populated by impoverished and vulnerable farm laborers. “The Okeechobee hurricane killed 2,500 people, mostly poor blacks who drowned in the vegetable fields of the Everglades. It was the second-deadliest disaster in American history, exceeded only by the Galveston hurricane of 1900; it was much deadlier than Hurricane Katrina’s drowning of New Orleans in 2005” (pp. 193-94). The disaster inspired a crucial scene in, and gave the title to, Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and the federal response, the building of the Hoover Dike that cut the lake off from the Everglades, introduced a period of drought to the once-flooded land, and made clear that each human effort to “control” the Everglades would carry its own unintended consequences.
Heroic figures are few in the messy saga of Everglades preservation; but one truly heroic figure is Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the Miami Herald journalist and author whose efforts on behalf of the Glades not only produced a great book, The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), but also helped contribute to the dedication of Everglades National Park in that same year. Casual observers might have been forgiven for assuming that the “Everglades problem” had been solved.
Yet more perceptive observers, like Douglas herself, knew that the fight to preserve the Everglades had not ended with the establishment of the national park; it had only entered a new phase, as the pressures of agricultural and real-estate development continued to encroach upon the “river of grass.” Forty years after the national park came into existence, in a 1980’s era when the Reagan administration’s “pro-business” policies posed new threats to the existence of the Glades, Douglas was still fighting. “[W]hen Marjory Stoneman Douglas – now in her nineties, and legally blind – called for restrictions on development in the east Everglades at a public hearing, landowners booed and yelled at her to go back to Russia. ‘I’ve got all night, and I’m used to the heat,’ Douglas shot back” (p. 274).
Other figures, even those who express concern for Everglades preservation, are depicted as facing the pressures posed by powerful economic interests. When Bob Graham became Governor of Florida in 1978, he launched an ambitious “Save Our Everglades” program that was widely praised in Florida and across the nation; as a U.S. Senator for Florida years later, by contrast, he emphasized “cooperation” with the sugar industry that has always held outsized power and influence in Florida politics. Grunwald quotes Graham’s assessment that “Florida sugar cane fields are an integral component of the Everglades ecosystem” and then sums up Graham’s attitude thus: “He might as well have called the Exxon Valdez an integral component of the Prince William Sound ecosystem” (p. 289).
Grunwald ends The Swamp by looking at current restoration efforts in the Everglades watershed – efforts that continue to face challenges from Big Sugar, from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that still seems to think it can achieve seamless management of the entire River of Grass, and from the ongoing manic pace of urban and suburban development across South Florida. In the wake of the 2000 Everglades preservation bill, Grunwald writes, “the Everglades is becoming a restoration model for damaged ecosystems around the globe” (p. 367); but the question of long-term political will to save the Glades remains open.
I read The Swamp on a trip to Florida. From my standpoint in downtown Tampa, close to historic Ybor City and the hockey arena where the Tampa Bay Lightning play, I knew that I could, if I wished, take a drive down the Tamiami Trail into the Glades. Yet I knew that if I did so, I would be driving a poorly planned and hastily built road that contributed to flooding throughout the Glades – one of many sad examples of human-caused harm to this unique and irreplaceable ecosystem.
In an era of climate change and rising sea levels, one can only hope, as Grunwald suggests in an afterword, that Floridians will see that controlled, sustainable growth that works in harmony with the Glades ecosystem is in their own best interest. “Floridians and Americans,” Grunwald concludes, “have failed the test of the Everglades for most of the last century. But they still haven’t taken the final exam” (p. 375). The Swamp is a powerful statement of concern for the preservation of the Florida Everglades.
June 15, 2009
All I knew about the Everglades before I visited in May 2009 was that I had never been to them, despite all the time I had spent in Miami as a child, and they had alligators. All I knew when I left was that the Everglades were endangered because of water use conflicts and that they weren't near as wet as I thought they'd be. Then I picked up The Swamp.
Grunwald does a masterful job of simplifying (perhaps over-simplifying but to one who knows nothing the clarity was welcome) the history of the Everglades, the history of southern Florida and the politics that still get in the way of logical and useful policy.
I used to think of the Everglades as a "from the dawn of time" kind of thing but it isn't all that old. As Grunwald writes, "If the history of the earth is condensed into a week, algae started growing Monday, fish started swimming Saturday morning, and birds flew in early Saturday afternoon. The Everglades showed up a half second before midnight, around the time the Egyptians started building pyramids." The land that would become the Everglades was formed at the dawn of time, when Pangaea broke up and North America spirited away with an appendage-shaped chunk of northwest Africa that would become Florida. It's been geologically stable ever since; none of those upheavals that cause mountains or canyons. It spent a lot of time covered by ocean. Then it emerged with a unique make-up; a gentle limestone slope towards the sea with a large lake (Okeechobee) that drank up the rain and overflowed slowly, sending water cascading gently towards the ocean. The conditions in the Everglades were harsh; very unsuited for life. Except life took hold anyway and created an ecosystem unlike any other in the world. An ecosystem that, by design, worked flawlessly despite the dearth of materials to support it. Then Man showed up.
And Man wanted progress. White Man, that is. Indian populations lived in the Everglades for centuries, taking advantage of the abundance of the ecosystem but also using sustainable practices, preserving the resources while simultaneously living off of them. White Man didn't do it that way. White Man wanted to conquer. White Man, particularly Christian White Man, wanted to exert dominion over nature; it says that in the Bible after all. A tiny example; White Man killed birds with abandon during the plumed-hat craze of the late 1800s. They left chicks to die without adults to take care of them. Then they wondered why the birds were disappearing.
That's how White Man approached the Everglades; how can it make me money? Once in a while, a White Man would pop up with the notion that human victory over nature didn't really represent progress but since there weren't dollars attached to the idea, that visionary was often ignored. Natural resources are only valuable insofar as they can be exploited by human beings.
Thoreau tried but his "loving nature for nature's sake" schtick wasn't appealing to the masses who only cared about the dollar and progress. Then George Perkins Marsh piped up with, "All nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other." That rang a little farther than Thoreau's poetic diatribes. But it didn't ring far enough.
Sure, conservation was a cornerstone of the progressive era; Teddy Roosevelt had a fascination for living beings. He also liked to shoot them. But he couldn't shoot unless there were beings to shoot, hence conservation.
But conservation is not preservation. And shooting things just for the pleasure of shooting them didn't over-ride the concerns of those who wanted to see economic progress; farm land made out of the River of Grass. Cities connected by roads and railways. And airports. Progress not preservation.
So the boondoggle of draining the Everglades began. And continues to this day. It never entirely worked, due mostly to the epic incompetency of the Army Core of Engineers, but it sure did destroy the ecosystem that made the Everglades the Everglades.
"There is something very distressing in the gradual destruction of the wilds, the destruction of the forests, the draining of the swamps, the transforming of the prairies with their wonderful wealth of bloom and beauty - and in its place the coming of civilized man with all his unsightly constructions, his struggles for power, his vulgarity and pretensions...We constantly boast of our marvelous national growth. We shall proudly point someday to the Everglade country and say; Only a few years ago this was worthless swamp; today it is an empire. But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings." -- Charles Torrey Simpson.
There are famous names of those who tried to save the Everglades and it was made a National Park, regardless of the fact that, as Grunwald writes, "It was less ooh or aah than hmm." But it also had to compete with the influx of man into a land that doesn't have enough natural resources to support the population that followed the developers' piper song. And even in the 1970s, when preservation became hip, the Everglades had to fight with the humans over who got the water. And the humans always won; or the corporations run by humans, rather. The Army Core of Engineers only released water to the Everglades when no one else needed it, including the Everglades. The delicate balance of the Everglades Ecosystem relies on the pattern of flood and drought that came to it naturally before man arrived. But that pattern isn't sustainable when the water is needed to assuage the thirst of all those retirees who flock to "God's Waiting Room" during the dry season when there wasn't enough water to go around even before they arrived. And the runoff from the crops contains phosphorus, which allows heartier life to take hold; cattails replace sedge sawgrass and the ecosystem changes forever. So the water that IS released to the Everglades often is one more bullet in an already dying corpse.
So the Everglades loses. Still losing, even though in a bizarre move in 2000, when a bipartisan coalition of unlikely characters like Jeb Bush and Al Gore came together, in the midst of Gore v. Bush, to sign an agreement that would ostensibly save the Everglades.
But the Everglades is still in dire danger. And so is the quality of life in south Florida; it's already a virtual hellscape of concrete, asphalt and strip malls. Man is soiling his own nest. Even "lower" beings don't do that.
"We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature today is critically important, simply because we have acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery - not of nature, but of ourselves." -- Rachel Carson
"We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Pogo
"The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet." -- attributed to Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Grunwald does a masterful job of simplifying (perhaps over-simplifying but to one who knows nothing the clarity was welcome) the history of the Everglades, the history of southern Florida and the politics that still get in the way of logical and useful policy.
I used to think of the Everglades as a "from the dawn of time" kind of thing but it isn't all that old. As Grunwald writes, "If the history of the earth is condensed into a week, algae started growing Monday, fish started swimming Saturday morning, and birds flew in early Saturday afternoon. The Everglades showed up a half second before midnight, around the time the Egyptians started building pyramids." The land that would become the Everglades was formed at the dawn of time, when Pangaea broke up and North America spirited away with an appendage-shaped chunk of northwest Africa that would become Florida. It's been geologically stable ever since; none of those upheavals that cause mountains or canyons. It spent a lot of time covered by ocean. Then it emerged with a unique make-up; a gentle limestone slope towards the sea with a large lake (Okeechobee) that drank up the rain and overflowed slowly, sending water cascading gently towards the ocean. The conditions in the Everglades were harsh; very unsuited for life. Except life took hold anyway and created an ecosystem unlike any other in the world. An ecosystem that, by design, worked flawlessly despite the dearth of materials to support it. Then Man showed up.
And Man wanted progress. White Man, that is. Indian populations lived in the Everglades for centuries, taking advantage of the abundance of the ecosystem but also using sustainable practices, preserving the resources while simultaneously living off of them. White Man didn't do it that way. White Man wanted to conquer. White Man, particularly Christian White Man, wanted to exert dominion over nature; it says that in the Bible after all. A tiny example; White Man killed birds with abandon during the plumed-hat craze of the late 1800s. They left chicks to die without adults to take care of them. Then they wondered why the birds were disappearing.
That's how White Man approached the Everglades; how can it make me money? Once in a while, a White Man would pop up with the notion that human victory over nature didn't really represent progress but since there weren't dollars attached to the idea, that visionary was often ignored. Natural resources are only valuable insofar as they can be exploited by human beings.
Thoreau tried but his "loving nature for nature's sake" schtick wasn't appealing to the masses who only cared about the dollar and progress. Then George Perkins Marsh piped up with, "All nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other." That rang a little farther than Thoreau's poetic diatribes. But it didn't ring far enough.
Sure, conservation was a cornerstone of the progressive era; Teddy Roosevelt had a fascination for living beings. He also liked to shoot them. But he couldn't shoot unless there were beings to shoot, hence conservation.
But conservation is not preservation. And shooting things just for the pleasure of shooting them didn't over-ride the concerns of those who wanted to see economic progress; farm land made out of the River of Grass. Cities connected by roads and railways. And airports. Progress not preservation.
So the boondoggle of draining the Everglades began. And continues to this day. It never entirely worked, due mostly to the epic incompetency of the Army Core of Engineers, but it sure did destroy the ecosystem that made the Everglades the Everglades.
"There is something very distressing in the gradual destruction of the wilds, the destruction of the forests, the draining of the swamps, the transforming of the prairies with their wonderful wealth of bloom and beauty - and in its place the coming of civilized man with all his unsightly constructions, his struggles for power, his vulgarity and pretensions...We constantly boast of our marvelous national growth. We shall proudly point someday to the Everglade country and say; Only a few years ago this was worthless swamp; today it is an empire. But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings." -- Charles Torrey Simpson.
There are famous names of those who tried to save the Everglades and it was made a National Park, regardless of the fact that, as Grunwald writes, "It was less ooh or aah than hmm." But it also had to compete with the influx of man into a land that doesn't have enough natural resources to support the population that followed the developers' piper song. And even in the 1970s, when preservation became hip, the Everglades had to fight with the humans over who got the water. And the humans always won; or the corporations run by humans, rather. The Army Core of Engineers only released water to the Everglades when no one else needed it, including the Everglades. The delicate balance of the Everglades Ecosystem relies on the pattern of flood and drought that came to it naturally before man arrived. But that pattern isn't sustainable when the water is needed to assuage the thirst of all those retirees who flock to "God's Waiting Room" during the dry season when there wasn't enough water to go around even before they arrived. And the runoff from the crops contains phosphorus, which allows heartier life to take hold; cattails replace sedge sawgrass and the ecosystem changes forever. So the water that IS released to the Everglades often is one more bullet in an already dying corpse.
So the Everglades loses. Still losing, even though in a bizarre move in 2000, when a bipartisan coalition of unlikely characters like Jeb Bush and Al Gore came together, in the midst of Gore v. Bush, to sign an agreement that would ostensibly save the Everglades.
But the Everglades is still in dire danger. And so is the quality of life in south Florida; it's already a virtual hellscape of concrete, asphalt and strip malls. Man is soiling his own nest. Even "lower" beings don't do that.
"We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature today is critically important, simply because we have acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery - not of nature, but of ourselves." -- Rachel Carson
"We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Pogo
"The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet." -- attributed to Marjory Stoneman Douglas
April 14, 2025
Fascinating and very well researched. Every American should read this book.
September 17, 2022
Even though this book doesn't get into woo woo stuff, reading this only reinforced my conviction that there are spiritual implications to protecting and respecting swamps. If you work to protect them they will protect you. Swamps protected the Seminole from Andrew Jackson's armies and they protect our cities from flooding and erosion. But if you try to fuck swamps, they will inevitably fuck you right back. Ex: Gore wouldn't take a stand against building Homestead airport right next to the Everglades so the Florida environmentalists ran to Nader and we got the whole entire Iraq war and lost out on 20 years of climate action for it. The consequences continue to compound.
This book is very thorough but it gets a little hard to keep track of the enormous cast of characters at times. Could have used more frequent reminders of who was who. And reading about the harebrained schemes to drain and sell and develop south Florida was like watching a slow motion train wreck. It'd have been funnier if it weren't so tragic.
This book is very thorough but it gets a little hard to keep track of the enormous cast of characters at times. Could have used more frequent reminders of who was who. And reading about the harebrained schemes to drain and sell and develop south Florida was like watching a slow motion train wreck. It'd have been funnier if it weren't so tragic.
March 17, 2020
This was a great entertaining and educating book, meticulously researched, about the history of the Florida Everglades. Back in the 1800s the Everglades was considered by almost everyone as a “vast and useless swamp” and everybody was trying to come up with schemes to drain it to make it “useful.” The animals and birds that called the everglades their home were considered of no consequence. Times have certainly changed but we should be ever diligent!
This book is full of characters, including Hamilton Disston, who’s distant relatives were the Disneys; Henry Flagler, railroad tycoon turned governor, and Spessard Holland, also known as Mr. Florida. These and others only managed to mess up the Everglades and lure unwitting northerners down to Florida.
There is a lot to take in with this book but the gist of it is that we might finally be learning to respect what's lef of the Everglades and hopefully things will improve in the future.
This book is full of characters, including Hamilton Disston, who’s distant relatives were the Disneys; Henry Flagler, railroad tycoon turned governor, and Spessard Holland, also known as Mr. Florida. These and others only managed to mess up the Everglades and lure unwitting northerners down to Florida.
There is a lot to take in with this book but the gist of it is that we might finally be learning to respect what's lef of the Everglades and hopefully things will improve in the future.
June 24, 2019
Ugh. It took me MONTHS to get through this. So difficult. Like chewing cardboard. I love the subject matter but found this very difficult to follow. I wanted to learn about why the red tides exist today and have a better understanding of Lake Okeechobee, and I came away with a very superficial knowledge. I don't even feel like I could intelligently discuss this topic at a party and I spent so many hours trying to get though it. Also, how many times can an author use the same stupid metaphor about someone's "ox being gored" before my eyes roll out of my head. Lazy. I really don't understand all the positive reviews! Maybe I just don't like non-fiction.
July 9, 2018
The book was great. I listened to and read this book. The narrator has a great voice but needs to learn there is no “N” in Kissimmee. He could not pronounce the work correctly and it was making me crazy.
July 14, 2019
A FL resident must-read
June 16, 2025
3.5 stars rounded up. This book gave me a lot of context for the politics in Florida in general, and the history of one of the most unique ecosystems on Earth. I would recommend this to anyone who lives in or is interested in Florida. The level of research that went into this book is astonishing, though my only criticism is it can be quite dense at points.
April 28, 2013
Flocculent ooze: Politics, progress and the poisoning of an American treasure
Author Michael Grunwald provides a riveting look at a swamp filled with danger, unpredictable currents, sucking quicksand, predators and prey, and treachery. And that’s just when he is describing Florida politics. The real star of the book is the Florida Everglades, a unique, threatened and vulnerable ecosystem in Florida. Known as the river of grass, it’s a long, gently sloping swamp which once covered a large percentage of the state and was home to a staggering array of flora and fauna. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see flocks of thousands of flamingos take to wing, but sadly, fashionistas needed their plumes to compensate for their own shortcomings.
I picked up this book on a swing through the Everglades national park on our way to Key West, and was very glad I did. Just a few hours stroll through the park and we got a lasting sense of what a majestic place the Everglades were before man tried to drain them and, in between mojitos and snorkeling, I immersed myself into the filth and muck of the politics behind the current park.
The book opens at the end of the story, as then-president Clinton signs into law an $8 billion restoration project for the Everglades with Jeb Bush on hand, as well as a variety of developers, environmentalists and other unlikely political bedfellows from both sides of the aisle. The bill was signed into law even as the Supreme Court was deciding the Gore vs. Bush recount in Florida (a decision which, the author hints, would have been rendered unnecessary had Gore come out in opposition to an airport expansion that gave at least 10,000 votes to Nader).
With the context set, the book then rewinds to the past when Native Americans lived in Florida and the Everglades was a massive, slowly seeping natural wonder akin to the Grand Canyon, only utterly flat and soggy and verdant. He then chronicles the painful march of history from natural wonder with saw grass as far as the eye could see, to national shame with strips malls as far as the eye could see, as Florida underwent an endless cycle of boom and bust development activities that wrecked the environment and pushed the Native Americans into the swamp as. Eventually, of course, the Everglades were deemed to profitable to leave alone and the Native Americans were impolitely asked to leave. They chose to fight and the U.S. got mired in a Vietnam style war two hundred years before the Vietnam War.
Following that, an endless array of politicians set out to tame the swamp, build roads and levees and canals and railroads and the resulting floods and fires and run-off loaded with poisons slowly strangled an American Treasure, albeit, a slightly mucky one.
It is a powerful look at how we always hurt the ones we love, especially when it comes to the environment. It would have been an enjoyable read without the firsthand introduction the Everglades, but the fact that I got to see alligators, anhingas, mangrove trees and even a purple gallinute up close made it a uniquely satisfying – and depressing – experience. Add to that our time in Key West where we traveled streets named for many of the players in the book, and I have to give this the highest rating.
It was exhaustively researched and he is a talented writer (even though he used the term “no one wanted to see their ox gored” a few times too many, it was redeemed by lines such as “…like drunks at the end of a bar fight. Their arms felt heavy and they wanted an excuse to stop slugging.). Highly recommend, and I also recommend – if you haven’t already – taking a trip to see what’s left of the Everglades before they are gone forever.
Author Michael Grunwald provides a riveting look at a swamp filled with danger, unpredictable currents, sucking quicksand, predators and prey, and treachery. And that’s just when he is describing Florida politics. The real star of the book is the Florida Everglades, a unique, threatened and vulnerable ecosystem in Florida. Known as the river of grass, it’s a long, gently sloping swamp which once covered a large percentage of the state and was home to a staggering array of flora and fauna. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see flocks of thousands of flamingos take to wing, but sadly, fashionistas needed their plumes to compensate for their own shortcomings.
I picked up this book on a swing through the Everglades national park on our way to Key West, and was very glad I did. Just a few hours stroll through the park and we got a lasting sense of what a majestic place the Everglades were before man tried to drain them and, in between mojitos and snorkeling, I immersed myself into the filth and muck of the politics behind the current park.
The book opens at the end of the story, as then-president Clinton signs into law an $8 billion restoration project for the Everglades with Jeb Bush on hand, as well as a variety of developers, environmentalists and other unlikely political bedfellows from both sides of the aisle. The bill was signed into law even as the Supreme Court was deciding the Gore vs. Bush recount in Florida (a decision which, the author hints, would have been rendered unnecessary had Gore come out in opposition to an airport expansion that gave at least 10,000 votes to Nader).
With the context set, the book then rewinds to the past when Native Americans lived in Florida and the Everglades was a massive, slowly seeping natural wonder akin to the Grand Canyon, only utterly flat and soggy and verdant. He then chronicles the painful march of history from natural wonder with saw grass as far as the eye could see, to national shame with strips malls as far as the eye could see, as Florida underwent an endless cycle of boom and bust development activities that wrecked the environment and pushed the Native Americans into the swamp as. Eventually, of course, the Everglades were deemed to profitable to leave alone and the Native Americans were impolitely asked to leave. They chose to fight and the U.S. got mired in a Vietnam style war two hundred years before the Vietnam War.
Following that, an endless array of politicians set out to tame the swamp, build roads and levees and canals and railroads and the resulting floods and fires and run-off loaded with poisons slowly strangled an American Treasure, albeit, a slightly mucky one.
It is a powerful look at how we always hurt the ones we love, especially when it comes to the environment. It would have been an enjoyable read without the firsthand introduction the Everglades, but the fact that I got to see alligators, anhingas, mangrove trees and even a purple gallinute up close made it a uniquely satisfying – and depressing – experience. Add to that our time in Key West where we traveled streets named for many of the players in the book, and I have to give this the highest rating.
It was exhaustively researched and he is a talented writer (even though he used the term “no one wanted to see their ox gored” a few times too many, it was redeemed by lines such as “…like drunks at the end of a bar fight. Their arms felt heavy and they wanted an excuse to stop slugging.). Highly recommend, and I also recommend – if you haven’t already – taking a trip to see what’s left of the Everglades before they are gone forever.
December 3, 2011
I enjoy finding local bookshops when we travel and buying a book or two about the place we're in. Normally I go for a local author or a history of the place. On our trip to Sanibel we found a great little gem of a place called simply the Sanibel Bookshop. This place had everything, including this book, "The Swamp." I had to buy it.
This book is fascinating, mainly because it mixes the history of South Florida from the early Spanish days up through the modern day with the environmental history of the Everglades. Before reading this book I had little knowledge of what the Everglades are but now that I have finished the book, I want to head straight back down to Florida and see them.
The Everglades are one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet. You won't find any other environmental structure like them on Earth. And they're dying. We're killing them with sprawl, chemicals, and bureaucratic neglect. Grunwald does a nice job of weaving the story of how man has lived with the Everglades ever since the Seminole and Miccosukee Indians lived there (and some still do).
There are times when the author gets a little distracted with one person's story or some silly government red tape crap, but overall this book inspired me to think more deeply about places like the Everglades. I've been a fan of our national parks for a long time, but now I have a better sense of how some of our parks need more than just a legal protection; they need engaged, knowledgeable bodyguards to keep them from disappearing forever.
This book is fascinating, mainly because it mixes the history of South Florida from the early Spanish days up through the modern day with the environmental history of the Everglades. Before reading this book I had little knowledge of what the Everglades are but now that I have finished the book, I want to head straight back down to Florida and see them.
The Everglades are one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet. You won't find any other environmental structure like them on Earth. And they're dying. We're killing them with sprawl, chemicals, and bureaucratic neglect. Grunwald does a nice job of weaving the story of how man has lived with the Everglades ever since the Seminole and Miccosukee Indians lived there (and some still do).
There are times when the author gets a little distracted with one person's story or some silly government red tape crap, but overall this book inspired me to think more deeply about places like the Everglades. I've been a fan of our national parks for a long time, but now I have a better sense of how some of our parks need more than just a legal protection; they need engaged, knowledgeable bodyguards to keep them from disappearing forever.
May 12, 2022
A great complement to Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf, The Swamp also recounts a detailed environmental history of one part of the region, dating all the way back to attempted Spanish colonization and Native American wars.
Like The Gulf, The Swamp is also a critique of man’s attempt to control nature, a sweeping history of the Manifest Destiny ethos in Southern Florida and how it came to drive development, growth, economic boom, and eventually, ecological catastrophe. The final act of the book is about trying to return the region to the natural beauty it once was.
“It’s a story about the pursuit of paradise and the ideal of progress, which once inspired the degradation of nature, and now inspires its restoration. It’s a story about hubris and unintended consequences, about the mistakes man has made in his relationship with nature and its unprecedented efforts to fix them.”
The book, in extreme detail, describes the complete transformation of the Everglades, this once-wilderness, flat, waste of space that colonizers tried again and again to make use of, to no avail. It's an inhospitable region of mosquitoes and alligators, an agricultural wasteland of wet marsh. But it was also the last frontier of Manifest Destiny, and Seminoles that lived there stood in the way of White America’s marching foot of progress.
To convert this worthless region into something “useful for mankind,” through agriculture, military protection, development to the southern tip of the country, required the annexation of thousands of Seminoles that had called it home. Thus sparked several waves of Indian wars that are little recounted in American history.
Aside from these brutal clashes of history and sociology that ended in forcible removal and broken pacts with natives are vast descriptions of this unique ecological terrain, rich in biodiversity and swamped with slow-moving water through sawgrass that gives life to so much flora and fauna. But that uniqueness soon became its problem and engineers’ biggest challenge: the undrained Everglades “seemed to mock the advance of civilization.”
Giving away land to promote development, the government triggered a string of decisions that would ultimately transform the Everglades forever. Many a engineer brought sweeping, innovative ideas to the table, trying and failing to attack the root of this water “problem,” draining Lake Okeechobee and taming the Kissimmee river through a series of canals and dredges that intended to mitigate flooding and send water to various estuaries, speeding and dumping excess water into bays and the Atlantic.
After a series of booms and busts, driven partially by the chaotic wet and dry seasons of South Florida, with a hurricane or two thrown in, plus millionaires like Henry Flagler dumping money to develop the coasts, from West Palm Beach to Miami, with railroads and buildings and mor drainage, the state slowly but surely began to take shape, driving people south to the tropical regions of South Florida.
But there was a problem: “All the glamor and mystery which once surrounded the great lake, all the wilderness and loneliness… peace and holiness are fast disappearing before the advance of white man’s civilization.”
Though a fantastic climate and soil for growing, by converting entire patches of South Florida into agricultural areas and sprawling suburbs, man began transforming the region into something completely unrecognizable — not only that, but the growth was unsustainable, creating a system so deprived of water yet still prone to flooding and severe storms that it may soon collapse on itself.
The water wars that followed defined yet another era of the area, with drainage for development competing with nature and agriculture, specifically Big Sugar, a formidable force that grew into a main player in Tallahassee. Grunwald touches here on the role of the Corps and the federal responsibility in taking charge of many of these water projects:
“The upper glades were no longer lakefront towns; they were dike-front towns, forever shielded from their old menace. Lake Okeechobee was no longer the wellspring of the Everglades, overflowing south into the Everglades during downpours; it was a giant reservoir, controlled by men who shunted its water east and west out to sea down man-made canals. The Everglades was cut off from its source.”
Only to reverse them decades later after people realized the ecological catastrophe they made: dust bowls, overdrainage, gutted areas that brutalized wildlife, all driven by a “schoolboy logic” that was so common in 20th century America and Florida: “The drainage of the Everglades would be a Great Thing. Americans did Great Things. Therefore Americans would drain the Everglades.”
What I didn’t understand before reading this was how connected the areas from the Kissimmee Valley to Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades were. Grunwald does a great job at connecting this intricate ecosystem and how it’s been transformed: through literal Agricultural Areas, canals, dikes, and levees, and attempts to resuscitate it through national parks, national preserves, wetlands restorations, storage reservoirs, wastewater treatment plants, and filter marshes.
I didn’t realize so much of South Florida went untouched from development (zoom out on Google Maps and there’s a literal line dividing the sprawling suburbs of Miami and their westward border with the Everglades), yet all of South Florida was once like that. The book also shows that if something remains untouched from development, that doesn't mean it’s not barely hanging on ecologically.
The Swamp is a growth of man's attempt to control nature, a development of a purely wild place in the name of “progress” with a reckless abandon that would later lead to the fall of the Everglades. The destiny became defeat, and only through billions of dollars to reverse some of the decisions made in the past could the Everglades have any hope of surviving.
The final section deals with this attempt, through federal efforts, political infighting, and special interests battling it out for a piece of the pie while attempting to balance man and nature again to breathe life into a once wild region. That effort is still ongoing, and the conclusion is not yet written.
Ultimately, The Swamp provides a warning sign for man’s war on nature, and the consequences that play out should narrow visions of progress win out above all, with nature and all that comes with it — environmental health, biological diversity, preserved areas for recreation/contemplation — becoming the ultimate casualty.
Like The Gulf, The Swamp is also a critique of man’s attempt to control nature, a sweeping history of the Manifest Destiny ethos in Southern Florida and how it came to drive development, growth, economic boom, and eventually, ecological catastrophe. The final act of the book is about trying to return the region to the natural beauty it once was.
“It’s a story about the pursuit of paradise and the ideal of progress, which once inspired the degradation of nature, and now inspires its restoration. It’s a story about hubris and unintended consequences, about the mistakes man has made in his relationship with nature and its unprecedented efforts to fix them.”
The book, in extreme detail, describes the complete transformation of the Everglades, this once-wilderness, flat, waste of space that colonizers tried again and again to make use of, to no avail. It's an inhospitable region of mosquitoes and alligators, an agricultural wasteland of wet marsh. But it was also the last frontier of Manifest Destiny, and Seminoles that lived there stood in the way of White America’s marching foot of progress.
To convert this worthless region into something “useful for mankind,” through agriculture, military protection, development to the southern tip of the country, required the annexation of thousands of Seminoles that had called it home. Thus sparked several waves of Indian wars that are little recounted in American history.
Aside from these brutal clashes of history and sociology that ended in forcible removal and broken pacts with natives are vast descriptions of this unique ecological terrain, rich in biodiversity and swamped with slow-moving water through sawgrass that gives life to so much flora and fauna. But that uniqueness soon became its problem and engineers’ biggest challenge: the undrained Everglades “seemed to mock the advance of civilization.”
Giving away land to promote development, the government triggered a string of decisions that would ultimately transform the Everglades forever. Many a engineer brought sweeping, innovative ideas to the table, trying and failing to attack the root of this water “problem,” draining Lake Okeechobee and taming the Kissimmee river through a series of canals and dredges that intended to mitigate flooding and send water to various estuaries, speeding and dumping excess water into bays and the Atlantic.
After a series of booms and busts, driven partially by the chaotic wet and dry seasons of South Florida, with a hurricane or two thrown in, plus millionaires like Henry Flagler dumping money to develop the coasts, from West Palm Beach to Miami, with railroads and buildings and mor drainage, the state slowly but surely began to take shape, driving people south to the tropical regions of South Florida.
But there was a problem: “All the glamor and mystery which once surrounded the great lake, all the wilderness and loneliness… peace and holiness are fast disappearing before the advance of white man’s civilization.”
Though a fantastic climate and soil for growing, by converting entire patches of South Florida into agricultural areas and sprawling suburbs, man began transforming the region into something completely unrecognizable — not only that, but the growth was unsustainable, creating a system so deprived of water yet still prone to flooding and severe storms that it may soon collapse on itself.
The water wars that followed defined yet another era of the area, with drainage for development competing with nature and agriculture, specifically Big Sugar, a formidable force that grew into a main player in Tallahassee. Grunwald touches here on the role of the Corps and the federal responsibility in taking charge of many of these water projects:
“The upper glades were no longer lakefront towns; they were dike-front towns, forever shielded from their old menace. Lake Okeechobee was no longer the wellspring of the Everglades, overflowing south into the Everglades during downpours; it was a giant reservoir, controlled by men who shunted its water east and west out to sea down man-made canals. The Everglades was cut off from its source.”
Only to reverse them decades later after people realized the ecological catastrophe they made: dust bowls, overdrainage, gutted areas that brutalized wildlife, all driven by a “schoolboy logic” that was so common in 20th century America and Florida: “The drainage of the Everglades would be a Great Thing. Americans did Great Things. Therefore Americans would drain the Everglades.”
What I didn’t understand before reading this was how connected the areas from the Kissimmee Valley to Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades were. Grunwald does a great job at connecting this intricate ecosystem and how it’s been transformed: through literal Agricultural Areas, canals, dikes, and levees, and attempts to resuscitate it through national parks, national preserves, wetlands restorations, storage reservoirs, wastewater treatment plants, and filter marshes.
I didn’t realize so much of South Florida went untouched from development (zoom out on Google Maps and there’s a literal line dividing the sprawling suburbs of Miami and their westward border with the Everglades), yet all of South Florida was once like that. The book also shows that if something remains untouched from development, that doesn't mean it’s not barely hanging on ecologically.
The Swamp is a growth of man's attempt to control nature, a development of a purely wild place in the name of “progress” with a reckless abandon that would later lead to the fall of the Everglades. The destiny became defeat, and only through billions of dollars to reverse some of the decisions made in the past could the Everglades have any hope of surviving.
The final section deals with this attempt, through federal efforts, political infighting, and special interests battling it out for a piece of the pie while attempting to balance man and nature again to breathe life into a once wild region. That effort is still ongoing, and the conclusion is not yet written.
Ultimately, The Swamp provides a warning sign for man’s war on nature, and the consequences that play out should narrow visions of progress win out above all, with nature and all that comes with it — environmental health, biological diversity, preserved areas for recreation/contemplation — becoming the ultimate casualty.
May 19, 2011
I give The Swamp two thumbs up, and will certainly read it multiple times. The book
describes the topography of the Everglades and what is known about the
geologic forces that shaped the continent, and continues with its
human history and impacts that various groups that came in contact
with the area had on the land and each other. European explorers and
early settlers of America viewed it as an undesirable region best left
to mosquitoes, alligators, and the Seminoles that took refuge there.
After the Civil War, it gained attention as a new frontier to be
conquered and "improved" for human use in agriculture. Speculators
sold "land by the gallon" and "improvements" in constraining water
levels and canalization made more land accessible, but led to
wildfires and floods. The roles of various political and interest
groups in devastating the Everglades, and the struggle between groups
desirous of restoring the Everglades and those that pay lip service to
restoration/preservation while promoting overdevelopment of the area,
are described in great detail. I found the story riveting--I highly
recommend exploring the Everglades area, reading a Carl Hiassen novel,
then checking this book out of the library.
describes the topography of the Everglades and what is known about the
geologic forces that shaped the continent, and continues with its
human history and impacts that various groups that came in contact
with the area had on the land and each other. European explorers and
early settlers of America viewed it as an undesirable region best left
to mosquitoes, alligators, and the Seminoles that took refuge there.
After the Civil War, it gained attention as a new frontier to be
conquered and "improved" for human use in agriculture. Speculators
sold "land by the gallon" and "improvements" in constraining water
levels and canalization made more land accessible, but led to
wildfires and floods. The roles of various political and interest
groups in devastating the Everglades, and the struggle between groups
desirous of restoring the Everglades and those that pay lip service to
restoration/preservation while promoting overdevelopment of the area,
are described in great detail. I found the story riveting--I highly
recommend exploring the Everglades area, reading a Carl Hiassen novel,
then checking this book out of the library.
October 27, 2013
Like many of us, my knowledge of the Everglades was limited to the "Save the..." phrase I learned from Ranger Rick as a kid. I learned a massive amount from this book, which was a fairly easy read even at 375 pages.
I have to say, the author did two things I greatly appreciated:
1. Grunwald explicitly stated that all of the information was taken directly from journals, interviews, studies, etc. and the only part that included any speculation was his description of the Everglades before it was touched by man. I don't know about you, but I often find myself wondering if the author is speculating on a person's motivations and emotions, which detracts from the experience.
2. Grunwald did not expect the reader to remember who every little player in the story was. When a small player was brought back into discussion, he included a quick sentence to remind us of the who and what of the person.
I have to say, the author did two things I greatly appreciated:
1. Grunwald explicitly stated that all of the information was taken directly from journals, interviews, studies, etc. and the only part that included any speculation was his description of the Everglades before it was touched by man. I don't know about you, but I often find myself wondering if the author is speculating on a person's motivations and emotions, which detracts from the experience.
2. Grunwald did not expect the reader to remember who every little player in the story was. When a small player was brought back into discussion, he included a quick sentence to remind us of the who and what of the person.
December 16, 2008
I now know a whole lot about the history of Florida and the utter mess we have made of the Everglades. This book chronicles the push for land reclamation at the turn of the century that started the decline of the Everglades. It also highlights the various colorful personalities on both sides of this environmental war. Of equal interest is the political war that has been waged that has made forward movement almost impossible and resulted in wasting billions of dollars. Although most of the book cannot report much good news, in the past few years there has been a bipartisan effort made that has caused some progress to have been made in saving a small part of this unique swamp.
This is a hefty book that dragged a bit at times but overall was an interesting and entertaining read.
This is a hefty book that dragged a bit at times but overall was an interesting and entertaining read.
July 12, 2018
There’s great history here and the book gives all indications of being well researched and grounded. The trouble is that Grunwald is relentless wonky. He constantly bogs down (forgive the pun) in the minutiae of this land deal or that swindle and that nefarious rogue of a speculator, and the reader (at least this reader) has to be forgiven for not being able to keep wading through. Too, the story of the Everglades is the history of crooks, genocide, and capitalism grown completely evil, and Grunwald’s attempts to keep a neutral tone in the face of atrocities are wearying.
July 2, 2020
A good story is tarnished by irritatingly flashy prose, horrifyingly blasé mentions of the genocide of the Seminole and Calusa people, and the (ridiculous for 2006) use of the word "man," as in: "the history of man," or "man-made paradise." Grunwald lovingly calls Andrew Jackson, notorious genocider, "America's boldest Indian fighter." Yikes!
December 30, 2024
There was so much MISSING here. Where were the indigenous people? What about the enslaved and then freed peoples villages? This felt like a ledger of business transactions between wealthy white bigoted men - which like, yes is a piece of history that matters - but with so much history and humanity missing from this it left me asking what the point of this long ass book was.
August 15, 2024
As a general rule, the “history of a place” genre is among my favorite — you learn not only about the geography, but debatably even more about the people and culture than you would reading something explicitly about the people and culture: generations come and go, but soil remains.
The indigenous state of the Everglades was astonishing. Unfathomable biodiversity and abundance. Yet Europeans for centuries called it worse than Hell.
Even up until 1900, when the railroad barons began laying tracks down the east coast, south Florida was basically unpopulated — especially when you consider that we murdered or removed its original inhabitants. (So much there that it’s worth its own book: read Unworthy Republic!). Until after World War II, the region’s ecosystem was largely intact and its population was still teeny. Everything west of I-95 was Glades. The backwater was thought of something like we consider the Dakotas today.
20, 30 years is all it took to ruin it! That’s what sticks with me the most. The largesse of the federal government subsidizing landscape destruction, the greed of Big Sugar and land developers, and the blissful ignorant drive of snowbirds and midwesterners seeking Paved Paradise aligned in a perfect storm of Growth Unbound — and within just a generation or two, the genie could not be put back in its bottle. Path dependence and unbridled capitalism meant that human beings who took the homes of alligators and wading birds then demanded flood protection from the government, and threatened to Shut It Down at the first hint of sacrifice on their part.
What’s left today is a shell of what once was. And yet, from my own visit, I know how astonishingly beautiful it is. There is hope yet: we know HOW to restore the ecosystem, but just need to pay for it.
Some broader themes I really enjoyed this book for depicting: man’s arrogant philosophy of “dominion” over nature; the complex interplay of colonial settlers putting themselves in harm’s way and then demanding the federal government bail them out; the nuanced and often differing strategies that different environmental groups/stakeholders employ to protect their interests.
Some narrower anecdotes I REALLY enjoyed: Bill Clinton interrupted his breakup with Monica Lewinsky to take a call from Big Sugar’s mafia boss; the most environmentally progressive VP of all time Al Gore’s waffling on a proposed airport project in Homestead cost him the enthusiastic backing of Everglades environmentalists; those key activists ultimately threw their support behind Ralph Nader in October 2000, costing Al Gore an estimated 10,000 votes; the most environmentally progressive presidential candidate of all American history lost to a Texas oil shill by 536 votes in Florida. LOL.
Truly sweeping book. My only regret is that it was published in 2006, and I want to know what has happened since!!!
The indigenous state of the Everglades was astonishing. Unfathomable biodiversity and abundance. Yet Europeans for centuries called it worse than Hell.
Even up until 1900, when the railroad barons began laying tracks down the east coast, south Florida was basically unpopulated — especially when you consider that we murdered or removed its original inhabitants. (So much there that it’s worth its own book: read Unworthy Republic!). Until after World War II, the region’s ecosystem was largely intact and its population was still teeny. Everything west of I-95 was Glades. The backwater was thought of something like we consider the Dakotas today.
20, 30 years is all it took to ruin it! That’s what sticks with me the most. The largesse of the federal government subsidizing landscape destruction, the greed of Big Sugar and land developers, and the blissful ignorant drive of snowbirds and midwesterners seeking Paved Paradise aligned in a perfect storm of Growth Unbound — and within just a generation or two, the genie could not be put back in its bottle. Path dependence and unbridled capitalism meant that human beings who took the homes of alligators and wading birds then demanded flood protection from the government, and threatened to Shut It Down at the first hint of sacrifice on their part.
What’s left today is a shell of what once was. And yet, from my own visit, I know how astonishingly beautiful it is. There is hope yet: we know HOW to restore the ecosystem, but just need to pay for it.
Some broader themes I really enjoyed this book for depicting: man’s arrogant philosophy of “dominion” over nature; the complex interplay of colonial settlers putting themselves in harm’s way and then demanding the federal government bail them out; the nuanced and often differing strategies that different environmental groups/stakeholders employ to protect their interests.
Some narrower anecdotes I REALLY enjoyed: Bill Clinton interrupted his breakup with Monica Lewinsky to take a call from Big Sugar’s mafia boss; the most environmentally progressive VP of all time Al Gore’s waffling on a proposed airport project in Homestead cost him the enthusiastic backing of Everglades environmentalists; those key activists ultimately threw their support behind Ralph Nader in October 2000, costing Al Gore an estimated 10,000 votes; the most environmentally progressive presidential candidate of all American history lost to a Texas oil shill by 536 votes in Florida. LOL.
Truly sweeping book. My only regret is that it was published in 2006, and I want to know what has happened since!!!
August 20, 2024
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise - Michael Grunwald: 53% Steve Nicholas Avocados.
The first 25% of The Swamp is pretty good; the history of pre-America Florida (read: Native Americans) is engaging and it moves quickly. The next 75% is the opposite. Once Grunwald begins to talk about the “politics” of the Everglades, The Swamp gets repetitive and quite tedious.
The Swamp is a very detailed history of man’s attempts to control the Everglades, from the wildlife to the flow of its stagnant water. Even for a born and raised Floridian, there was way too much detail about failed attempts to drain the Everglades from multiple generations of politicians. However, it was interesting to hear the namesakes of many famous landmarks around Florida (ie – Graham for the Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway, Gov. Broward for Broward County, etc.), but that’s about it.
Verdict: I can sum up the entire book in one sentence – Billions of dollars were dumped into efforts to control or drain the Everglades and efforts still fail to this day.
The first 25% of The Swamp is pretty good; the history of pre-America Florida (read: Native Americans) is engaging and it moves quickly. The next 75% is the opposite. Once Grunwald begins to talk about the “politics” of the Everglades, The Swamp gets repetitive and quite tedious.
The Swamp is a very detailed history of man’s attempts to control the Everglades, from the wildlife to the flow of its stagnant water. Even for a born and raised Floridian, there was way too much detail about failed attempts to drain the Everglades from multiple generations of politicians. However, it was interesting to hear the namesakes of many famous landmarks around Florida (ie – Graham for the Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway, Gov. Broward for Broward County, etc.), but that’s about it.
Verdict: I can sum up the entire book in one sentence – Billions of dollars were dumped into efforts to control or drain the Everglades and efforts still fail to this day.
June 16, 2025
3.5 rounded down.
Listen this is an excellent historical account of the Everglades. But it’s a little too verbose for my tastes and I LOVE HISTORY. Especially towards the end I was struggling to wade through all the minutia of the governmental proceedings.
I don’t think I could possibly done this one without audiobook. It was so difficult and would have given up pretty early in without it.
With all that being said it’s such an important topic and Grunwald does a great job taking you through the decades to develop South Florida. The sheer rate of rapid development is staggering and people just keep moving into the swamp. Carving more and more of the Everglades for themselves.
This was Bitches’ book for June and we had a lively discussion and spent lots of time looking at Florida on the map and marveling at Marjory Stoneman Douglas living until 108. We learned about Dikes and Herbert Hoover. What a meeting!
Onto the next book: a modern-classic gay romance!!! 🏳️🌈👨❤️💋👨🏳️🌈 happy pride!
Listen this is an excellent historical account of the Everglades. But it’s a little too verbose for my tastes and I LOVE HISTORY. Especially towards the end I was struggling to wade through all the minutia of the governmental proceedings.
I don’t think I could possibly done this one without audiobook. It was so difficult and would have given up pretty early in without it.
With all that being said it’s such an important topic and Grunwald does a great job taking you through the decades to develop South Florida. The sheer rate of rapid development is staggering and people just keep moving into the swamp. Carving more and more of the Everglades for themselves.
This was Bitches’ book for June and we had a lively discussion and spent lots of time looking at Florida on the map and marveling at Marjory Stoneman Douglas living until 108. We learned about Dikes and Herbert Hoover. What a meeting!
Onto the next book: a modern-classic gay romance!!! 🏳️🌈👨❤️💋👨🏳️🌈 happy pride!
April 2, 2023
First third: this is a hellhole, we need to drain it and build upon it!
Second third: [draining and building]
Final third: oh no... I think we ruined it
This book taught me so much!! I was shocked to learn about how large and expansive the Everglades originally was. The antics of early 20th century men were so frustrating to read, with their beliefs that man was created to subdue and control nature. I was quietly hoping for a happy ending all along, despite knowing fully well what south Florida currently looks like. I finished this book feeling discouraged, as well as a reverence for the Everglades landscape. It is dizzying to consider the sheer amount engineering required for this landscape to become, and remain, inhabitable. The Everglades is choked, forced and manipulated to be paradise for man, when truly it just wants to be a swamp.
Second third: [draining and building]
Final third: oh no... I think we ruined it
This book taught me so much!! I was shocked to learn about how large and expansive the Everglades originally was. The antics of early 20th century men were so frustrating to read, with their beliefs that man was created to subdue and control nature. I was quietly hoping for a happy ending all along, despite knowing fully well what south Florida currently looks like. I finished this book feeling discouraged, as well as a reverence for the Everglades landscape. It is dizzying to consider the sheer amount engineering required for this landscape to become, and remain, inhabitable. The Everglades is choked, forced and manipulated to be paradise for man, when truly it just wants to be a swamp.
June 7, 2023
4 stars
A must read for Floridians. While a bit dry at times, I very much enjoyed learning about the politics of the Everglades. Grunwald covers some of the nuance in partnerships, policy and trade that happened to shape the Everglades as it is today and the direction it will go in.
Florida has always been a delicate balance of commerce and conquest paired with ecological conservation and preservation. Our politicians have pushed for growth and migration while often paying little attention to the unique ecosystem of our state. "We have met the enemy, and he is us".
This book reminds me that we are stewards of the planet.
A must read for Floridians. While a bit dry at times, I very much enjoyed learning about the politics of the Everglades. Grunwald covers some of the nuance in partnerships, policy and trade that happened to shape the Everglades as it is today and the direction it will go in.
Florida has always been a delicate balance of commerce and conquest paired with ecological conservation and preservation. Our politicians have pushed for growth and migration while often paying little attention to the unique ecosystem of our state. "We have met the enemy, and he is us".
This book reminds me that we are stewards of the planet.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 13, 2025
C.R.E.A.M. especially nature
September 1, 2024
This book covers a broad swathe of history in such an amazing way! It covers lots of perspectives around the Everglades very well.
September 21, 2024
Every Floridian should read this book. Very thorough and comprehensive history of the Everglades to 2006. Well researched.
December 2, 2023
Grunwald really makes you feel like youre trudging through the Everglades
There's some good in this book. Definitely very thorough (sometimes too much. I really don't gaf what some politician ate for breakfast before a meeting about the Everglades) and you'll be introduced to most of the major political players of South FL. I'll also say at points he does a decent job covering native history with regard to the Everglades but at other points he is frustratingly dismissive of their culture especially precolumbian natives.
There's a lot that I didn't like about this book. Grunwalds attempt at even handedness between environmentalists and big sugar and other destructive forces quickly become wearing in the final chapters of the book. He sometimes seems to be bitter towards environmentalists who don't immediately conform to whatever "compromise" Democrats and Republicans have come to. I also think grunwalds analysis sometimes focused so much on the minutiae and individual political actors without looking at the big picture of how our economy/society is at odds with protecting and restoring the Everglades. Like ffs we bulldozed like half of the swamp to build sugar plantations so we could avoid paying communist Cuba for their sugar. Grunwald mentions this and I don't want to make it seem like he doesn't write at all abt the general political system but I think instead of focusing on individual capitalists' interests this book could have benefited from also looking at the system as a whole. Idk if that makes sense.
Anyway Id be willing to bet there's better books on the Everglades out there but this one is ok. wouldn't recommend it at the end of the day. If u do read it do me a favor and take a shot everytime he uses the phrase gore someones ox.
There's some good in this book. Definitely very thorough (sometimes too much. I really don't gaf what some politician ate for breakfast before a meeting about the Everglades) and you'll be introduced to most of the major political players of South FL. I'll also say at points he does a decent job covering native history with regard to the Everglades but at other points he is frustratingly dismissive of their culture especially precolumbian natives.
There's a lot that I didn't like about this book. Grunwalds attempt at even handedness between environmentalists and big sugar and other destructive forces quickly become wearing in the final chapters of the book. He sometimes seems to be bitter towards environmentalists who don't immediately conform to whatever "compromise" Democrats and Republicans have come to. I also think grunwalds analysis sometimes focused so much on the minutiae and individual political actors without looking at the big picture of how our economy/society is at odds with protecting and restoring the Everglades. Like ffs we bulldozed like half of the swamp to build sugar plantations so we could avoid paying communist Cuba for their sugar. Grunwald mentions this and I don't want to make it seem like he doesn't write at all abt the general political system but I think instead of focusing on individual capitalists' interests this book could have benefited from also looking at the system as a whole. Idk if that makes sense.
Anyway Id be willing to bet there's better books on the Everglades out there but this one is ok. wouldn't recommend it at the end of the day. If u do read it do me a favor and take a shot everytime he uses the phrase gore someones ox.
Read
June 24, 2023The Swamp was a fantastic stop on my Florida history reading tour. It was a great complementary read to the breezy,Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean, the other book I bought at the Key West Island Bookstore. While Last Train to Paradise is more of a micro history, The Swamp is necessarily expansive. It tells the story of the Everglades, one of the world's most unique ecosystems. This massive, gently sloping swamp, "The River of Grass," has historically been home to a staggering amount of plants and wildlife that, over time, have been destroyed or reduced. Grunwald tells the story of the Everglades in an engaging manner. Like the Everglades itself, the book can become overflowing. Sometimes I lost track of characters. Sometimes I felt like a piece of history could have been expanded upon. Overall though, I thought this was the most relevant nonfiction that I have read on South Florida.
I cannot account for the whole book, but I highlighted a few tidbits. The early recorded history of the Everglades is interesting. I felt that Grunwald went a little quickly through Native American history. I know that this is not a Native American history book, but It almost feels like there were no tribes in the Everglades or even on the outskirts until Americans pushed them into the interior. I don't believe this is true. I am by no means an expert, nor am I sure that Grunwald even intended to do this. I do agree though, as Grunwald contends, that nation-states (Spain, England, US) that colonized Florida essentially avoided the Everglades, especially its interior. American colonists likely pushed Native Americans into the Everglades after taking their rich land in North Florida.
Grunwald correctly and very briefly argues that the Second Seminole War was America's first Vietnam. It was a guerilla war of attrition fought on unfamiliar, unforgiving terrain, against an underestimated enemy. This is a fascinating and under appreciated war. I don't think there has been anything written about it in the mainstream, but it was a war of "firsts" in American history and resulted in over 600 Seminole/Muskogees (woman and children included) being captured by Thomas Jessup and a bunch of Tennessee Volunteers under the false flag of truce and sent to either Oklahoma or prison. The trail of tears took them from the site of their "capture" on the east coast of Florida back through their villages in the Loxahatchee, which is in the Everglades. In Grunwald's picture of Native American history in the everglades, he paints beautiful portrait of Osceola (known today as a symbol for FSU sports) that made me want to explore his life (and death) more.
For the US settlers, the most valuable thing about the war in Florida to exterminate the Native Americans was the initial mapping of the Everglades, which remained as mysterious as China. (Fun fact: Abner Doubleday (falsely attributed to creating baseball) was stationed in the Everglades and commented on how god awful it was). South Florida was to be avoided. Its development, from the start, was marked by fits of random opportunism and scams. Grunwald dives into this shadiness in a thorough manner. It feels appropriate that Charles Ponzi resurfaced in Jacksonville with a new name and pyramid schemes during a boom. The reason Flagler connected with Julia Tuttle to run his train through Miami was because a particularly bad hurricane and other weather did not affect Miami's citrus production during a generally bad season. (Another fun fact is that University of Miami's mascot is an Ibis because it is apparently the first bird to return after a storm). Grunwald describes the boom times of South Florida in detail. Everyone was swept up in it either as a profiteer or a dupe. Everyone from Marjory Stoneman Douglas's and William Jennings Bryan were selling towns like Coral Gables and less opulent neighborhoods to heat starved people from the midwest and north. Throughout Florida's history, there have always been naysayers, urging people to curb development and allow this ecological miracle largely function as it did before humans built large levees and dikes. Charles Torrey Simpson, Art Marshall, Ernest Coe, and Ernest Lyons, were some of the names of people Grunwald memorializes who had a more grand appreciation and vision of conservation than their contemporaries.
I am glossing over a large part of the book, which is Florida's modern development because it is fairly simple and sad. Florida is a state of immigrants from the country and world. It keeps growing and its growth directly taxes the Everglades. In many cases on the west and east, its growth has directly been in the Everglades. The Army Corps of Engineers, sugar planters, miners, and developers are among the villains who have mangled the natural flow of the Everglades to support population growth and economic activity. In the face of those dynamics, Grunwald introduces a disconcerting cast of conservationists, lobbyists, politicians that take us into 2006, which was been marred by state and NGO infighting, national conflicts, and some victories over how to reckon with the current day Everglades. There is a large and sometimes confusing discussion of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. I don't really know what to make of it and would be curious to read an update from Grunwald or other Florida observers. It was fun to hear that Al Gore didn't have the cojones to reject a plan to build an airport in Homestead, right next to the Glades and also to learn that Donna Brazile said that environmentalists can go fuck themselves. Relatedly, was reassuring to hear that Jeb Bush was all ears when Azurix, an Enron water services company, asked to pay a few billion for Everglades restoration if they could sell water captured by the project. It would be more disappointing to hear these modern stories if Grunwald had not laid out the history so well.
This book is an accomplishment. If you are curious about the political and ecological history of one of the world's most unique and beautiful ecosystems. If you are more broadly interested in how humans interact with our environment - look no further.
I cannot account for the whole book, but I highlighted a few tidbits. The early recorded history of the Everglades is interesting. I felt that Grunwald went a little quickly through Native American history. I know that this is not a Native American history book, but It almost feels like there were no tribes in the Everglades or even on the outskirts until Americans pushed them into the interior. I don't believe this is true. I am by no means an expert, nor am I sure that Grunwald even intended to do this. I do agree though, as Grunwald contends, that nation-states (Spain, England, US) that colonized Florida essentially avoided the Everglades, especially its interior. American colonists likely pushed Native Americans into the Everglades after taking their rich land in North Florida.
Grunwald correctly and very briefly argues that the Second Seminole War was America's first Vietnam. It was a guerilla war of attrition fought on unfamiliar, unforgiving terrain, against an underestimated enemy. This is a fascinating and under appreciated war. I don't think there has been anything written about it in the mainstream, but it was a war of "firsts" in American history and resulted in over 600 Seminole/Muskogees (woman and children included) being captured by Thomas Jessup and a bunch of Tennessee Volunteers under the false flag of truce and sent to either Oklahoma or prison. The trail of tears took them from the site of their "capture" on the east coast of Florida back through their villages in the Loxahatchee, which is in the Everglades. In Grunwald's picture of Native American history in the everglades, he paints beautiful portrait of Osceola (known today as a symbol for FSU sports) that made me want to explore his life (and death) more.
For the US settlers, the most valuable thing about the war in Florida to exterminate the Native Americans was the initial mapping of the Everglades, which remained as mysterious as China. (Fun fact: Abner Doubleday (falsely attributed to creating baseball) was stationed in the Everglades and commented on how god awful it was). South Florida was to be avoided. Its development, from the start, was marked by fits of random opportunism and scams. Grunwald dives into this shadiness in a thorough manner. It feels appropriate that Charles Ponzi resurfaced in Jacksonville with a new name and pyramid schemes during a boom. The reason Flagler connected with Julia Tuttle to run his train through Miami was because a particularly bad hurricane and other weather did not affect Miami's citrus production during a generally bad season. (Another fun fact is that University of Miami's mascot is an Ibis because it is apparently the first bird to return after a storm). Grunwald describes the boom times of South Florida in detail. Everyone was swept up in it either as a profiteer or a dupe. Everyone from Marjory Stoneman Douglas's and William Jennings Bryan were selling towns like Coral Gables and less opulent neighborhoods to heat starved people from the midwest and north. Throughout Florida's history, there have always been naysayers, urging people to curb development and allow this ecological miracle largely function as it did before humans built large levees and dikes. Charles Torrey Simpson, Art Marshall, Ernest Coe, and Ernest Lyons, were some of the names of people Grunwald memorializes who had a more grand appreciation and vision of conservation than their contemporaries.
I am glossing over a large part of the book, which is Florida's modern development because it is fairly simple and sad. Florida is a state of immigrants from the country and world. It keeps growing and its growth directly taxes the Everglades. In many cases on the west and east, its growth has directly been in the Everglades. The Army Corps of Engineers, sugar planters, miners, and developers are among the villains who have mangled the natural flow of the Everglades to support population growth and economic activity. In the face of those dynamics, Grunwald introduces a disconcerting cast of conservationists, lobbyists, politicians that take us into 2006, which was been marred by state and NGO infighting, national conflicts, and some victories over how to reckon with the current day Everglades. There is a large and sometimes confusing discussion of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. I don't really know what to make of it and would be curious to read an update from Grunwald or other Florida observers. It was fun to hear that Al Gore didn't have the cojones to reject a plan to build an airport in Homestead, right next to the Glades and also to learn that Donna Brazile said that environmentalists can go fuck themselves. Relatedly, was reassuring to hear that Jeb Bush was all ears when Azurix, an Enron water services company, asked to pay a few billion for Everglades restoration if they could sell water captured by the project. It would be more disappointing to hear these modern stories if Grunwald had not laid out the history so well.
This book is an accomplishment. If you are curious about the political and ecological history of one of the world's most unique and beautiful ecosystems. If you are more broadly interested in how humans interact with our environment - look no further.
October 13, 2018
**4.5 Stars**
I grew up in South Florida, east of 95. Everything west of 95, was considered the boonies. Some of the roads out there were actually dirt -- they are now paved & divided 6 lane roads, always packed with cars -- and cows & horses roamed on acres & acres of land. Today, you'd be lucky if you can find anything green outside the plantings municipalities place in their road dividers (which do nothing but put undue pressure on the already strained water system). So you see, I've seen the changes in this book firsthand. And seeing these changes in black & white all these years later, really makes me angry. Angry that what I grew up with I'll never see again; Angry that at every turn development was more important then sustainability; Angry at the short-sidedness & inactivity of the people who are supposed to serve all of us; Angry that the Everglades is really nothing more then a catchphrase politicians use come election time.
After reading this book, I know that nothing will change. Once the sugar growers have used up their lands, they will develop them, and the state of FL won't do a damn thing to stop them. The only thing that could get their attention at this rate, is the complete & utter destruction of Lake Okeechobee, which we're probably just a hurricane or 2 away from.... It will make the 1926 & 28 hurricanes look like child's play. Maybe then they'll pay attention. Then again, maybe not.
I grew up in South Florida, east of 95. Everything west of 95, was considered the boonies. Some of the roads out there were actually dirt -- they are now paved & divided 6 lane roads, always packed with cars -- and cows & horses roamed on acres & acres of land. Today, you'd be lucky if you can find anything green outside the plantings municipalities place in their road dividers (which do nothing but put undue pressure on the already strained water system). So you see, I've seen the changes in this book firsthand. And seeing these changes in black & white all these years later, really makes me angry. Angry that what I grew up with I'll never see again; Angry that at every turn development was more important then sustainability; Angry at the short-sidedness & inactivity of the people who are supposed to serve all of us; Angry that the Everglades is really nothing more then a catchphrase politicians use come election time.
After reading this book, I know that nothing will change. Once the sugar growers have used up their lands, they will develop them, and the state of FL won't do a damn thing to stop them. The only thing that could get their attention at this rate, is the complete & utter destruction of Lake Okeechobee, which we're probably just a hurricane or 2 away from.... It will make the 1926 & 28 hurricanes look like child's play. Maybe then they'll pay attention. Then again, maybe not.
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