Quagmire: How America Learned to Love the Everglades

Michael Grunwald’s new book

Everyone knows that Everglades National Park is a national treasure. It’s a unique ecosystem, a river of grass 50 miles wide and often less than a foot deep, home to storks and ibises, alligators and crocodiles, mangroves and mahogany trees. But as Michael Grunwald explains in his highly entertaining new book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, for a long time it was regarded as a dismal bog that needed to be drained, incinerated, and exploited.

Grunwald, a journalist for the Washington Post, Slate, and The New Republic, begins his lively history 200 million years ago, when South Florida emerged from the ocean during the last ice age. He describes the Everglades as “a vast sheet of water spread across a seemingly infinite prairie of serrated sawgrass, a liquid expanse of muted greens and browns extending to the horizon. It has the panoramic sweep of a desert, except flooded, or a tundra, except melted, or a wheat field, except wild.” As soon as Americans clapped eyes on it, they wanted to transform it into something useful, meaning something that would make them money.

During the 1800s, as population grew in eastern and northern Florida, the Everglades remained impenetrable. Attempts at settlement left soggy pioneers with failed crops. Grunwald loads his book with colorful characters who tried to conquer the swamp, including carpetbaggers, con artists, and politicians eager to make a quick buck. He draws vivid characters with a few deft strokes, such as “a trim, clean-cut engineer with a military bearing, a Wall Street haircut, and a formidable aura of confidence and competence.” An Audubon Society representative “looked like Buddy Holly on an extremely tight deadline.” One compelling character is Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, a former society-page reporter for the Miami Herald who after observing the deplorable state of the Everglades became a “relentless reporter and fearless crusader.” In 1947, the same year Everglades National Park was dedicated, she published The Everglades: River of Grass, a book that brought the area and its travails to a broad popular audience. With her diminutive frame, large glasses, and signature floppy hat, she cut a unique figure, and she fought for the Everglades tirelessly until her death in 1998 at age 108.

From the early 1900s, when conservation often meant protecting the rights of hunters and fishers and turning “useless” wilderness into farm land, until the arrival of the Army Corps of Engineers after the 1928 hurricane, Everglades development roughly followed a cyclical pattern. Overblown promises of taming a landscape that wouldn’t be tamed lured settlers, the swamp would obediently dry up as the canals cut through it, and then it would either reflood or become parched enough to catch fire. Most of the settlers would then leave.

The Army Corps of Engineers trooped in to dam lakes, straighten rivers, and drain the basin into the ocean. Overzealous in its efforts, its turned vast swaths of the Everglades into a dust bowl. In 1939 nearly a million acres burned, chasing out the remaining Seminole Indians and devastating wildlife.

The first real attempt to preserve some of the remarkable ecosystem came in 1914, when the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs launched an effort to create the first state park around Paradise Key, a lush palm-covered island in the middle of the swamps. At 4,000 acres, this was a tenth of a percent of the Everglades, but it was a start. The preservation effort got much bigger during the 1930s when Ernest Coe, a landscape painter, started the crusade to create Everglades National Park. His romantic campaign was taken over by the more practically minded Spessard Linsey Holland, governor of and later senator from Florida. Holland negotiated an area that was smaller than what Coe had envisioned but, at 1.3 million acres, still the nation’s second largest national park.

The park was dedicated in 1947, but its sustainability was immediately threatened. It was besieged on all sides, starved of water by Army Corps of Engineers projects and polluted by sugar growers to the north. Anyone visiting it in the 1950s saw a shriveled, barren landscape that had lost much of its wildlife.

In the 1980s a major effort got underway to undo much of the Army Corps’ draining, canal digging, and diking in the hopes that the Everglades could then fix themselves. But the biggest boon for environmentalists came in 2000, when the country’s largest environmental restoration project ever was signed into law in the eleventh hour of the Clinton presidency. The Everglades Forever Act slipped under the radar of public attention as the nation was transfixed by Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the winner of that year’s presidential election.

The biggest threat to the Everglades now is runaway urban sprawl to the north and northeast. President George W. Bush has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to defer to the state in enforcing the Everglades Forever Act. His brother Governor Jeb Bush has extended the deadline for the cleanup of phosphorus runoff from sugar growers and made sure the bill contained other allowances for commercial interests. Some environmentalists now call it the Everglades Whenever Act. As the governor has worked to meet the water needs of businesses—needs that compete with those of the park—one Army Corps engineer working on the project has complained, “It’s different than what we told Congress we would do—and it’s not restoration!!!”

And so the future of a unique and fragile environmental treasure remains as it has been since civilization first reached the area—dangerously uncertain.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.