![]() ![]() ![]() I was a gone in 30 seconds from that warm, sweet air and the sight of my first palm tree swaying green and shirtless by the exit ramp. I avoided Florida all my life until I made the mistake of just-passin'-thru on the way to something else. Read moreĭid I ever tell you I fell in love with Florida two years ago? I thought I was too good for it, a ticky-tacky place with no wilds ruled by the Mouse. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed, and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline. And The Swamp is a cautionary tale for that era. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. In this book, Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. ![]()
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