The Swamp; The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise

by Michael Grunwald

• ISBN13: 9780743251051
• ISBN10: 0743251059
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-02-28
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

The Everglades was once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it. The Swamp is the stun

Table of Contents

Introduction ``A Treasure for Our Country''	1	(8)
Part One The Natural Everglades
Grassy Water	9	(15)
The Intruders	24	(16)
Quagmire	40	(14)
A New Vision	54	(10)
Drainage Gets Railroaded	64	(17)
Part Two Draining the Everglades
The Reclamation of a Kingly Domain	81	(17)
The Father of South Florida	98	(19)
Protect the Birds	117	(13)
``Water Will Run Downhill!''	130	(21)
Land by the Gallon	151	(25)
Nature's Revenge	176	(21)
``Everglades Permanence Now Assured''	197	(19)
Taming the Everglades	216	(23)
Part Three Restoring the Everglades
Making Peace with Nature	239	(25)
Repairing the Everglades	264	(16)
Something in the Water	280	(24)
Something for Everyone	304	(29)
Endgame	333	(24)
Epilogue: The Future of the Everglades	357	(14)
Notes	371	(62)
Acknowledgments	433	(2)
Index	435

Excerpts

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 fat