[bksvol-discuss] scanning request
- From: "cheryl fogle" <cfogle@xxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 19:34:01 -0600
The book described in the following review seems interesting. I'd be willing
to validate if someone wants to scan.
Washington Post Book Review
April 2, 2006
Muddy Waters
In this rousing history, the marsh known as the River of Grass flows into
the
barrel of pork.
Reviewed by John G. Mitchell
THE SWAMP
The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
By Michael Grunwald
Simon & Schuster. 450 pp. $27
In recent years, writers have devoted a lot of ink to the tortured history
of
south Florida's Everglades. But no one has nailed that story as effectively,
as hauntingly and as dramatically as Michael Grunwald does in The Swamp , a
brilliant work of research and reportage about the evolution of a reviled
bog
into America's -- if not the world's -- most valuable wetland.
Grunwald, a prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, explains that
the
true, original Everglades were not a swamp in any botanically correct sense
of the word but rather a marsh, "a vast sheet of shallow water spread across
a seemingly infinite prairie of serrated sawgrass," often called the River
of Grass. But Grunwald's sweep is bigger than that. It embraces the entire
south Florida hydrosystem, a 100-mile long funnel that seeps from the
Kissimmee
lakes near Orlando, spills into Lake Okeechobee, then overflows through the
Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp to the mangroves of Florida Bay and the
Gulf of Mexico. At least that's the way it used to be. Now, despite recent
efforts to undo some of the engineered damage inflicted on it over the past
150 years, the swamp remains imperiled. "Half the Everglades is gone,"
Grunwald writes.
"The other half is an ecological mess. Wading birds no longer darken the
skies above it." Okeechobee is choking on algal blooms. Sprawl continues to
nibble
the edge of the Big Cypress. Unsustainable communities "are at risk from the
next killer hurricane -- and the one after that."
Risk has been south Florida's leitmotif since Europeans first pushed their
way into its wild interior. The region was certainly risky for the Seminole
Indians,
who barely escaped annihilation by the U.S. Army in the 1830s. Unconquered,
a
few hundred managed to hang on in the Big Cypress. Later in the 19th
century,
risk shifted to the great flocks of wading birds -- spoonbills, flamingos,
herons and egrets -- whose plumage was thought better adorning milady's
stylish
hats. Before laws brought that slaughter to a halt, one report fixed the
kill
at 5 million birds a year.
The most enduring risks were framed by the dreamers and schemers who
believed
that the Everglades must be drained to make the country fit for settlement
and cultivation. Grunwald chronicles each successive (though not always
successful) effort to dry out the swamp and describes the devastating
hurricanes
of 1926 and 1928, which uncorked the backed-up waters of Lake Okeechobee,
drowning nearly 3,000 people (mostly poor blacks -- a foretaste of Hurricane
Katrina) and prompting the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a four-story
concrete dike around the lake, thus stifling much of the flow to the
Everglades.
Grunwald is at his best in dissecting the political wars that rattled the
region after Everglades National Park was established at the toe of the
hydrosystem
in 1947 -- which meant that upstream city folks and cattlemen and sugar
growers got first dibs on releases of fresh water while the park had to
settle
for the leftovers, now tainted with pesticides and fertilizers. Meanwhile,
the Corps of Engineers, presiding over "the largest earth-moving effort
since
the Panama Canal," crisscrossed the peninsula with hundreds of miles of
levees and canals designed not so much to save human lives as to boost the
Sunshine
State's economy.
A reader might become numb from Grunwald's stacking of the details were it
not for his skill at profiling the characters who, by the late 1960s, were
trying
to turn the flow of events back Nature's way. Among them: activist-writer
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, grand dame of the River of Grass; and Nathaniel
Pryor
Reed, the "blue-blooded outdoorsman" whose 6-foot-5-inch frame "evoked a
great blue heron" and whose eloquence convinced two pro-development
Republican
politicians, Florida Gov. Claude Kirk Jr. and U.S. Interior Secretary Walter
Hickel, to scuttle Dade County's plan to build the world's largest jetport
just a coconut-throw north of Everglades National Park.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew leveled Homestead Air Force Base, located between
Everglades and Biscayne national parks. Afterward, Dade County's high
rollers,
including some who had lost out on that earlier jetport scheme, said this
would be a fine place to build a big commercial airport -- never mind that
the
result would darken both parks' skies with 600 flights a day. The Clinton
administration juggled that one for several years even as it cobbled
together
a $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan and billed it as
the
most expensive and extensive environmental initiative in history. Calculated
to undo much of the damage inflicted on the 'glades over the years, the
restoration plan was unveiled by Vice President Al Gore in West Palm Beach
in
1998.
Environmentalists cheered.
But few Florida enviros cheered for Gore in 2000. The greenest presidential
candidate in American history declined to renounce the Homestead jetport and
was punished for it. According to Grunwald, of the 96,000 votes received by
Ralph Nader in Florida that November, some 10,000 were probably attributable
to Gore's waffling on the airport. And the final irony? Four days before
Clinton turned over the Oval Office to the anti-green George W. Bush,
Clinton's
administration announced that the Homestead deal was dead in the water --
what little there was left of it. *
John G. Mitchell, a former editor at Newsweek and National Geographic, has
been writing about the Everglades since 1967.
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