The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise Flagler and other railroad barons, he complained, were “draining the people instead of the swamps” At a time when the richest one percent of Americans owned halfthe nation’s wealth, when forty-two corporate trusts controlled at least 70 percent of their industries, Broward wanted to turn the Everglades into a place where ordinary people could deprive their lot in life through hard work. His crusade for Everglades drainage was not just a fight for man against nature it was a fight for ordinary Floridians angst’s the “seductive and enslaving power of corporate interests” who monopolized state lands without improving them. The conservationist John Giford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, bu the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”īroward was also a progressive- an anti railroad, anti corporation, anti-Flagler populist. Brossard never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. he supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and envelopment.
(Mar.“Broward had been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assautl on the everglades, but he was considered a staunch conversvationist in his day. 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. 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. Escalating demands of new residents after WWII were sapping the Everglades of its water and decimating the shrinking swamp's wildlife. By the turn of this century, more than seven million people lived there (and 40 million tourists visited annually). In 1838, fewer than 50 white people lived in south Florida, and the Everglades was seen as a vast and useless bog. 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.
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