The New York Times usually reviews too much fiction for my taste. Today, greens should be interested in this specific book review reported below. Why has Florida's Everglades been declining? The book reviewer seems to be blaming sprawl. I had always thought that it was related to sugar subsidies. As usual, we run into the issue of "counter-factuals". If there were no sugar industry subsidies, would the everglades be in better shape? I'm always fascinated by how journalists voice their certainty about the key causal factors without actually collecting any data or doing any original statistical analysis. I wish I could be so certain about how the world works. Perhaps I should enroll in Columbia's School of Journalism?
March 8, 2006
Books of The Times | 'The Swamp'
Visionaries and Rascals in Florida's Wetlands
By WILLIAM GRIMES
For at least a century and a half, the Everglades wrestled with an image problem. Today, looking at its endless acres of swaying sawgrass, Americans see precious wetlands, home to the egret and the orchid. But for earlier generations, the Everglades was simply a swamp, a mosquito-infested wasteland. "The first and most abiding impression is the utter worthlessness to civilized man, in its present condition, of the entire region," wrote Buckingham Smith, a Harvard-educated lawyer and historian sent by the government to study the Everglades in the 1840's.
Drain it, settle it and put it to productive use. That was the mission, pursued zealously by wave after wave of engineers, politicians, real estate sharks, simple farmers and sun chasers from the North and Midwest. Their quest, fueled by ignorance and greed, transformed one the country's great natural wonders into an ecological disaster area, or to adopt the persuasive metaphor proposed by Michael Grunwald in "The Swamp," a desperately sick patient. There is still movement in the limbs, and a faint touch of color in the cheeks. After an almost fatal delay, doctors have arrived on the scene. But the vital signs are weak. The Everglades may not make it.
Mr. Grunwald, a reporter for The Washington Post, tells three intertwined stories in "The Swamp." Beginning at the beginning, he describes the creation of the Everglades, the unique "river of grass" whose exotic wildlife and vegetation held naturalists like John James Audubon spellbound, and traces the ill-advised efforts to tame it. His second theme is politics and power, the high-stakes battles over the Everglades waged by environmentalists, developers, sugar barons and politicians.
Finally, there is "the swamp" itself, whose intricate, far-flung ecological system Mr. Grunwald evokes in loving detail, from the twists and turns of the Kissimmee River to the shores of Lake Okeechobee to the herons, mangroves and purple gallinutes of the Glades. He even finds imaginative space for periphyton, the "golden-brown Everglades goop" that clumps around aquatic plants "like slimy oatmeal sweaters," providing nutrition for small fish, prawns, insects and snails. The Everglades, Mr. Grunwald writes, was always too subtle to command love and respect, "less ooh or aah than hmm." In his hands, the ooh and aah come to life.
"The Swamp" abounds in rascals, visionaries and visionary rascals. One of Mr. Grunwald's virtues is his clear-eyed refusal to impose present-day standards on past behavior. The can-do engineers and ruthless tycoons who looked at Florida's squishy, malarial landscape and saw paradise in the making usually thought they were rendering a service to mankind. The most enlightened minds of the Progressive era believed in a "wise use" policy toward nature. The land and its gifts were there to be managed and turned to profitable account, and that's exactly what the early would-be conquerors of the Everglades intended to do. "The Everglades of Florida should be saved," Napoleon Bonaparte Broward announced after being elected governor in 1904. "They should be drained and made fit for cultivation."
Mr. Grunwald, a terrific writer, moves along at a cracking pace. The dredges dig, the railroad advances, the politicians scheme and the dreamers paint their Technicolor fantasies. There is a feverish quality to the endless engineering assaults, the mad plans to rechannel the circulatory system of the Everglades, the blind determination to ignore the forces of nature. For example, no one quite understood that South Florida often experienced powerful hurricanes, so hundreds of poor farmers died in 1926 and 1927 when Lake Okeechobee overflowed.
The wildlife seemed like an inexhaustible resource, so when the fashion in women's hats demanded feathers, plume hunters went on a rampage, killing spoonbills, great white herons, snowy egrets and flamingos. An estimated five million birds were slaughtered in 1886 alone. A birdwatcher strolling along the Ladies' Mile in Manhattan saw feathers from 160 species in the store windows. Some hats supported entire birds. Belatedly, Florida imposed a plume ban, and in 1903 Teddy Roosevelt created a five-acre bird sanctuary on Pelican Island.
Again and again, wanton destruction led to horrified realization, followed by remorse and pledges to repair the damage, or the creation of parks, most notably the Everglades National Park in 1947. But year after year, acre by acre, the Everglades shrank. The Army Corps of Engineers continued to see flood control and economic development as its primary mission, not protection of the ecosystem.
"The Swamp" turns a corner in the early 1970's, when the heroic era of digging and planting and damming comes to an end. The last third of the book deals increasingly with intricate political and economic maneuvering over the Everglades. Nowadays, all politicians want to be seen as friends of the Glades. Rock-ribbed conservatives have found common cause with conservationist firebrands. Conversely, in the last presidential election, friends of the earth lined up against the ecologically sensitive Al Gore when he refused to take a stand against a proposed airport in Homestead, on the Everglades' fringes.
Elections, Mr. Grunwald points out, tend to be very good for the Everglades. In 2000, the $8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was making its way through Congress. It passed because E. Clay Shaw Jr., the 10-term Republican congressman from Fort Lauderdale, found himself in a tight race, and the Republicans held a razor-thin majority in the House. The speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, threw his full weight behind the plan. "We knew this could come down to two seats, and if that meant we had to spend $8 billion for Mr. Shaw, that's what we were going to do," an aide to Mr. Hastert recalled.
"The Swamp" ends on an uncertain note. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan passed, but its goals seem ambiguous. Half the original Everglades has disappeared, the remainder is slowly dying and the pressures of population growth and development in Florida continue unabated. (The sugar fields may one day give way to something even worse: condominiums.) Good intentions, and lots of government money, may not be enough. In the future there may be no ooh, no aah, not even hmm.