24 Apr Write a well-developed esay discussing how a bi-partisan consensus was created over Everglades restoration that please both pro-growth and environmentalists. Write a well-developed es
- Write a well-developed esay discussing how a bi-partisan consensus was created over Everglade’s restoration that please both pro-growth and environmentalists.
- Write a well-developed esay discussing why Michael Grunwald argued that the Everglades must be restored.
- Write a well-developed esay discussing what Michael Grunwald means when he talks about the conquest of the Everglades.
- Write a well-developed esay discussing why Senator Marco Rubio is more optimistic than Michael Grunwald about Everglades restoration.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Grunwald All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered
trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Designed by Ellen Sasahara
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grunwald, Michael.
The swamp / Michael Grunwald.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Everglades (Fla.)—History. 2. Everglades (Fla.)—
Environmental conditions. 3. Environmental protection—
Florida—Everglades—History. 4. Drainage—Florida—
Everglades—History. I. Title.
F317.E9G78 2005
975.9’39—de22 2005056329
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3727-4
ISBN-10: 1-4165-3727-9
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
For Mom and Dad
with love
Contents
Introduction “A Treasure for Our Country”
Part One The Natural Everglades
1 Grassy Water
2 The Intruders
3 Quagmire
4 A New Vision
5 Drainage Gets Railroaded
Part Two Draining the Everglades
6 The Reclamation of a Kingly Domain
7 The Father of South Florida
8 Protect the Birds
9 “Water Will Run Downhill!”
10 Land by the Gallon
11 Nature’s Revenge
12 “Everglades Permanence Now Assured”
13 Taming the Everglades
Part Three Restoring the Everglades
14 Making Peace with Nature
15 Repairing the Everglades
16 Something in the Water
17 Something for Everyone
18 Endgame
Epilogue The Future of the Everglades
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
And God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing that moveth upon the
earth.
—Genesis 1:28
Nature is overrated.
But we’ll miss it when it’s gone!
—Florida golfers, in the 2002 film Sunshine State
Introduction
“A Treasure for Our Country”
ON DECEMBER 11, 2000, the Supreme Court heard oral
arguments in George W. Bush, et al. v. Albert Gore Jr., et al.,
the partisan battle royale that would end the stalemate over
the Florida recount and send one of the litigants to the
White House. The deadlocked election had exposed a
divided nation, and pundits were describing Governor
Bush’s “Red America” and Vice President Gore’s “Blue
America” as if they were separate countries at war. After
five weeks of ferocious wrangling over “pregnant chads”
and “hanging chads,” hard-liners in both camps were
warning of an illegitimate presidency, a constitutional crisis,
a bloodless coup.
Inside the Court’s marble-and-mahogany chambers,
Senator Robert Smith of New Hampshire watched the legal
jousting with genuine awe. Smith was one of the hardest of
Red America’s hardliners, a passionate antiabortion,
antigay, antitax Republican, and he believed he was
watching a struggle for the soul of his country. Smith was
also a former small-town civics teacher, less jaded than
most of his colleagues in Congress, and Bush v. Gore was a
civics lesson for the ages, a courtroom drama that would
decide the leader of the free world. “It doesn’t get any
bigger than this,” he thought.
But less than an hour into the proceedings, Smith
suddenly walked out on history, squeezing his six-foot-five,
280-pound frame past his perplexed seatmates. “Excuse
me,” he whispered. “Excuse me.” A bear of a man with
fleshy jowls, a bulbous nose, and a sloppy comb-over, Smith
could feel the stares as he lumbered down the center aisle,
then jostled through the hushed standing-room crowd to the
exit. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”
Smith’s abrupt departure looked like one of his
unorthodox protests, like the time he brandished a plastic
fetus on the Senate floor, or the time he announced he was
resigning from the Republican Party because it was cutting
too many big-government deals with the Democrats. Smith
was an unabashed ideologue, rated the most conservative
and the most frugal senator by various right-wing interest
groups. He had voted against food stamps and Head Start,
clamored for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and even
mounted his own quixotic campaign for president on a
traditional-values platform.
But this was no protest. Smith was rushing to the White
House, to celebrate a big-government deal with the
Democrats.
At the height of the partisan war over the Florida
recount, President Clinton was signing a bipartisan bill to
revive the Florida Everglades, a $7.8 billion rescue mission
for sixty-nine endangered species and twenty national parks
and refuges. It was the largest environmental restoration
project in the history of the planet, and Smith had pushed it
through Congress with classic liberal rhetoric, dismissing its
price tag as “just a can of Coke per citizen per day,”
beseeching his colleagues to “save this treasure as our
legacy to our children and grandchildren.” So after his dash
from the Court, he headed straight to the Cabinet Room,
where he exchanged congratulations with some of the
Democratic Party’s top environmentalists, like Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the former head of the League of
Conservation Voters, and White House aide George
Frampton, the former head of the Wilderness Society. And
Smith was not even the most surprising guest in the West
Wing that day.
That was Florida’s Republican governor, another key
supporter of the Everglades plan, a former Miami developer
named Jeb Bush. As the world waited to hear whether his
brother would win his state and succeed their father’s
successor in the White House, Jeb was already there, 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. “The last time I was here, your father was
president!” one lobbyist told him. Jeb tried to smile, but it
came out more like a grimace. One Clinton appointee began
babbling about the Cuban Missile Crisis—possibly the last
time that room had felt that tense. Jeb even said hi to a
Miami congresswoman who had publicly accused him of
suppressing black votes. “This,” thought Jeb’s top
environmental aide, “is as surreal as politics can get.”
Unless, that is…but no, Vice President Gore, a key
architect of the Everglades plan, stayed home to listen to
the Supreme Court audiotape. “I was really proud of what
we accomplished in the Everglades,” Gore later recalled.
“But I was in a pretty pitched battle that day.”
At 1:12 P.M., an ebullient President Clinton invited
everyone into the Oval Office, the room that George W. Bush
liked to say needed a good scrubbing. If the president was
upset about Gore’s plight, or Jeb’s presence, or the legacy of
impeachment, or his imminent move to the New York
suburbs, the legendary compartmentalizer hid it well. “This
is a great day!” he said. “We should all be very proud.” He
used eighteen ceremonial pens to sign the bill, graciously
handing the first souvenir to Jeb. Senator Smith quipped
that it was lucky Clinton’s name wasn’t Cornelius
Snicklefritzer, or else the ceremony might never end. The
president threw his head back and laughed. “Wow,” thought
his chief of staff, John Podesta, “this is like a Fellini movie.”
If Florida’s political swamp was tearing Americans apart,
Florida’s actual swamp had a knack for bringing people
together. The same Congress that had been torn in half by
Clinton’s impeachment had overwhelmingly approved his
plan for the Everglades, after lobbyists for the sugar
industry and the Audubon Society walked the corridors of
Capitol Hill arm-in-arm. The same Florida legislature that
was in turmoil over Bush v. Gore had approved Everglades
restoration without a single dissenting vote.
At a press conference after the ceremony, Jeb
sidestepped the inevitable Bush v. Gore questions to
highlight this unity: “In a time when people are focused on
politics, and there’s a little acrimony—I don’t know if y’all
have noticed—this is a good example of how, in spite of all
that, bipartisanship is still alive.” Reporters shouted follow-
ups about the Court, but the governor cut them off with a
smile. “No, no, no, no, you’re going the wrong way on that
one. We’re here to talk about something that’s going to be
long-lasting, way past counting votes. This is the restoration
of a treasure for our country.”
The Test
TODAY, EVERYONE AGREES that the Everglades is a national
treasure. It’s a World Heritage Site, an International
Biosphere Reserve, the most famous wetland on earth. It’s a
cultural icon, featured in Carl Hiaasen novels, Spiderman
comics, country songs, and the opening credits of CSI:
Miami, as well as the popular postcards of its shovel-faced
alligators and spindly-legged wading birds. It’s the
ecological equivalent of motherhood and apple pie; when an
aide on NBC’s The West Wing was asked the most popular
thing the president could do for the environment, he
immediately replied: “Save the Everglades.”
But there was once just as broad a national consensus
that the Everglades was a worthless morass, an enemy of
civilization, an obstacle to progress. The first government
report on the Everglades deemed it “suitable only for the
haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential
reptiles.” Its explorers almost uniformly described it as a
muddy, mushy, inhospitable expanse of razor-edged
sawgrass in shallow water—too wet to farm, too dry to sail,
too unpredictable to settle. 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.
The heart of the Everglades was technically a marsh, not
a swamp, because its primary vegetation was grassy, not
woody; the first journalist to slog through the Everglades
called it a “vast and useless marsh.” But it was usually
described as a dismal, impenetrable swamp, and even
conservationists dreamed of draining it; converting wet land
into productive land was considered the essence of
conservation. Hadn’t God specifically instructed man to
subdue the earth, and take dominion over all the living
creatures that moveth upon it? Wasn’t America destined to
overpower its wilderness?
This is the story of the Everglades, from useless bog to
national treasure, from its creation to its destruction to its
potential resurrection. It is the story of a remarkable swath
of real estate and the remarkable people it has attracted,
from the aboriginals who created the continent’s first
permanent settlement in the Everglades, to the U.S. soldiers
who fought a futile war of ethnic cleansing in the
Everglades, to the dreamers and schemers who have tried
to settle, drain, tame, develop, sell, preserve, and restore
the Everglades. 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 his
unprecedented efforts to fix them.
THE STORY BEGINS with the natural Everglades ecosystem,
which covered most of south Florida, from present-day
Orlando all the way down to the Florida Keys. For most of its
history, it was virtually uninhabited. As late as 1897, four
years after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared
the western frontier closed, an explorer marveled that the
Everglades was still “as much unknown to the white man as
the heart of Africa.”
But once white men got to know it, they began to
transform it. A Gilded Age industrialist named Hamilton
Disston was the first visionary to try to drain the swamp. A
brilliant oilman-turned-developer named Henry Flagler
considered his own assault on the Everglades while he was
laying the foundation for modern south Florida. And an
energetic Progressive Era governor named Napoleon
Bonaparte Broward vowed to create an Empire of the
Everglades with more canals, declaring war on south
Florida’s water.
The Everglades turned out to be a resilient enemy,
resisting man’s drainage schemes for decades, taking
revenge in the form of brutal droughts and catastrophic
floods, converting Florida swampland into an enduring real
estate punchline. In 1928, a hurricane blasted Lake
Okeechobee through its flimsy muck dike and drowned
2,500 people in the Everglades, a ghastly fore-shadowing of
Hurricane Katrina’s assault on New Orleans. Mother Nature
did not take kindly to man’s attempts to subjugate her.
But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the ground troops
in America’s war against nature, finally conquered the
Everglades with one of the most elaborate water-control
projects in history, setting the stage for south Florida’s
spectacular postwar development. Suburbs such as Weston,
Wellington, Plantation, Pembroke Pines, Miami Lakes, and
Miami Springs all sprouted in drained Everglades wetlands.
So did Miami International Airport, Sawgrass Mills Mall,
Florida International University, Burger King corporate
headquarters, and a vast agricultural empire that produces
one out of every five teaspoons of American sugar. Disney
World was built near the headwaters of the Everglades. And
some people began to wonder whether the creation of a
man-made paradise across Florida’s southern thumb was
worth the destruction of a natural one.
So the story of the Everglades is also the story of the
transformation of south Florida, from a virtually uninhabited
wasteland to a densely populated Fantasyland with 7 million
residents, 40 million annual tourists, and the world’s largest
concentration of golf courses. “There has never been a more
grossly exaggerated region, a more grossly misrepresented
region, or one concerning which less has been known than
this mighty empire of South Florida,” the Palm Beach Post
said in 1924. That’s still about right.
AMERICA’S WAR ON NATURE has left a tattered battlefield in
south Florida. Half the Everglades is gone. The other half is
an ecological mess. Wading birds no longer darken the skies
above it. Algal blooms are exploding in its lakes and
estuaries, massacring its dolphins, oysters, and manatees.
And it is now clear that the degradation extends beyond
noxious vermin and pestilential reptiles, affecting the people
of south Florida as well. The aquifers that store their
drinking water are under siege. Their paradise has been
sullied by sprawl, and by overcrowded schools, hospitals,
and highways. Most of them are at risk from the next killer
hurricane—and the one after that. It is now almost
universally agreed that south Florida’s growth is no longer
sustainable.
The Everglades restoration plan that President Clinton
signed with Governor Bush at his side is supposed to restore
some semblance of the original ecosystem, and guide south
Florida toward sustainability. And the Army Corps of
Engineers, after decades of helping to destroy the
Everglades, will lead the effort to undo some of the damage.
“The Everglades is a test,” one environmentalist has
written. “If we pass, we may get to keep the planet.”
On that December day at the millennium’s end,
Republicans and Democrats described Everglades
restoration as the dawn of a new era in conservation—not
only for south Florida, but for mankind. Instead of taming
rivers, irrigating deserts, and draining swamps, man would
restore ravaged ecosystems. Instead of fighting over scarce
fresh water—the oil of the twenty-first century—Floridians
would demonstrate how to share. The Everglades, Jeb Bush
said, would be “a model for the world,” proof that man and
nature could live in harmony. America’s politicians would
finally pass the Everglades test.
It was a noble sentiment. But man had been flunking that
test for a long time.
Part 1
The Natural Everglades
One
Grassy Water
There are no other Everglades in the world.
—South Florida author Marjory Stoneman
Douglas
“The Place Looked Wild And Lonely”
THE NATURAL EVERGLADES was not quite land and not
quite water, but a soggy confusion of the two.
It was a vast sheet of shallow water spread across a
seemingly infinite prairie of serrated sawgrass, a liquid
expanse of muted greens and browns extending to the
horizon. It had the panoramic sweep of a desert, except
flooded, or a tundra, except melted, or a wheat field, except
wild. It was studded with green teardrop-shaped islands of
tangled trees and scraggly shrubs, and specked with white
spider lilies and violet-blue pickerelweeds. But mostly it
looked like the world’s largest and grassiest puddle, or the
flattest and wettest meadow, or the widest and slowest-
moving stream. It had the squish and the scruff of an
untended yard after a downpour, except that this yard was
larger than Connecticut. It wasn’t obviously beautiful, but it
was obviously unique. “No country that I have ever heard of
bears any resemblance to it,” wrote one of the U.S. soldiers
who hunted Seminole Indians in the Everglades in the
nineteenth century. “It seems like a vast sea, filled with
grass and green trees.”
The Everglades seeped all the way down Florida’s
southern thumb, from the giant wellspring of Lake
Okeechobee in the center of the peninsula to the ragged
mangrove fringes of Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, a
sodden savanna more than 100 miles long and as much as
60 miles wide—just grass and water, water and grass,
except for the tree islands and wildflowers that dotted the
grass, and the lily pads and algal mats that floated on the
water. The Seminoles called it Pa-Hay-Okee, or Grassy
Water. The American soldiers who trudged through it during
the Seminole Wars described it as a grassy lake, a grassy
sea, an ocean of grass. The bard of the Everglades, Marjory
Stoneman Douglas, later dubbed it the River of Grass.
Sawgrass is actually a sedge, not a grass, but the nickname
stuck.
The Everglades was relentlessly, remarkably, almost
perfectly flat—no majestic canyons, rugged cliffs, or rolling
hills, no glaciers, geysers, or craters. Even Everglades
National Park’s first superintendent admitted that its
landscape lacked a certain flair, calling it “a study in
halftones, not bright, broad strokes of a full brush,”
summarizing its attractions as “lonely distances, intricate
and monotonous waterways, birds, sky and water.” The
Everglades was also an incomparably tough slog. It lacked
shade and shelter, high ground and dry ground. Breathing
its heavy air felt like sucking on cotton. Wading through its
hip-deep muck felt like marching in quicksand. Penetrating
its dense thickets of sharp-toothed sawgrass felt like bathing
in broken glass. And there was something downright spooky
about the place, with its bellowing alligators, grunting
pigfrogs, and screeching owls—and especially its eerie
silences.
“The place looked wild and lonely,” one hunter wrote
after an 1885 expedition through the Everglades. “About
three o’clock it seemed to get on Henry’s nerves, and we
saw that he was crying, he would not tell us why, he was
just plain scared.”
The Everglades also teemed with rats, roaches, snakes,
scorpions, spiders, worms, deerflies, sand flies, and
unfathomably thick clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes that
flew up nostrils and down throats and into ears. The pioneer
Miami naturalist Charles Torrey Simpson loved the
Everglades like a son, but he readily acknowledged that “the
wilds of Lower Florida can furnish as much laceration and as
many annoyances to the square inch as any place I have
ever seen.”
“My advice is to urge every discontented man to take a
trip through the Everglades,” another explorer wrote. “If it
doesn’t kill him, it will certainly cure him.”
BUT THE EVERGLADES was more than a river of grass, and it
contained more than swarming bugs, slithering reptiles, and
lacerating annoyances.
The river of grass was only the most distinctive link of an
interconnected ecosystem that once blanketed almost all of
south Florida, from its headwaters atop the Kissimmee
Chain of Lakes near modern-day Orlando down to the coral
reefs off the Keys, an area twice the size of New Jersey. The
ecosystem was a watery labyrinth of lakes and lagoons,
creeks and ponds, pine flatwoods and hardwood hammocks.
It encompassed Biscayne Bay and Florida Bay, the St. Lucie
and Miami Rivers. And in addition to its extensive
marshlands, it included genuine swamps, most notably the
Big Cypress Swamp, a Delaware-sized mosaic of pinelands,
prairies, and black-water bogs just west of the sawgrass
Everglades.
Sawgrass could be as uninviting to wildlife as it was to
people, but the diverse habitats of the broader Everglades
ecosystem—also known as the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-
Everglades or south Florida ecosystem—supported an
astonishing variety of life, from black bears to barracudas,
turkey vultures to vase sponges, zebra butterflies to fuzzy-
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