The Swamp

Starred review from December 19, 2005
Washington Post
reporter Grunwald brings the zeal of his profession—and the skill that won him a Society of Environmental Journalists Award in 2003—to this enthralling story of "the river of grass" that starry-eyed social engineers and greedy developers have diverted, drained and exploited for more than a century. In 1838, fewer than 50 white people lived in south Florida, and the Everglades was seen as a vast and useless bog. By the turn of this century, more than seven million people lived there (and 40 million tourists visited annually). Escalating demands of new residents after WWII were sapping the Everglades of its water and decimating the shrinking swamp's wildlife. But in a remarkable political and environmental turnaround, chronicled here with a Washington insider's savvy, Republicans and Democrats came together in 2000 to launch the largest ecosystem restoration project in America's history. This detailed account doesn't shortchange the environmental story—including an account of the senseless fowl hunts that provoked abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1877 broadside "Protect the Birds." But Grunwald's emphasis on the role politics played in first despoiling and now reclaiming the Everglades gives this important book remarkable heft. 18 pages of b&w photos; 7 maps.

Starred review from February 1, 2006
The phrase " teeming with life" could have been coined to describe the Everglades in its pristine state, but as Grunwald, an award-winning journalist for the " Washington Post," so vividly describes, this vast Florida wetland has been under siege since the days of the conquistadors. As enterprising men attempted to drain, tame, and develop this fertile swamp, they wreaked ecological chaos instead, causing droughts, dust storms, wildfires, extinctions, pollution, and water shortages. Grunwald strikes just the right balance of awe, ire, and analysis in his expert and animated chronicle of the history of the Everglades, which encompasses the Seminole wars, a Reconstruction-era land rush, the notorious Roaring Twenties boom that made Florida swampland "a national punch line," the even more rampant and decimating postwar explosion, on to congressional battles over the beleaguered swamp during the Clinton and Bush years. Grunwald is especially captivating in his profiles of the Seminole warrior Osceola and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, of " River of Grass" fame, an Everglades activist until her death at 108. The colorful, infuriating, and instructive story of the Everglades is a riveting tale of ambition versus ecological reality, politics versus science, and, on the upside, our gradual awakening to the true nature of nature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)