More about The Swamp (book)

Second post regarding The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, by Michael Grunwald. We’ll pick up the story at the dawn of the 20th century… (photos from Grassy Waters Preserve the other day)

NAPOLEON BROWARD declared war on the swamp during his 1904 campaign for governor, unfurling giant multicolored maps of the Everglades at campaign rallies, promising to bust a few holes in the coastal ridge and create an instant Empire of the Everglades. “It would indeed be a sad commentary on the intelligence and energy of the people of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering feat as the drainage of a body 21 feet above the level of the sea was beyond their power,” he taunted his audiences.

Broward has been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assault on the Everglades, but he was considered a staunch conservationist in his day. He supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and development. Broward never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Gifford 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, but the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”

When a canal-based drainage project did succeed, the projects could be substantial.

Swampland the state had sold to settlers for 25 cents an acre now produced harvests of $600 an acre for tomatoes, $1,000 for lettuce, $1,500 for celery. At a time when farmers were struggling to survive on 160-acre homesteads out west, the farmer Walter Waldin netted $3,400 on six acres in six months in the Everglades—after building a home and feeding a family of five.

One problem, however, was that the canals were temporary:

[James Wright, a former high school math teacher hired by the Feds to study the challenge] also ignored the high cost of maintaining canals, a problem exacerbated by the gentle gradient of the Everglades, which produced currents too slow for the canals to scour themselves out, and by the explosive proliferation of the water hyacinth, an attractive but invasive weed that had clogged almost all the state’s waterways since a well-intentioned gardener named Mrs. Fuller imported it to Florida in 1884.

The setting aside of swamp for parks began in 1916 with a 4,000-acre Royal Palm State Park that became the core of Everglades National Park. Meanwhile, humans were trashing the rest. Regarding the Miami area:

Meanwhile, 34,000 acres of the Everglades had been converted into farms, and much of the rest was parched by ditches, drought, and the Tamiami Trail. “The drying up of the Glades, due to the various canals, is playing havoc with the birds here,” one surveyor wrote. “The finer ones are fast disappearing. They lack feeding grounds.” The water table was dropping fast, drying out springs that once bubbled to the surface on Cape Sable and within Biscayne Bay, reducing the downward hydraulic pressure caused by the weight of fresh water—the “head”—that kept salt water from the region’s estuaries from intruding into its aquifers. By 1920, Miami’s overpumped well fields at the edge of the Everglades were turning salty. The declining water table was also fueling the fires that raged in overdrained Everglades wetlands. Broward had ridiculed the idea that a swamp could catch fire, and Randolph had predicted soil shrinkage of no more than eight inches, but some of the Everglades had already lost three to five feet of the black muck that had inspired so many pioneer dreams. This was not only the result of subterranean fires; it was also caused by “oxidation,” the exposure of historically flooded organic soils to the open air. The aeration of the muck breathed life into long-dormant microbes in the soil, which consumed organic material that had accumulated underwater over thousands of years. The soils then dried into powder and blew away on windy days, kicking up dust storms so violent that pioneers “could hardly get out of the house without wearing goggles.”

Charles Torrey Simpson, an early preservationist, very nearly wondered heretically whether at least some humans should be illegal:

“We shall proudly point someday to the Everglade country and say: Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; today it is an empire. But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings.”

Agriculture in the Florida swamp got a huge boost when the state’s research lab figured out that the Everglades soil was deficient in copper, manganese, and some other necessary trace elements.

The idea that the federal government should be in charge of all of the water in Florida got a huge boost from President Herbert Hoover, whose confidence was not shaken in the repeated failures of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the Mississippi. The dike that surrounds Lake Okeechobee is named after Hoover. The effects of the dike were not all positive…

The Depression years were drought years, and the combination of the new dike, which prevented water from the lake from reaching the Everglades, and the old ditches, which carried water from the sky away from the Everglades, left its wetlands desert dry. Its fresh water table dropped like a boulder, allowing salt water to intrude further into its aquifers every year, contaminating wells and ruining tomato farms along the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, soils that had been accumulating underwater for thousands of years were vanishing with exposure to the air; in Belle Glade—town motto: Her Soil Is Her Fortune—the ground was sinking so quickly that settlers had to add an extra doorstep every few years.

Failure and unintended consequences always motivated the experts to go bigger. The late 1940s:

The Army Corps plan for the Central and Southern Florida project called for the most elaborate water control system ever built, the largest earthmoving effort since the Panama Canal. It envisioned 2,000 miles of levees and canals, along with hundreds of spillways, floodgates, and pumps so powerful they would be cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The C&SF project was designed to control just about every drop of rain that landed on the region, in order to end the cycle of not-enough-water and too-much-water that had destabilized the frontier and stifled its growth…

The plan’s first big innovation was its strict separation of the usable Everglades from the unusable Everglades, a concept that first appeared in Captain Rose’s drainage proposal for Henry Flagler. The plan also adopted Rose’s call for piece-by-piece as opposed to all-at-once drainage. The work began with a 100-mile-long “perimeter levee” running more or less parallel to the coastal ridge, walling off the Gold Coast and a wide slice of the eastern Glades from the rest of the marsh. Next, the Corps encircled and reclaimed the rich soils of the upper Glades with more levees and drainage canals, creating an Everglades Agricultural Area the size of Rhode Island. The Corps then built more levees to divide a swath of the central Glades even larger than Rhode Island into three gargantuan “water conservation areas,” a more recent plan devised by the Belle Glade research station. The station’s scientists had suggested that “rewatering” the central Glades could restore the region’s hydraulic head and mimic the natural storage capacity of the Everglades, preventing salt intrusion, soil subsidence, muck fires, and water shortages all at once. The conservation areas would still look like the Everglades, but they would hold onto needed water for farms and cities during droughts, absorb excess water from farms and cities during storms, and recharge the region’s aquifers to keep salt out of its groundwater.

In the mid-1950s, the Army Corps made a movie about their plans and achievements, Waters of Destiny:

One the Corps was on the job, people felt confident that dry land was around the corner and, therefore, real estate could be purchased without much thought regarding whether it was buildable.

The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:

THE C&SF PROJECT did not extend the glories of flood control to southwest Florida, but that did not stop two Baltimore brothers named Leonard and Julius Rosen from selling nearly half a million acres of swampland there during the boom. The Rosens had gotten rich selling an anti-baldness tonic called Formula Number Nine, featuring the miracle ingredient of lanolin—and the immortal tagline, “Have you ever seen a bald sheep?” The brothers could see that shivering northerners yearned for a piece of Florida the way bald men yearned for hair. Their Gulf American Corporation offered “a rich man’s paradise, within the financial reach of everyone,” the ultimate miracle elixir. Gulf American’s most ambitious venture was Golden Gate Estates, where the Rosens platted the world’s largest subdivision in the middle of Big Cypress Swamp. … The Rosens sold tens of thousands of lots in Golden Gate, parlaying their $125,000 investment in Florida swampland into a $115 million payout, but only a few dozen homes were built there.

The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:

Marjory Stoneman Douglas had expected the C&SF project to save the Everglades, but it turned out to be an ecological menace. It did a terrific job of draining wetlands and promoting growth, but its expanded canals carried more water out of the Everglades at a time when south Florida’s expanding cities and farms were increasingly dependent on water in the Everglades. Its flood protection prompted additional development in the Everglades floodplain, which prompted demands for additional flood protection. And the Corps and its like-minded partners in the flood control district—often run by former Corps engineers—refused to release water to the park, except when it was already inundated. They manipulated water levels to accommodate irrigation schedules and development schemes, discombobulating the natural water regime to which flora and fauna had adapted over the millennia. “What a liar I turned out to be!” Douglas cried.

Nobody benefitted more from this than the sugar industry:

Big Sugar received no direct subsidies, as its army of spokesmen constantly pointed out, but it depended on federal import quotas, tariffs, and price supports that cost American consumers as much as $2 billion a year. Florida’s growers also relied on a federal program to import their labor pool of 10,000 impoverished West Indian cane-cutters; the industry was notorious for mistreating them, withholding their wages, and deporting any who dared complain. The growers also reaped the benefits of the C&SF project, which irrigated their fields in the dry season and drained their fields in the rainy season. They received more than half the project’s water releases, while paying less than one percent of the district’s taxes.

But that runoff [from sugar cane fields] wasn’t harmless to the Everglades, because the things that extra phosphorus made grow generally didn’t belong in the marsh. The Everglades was “phosphorus-limited,” with flora and fauna peculiarly adapted to a nutrient-starved environment, and ill-suited to compete when even minute amounts of phosphorus became available. And those thimbles added up; the agricultural area pumped 100 tons of phosphorus a year into the Loxahatchee refuge, fertilizing the march of the cattails.

President Nixon began to reverse some of the damage that the 1950s hubris had caused, with the help of Florida’s first Republican governor (voters in the former slave state had previously been loyal Democrats):

The other tectonic shift in Florida politics in 1967 was the ascension of Claude Roy Kirk Jr., a little-known insurance salesman who looked like a mob boss, partied like a frat boy, and stunned the state’s political establishment by becoming its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Kirk only received the GOP nomination because no serious candidate wanted it, but he exploited the growing rift within the Democratic Party, winning votes from north Florida conservatives by attacking his opponent as a Miami liberal. Kirk squired a mystery blonde he dubbed “Madame X” to his inaugural ball, and continued his flamboyant antics for the next four years, hiring a private security firm to lead his war on crime, upstaging the black militant H. Rap Brown at a stadium rally, planting Florida’s flag on the ocean floor, mobilizing the power of his office to save a child’s lemonade stand. “Claudius Maximus” had an insatiable thirst for publicity and a poorly disguised lust for higher office. But he also had a passion for rattling powerful cages; he called himself “a tree-shakin’ son of a bitch.” And with the help of an energetic young aide, he became Florida’s first environmental governor. The aide was Nathaniel Pryor Reed, a blue-blooded outdoorsman whose family had developed Jupiter Island, America’s wealthiest community, the winter retreat for old-money names like Whitney, Harriman, Ford, Duke, Doubleday, and Bush. Growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut, summering in Maine and wintering in Florida, Reed fell in love with all things natural; he collected bugs in his bedroom, memorized the names of birds, trees, and butterflies, and spent so much time chasing snook and redfish that his mother, Permelia, the legendary doyenne of Jupiter Island society, used to say he came out of the womb casting a fly rod.

developers,

Reed’s angular six-foot-five, 170-pound frame evoked a great blue heron, but his ruddy complexion, unfailing sense of noblesse oblige, and soaring rhetoric began drawing frequent comparisons to John F. Kennedy. Reed launched an all-out battle to save natural Florida, turning his office into a war room reminiscent of his days in military intelligence, with maps dotted by pins representing his environmental allies around the state. Reed regularly took on Florida’s most powerful interests—developers, businessmen, manufacturers, and their friends in government—but his boss backed him all the way.

Voters were also behind both Nixon’s and the governor’s efforts.

THE STATE THAT Harriet Beecher Stowe had described as “a prey and a spoil to all comers” was now an environmental model for the nation. One poll found that Florida was the only state where concern about the environment overshadowed the economy, with three-fourths of its residents supporting strict limits on future growth. There was certainly an element of selfishness to this backlash against helter-skelter development, as newcomers tried to slam Florida’s door behind them once they had secured their own slice of paradise. But whatever their motives, environmental politics became smart politics in the Sunshine State.

Undoing in the 1990s what had been done in the 1950s would cost 15X the as much (but the author may not be accounting for inflation, which was 5X from 1955-1995).

The Clinton administration initially sold out to the sugar industry, slowing down the restoration process that Nixon had begun. But the sugar industry managed to cut phosphorus by 50 percent, despite having been required to cut only 25 percent. The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (2000) ended up being Too Big to Completely Derail, but restoring the natural north-to-south flow of the water through the Everglades has been mostly abandoned, according to the author. The book was published in 2007, so the author couldn’t envision the millions of lockdown refugees that would emigrate to Florida. Nonetheless, the future was already apparent:

THE MOST DAUNTING THREAT to the Everglades is the runaway development that is still wiping out its wetlands and stressing its aquifers. The Miami—Fort Lauderdale—West Palm Beach conurbation has become America’s sixth-largest metropolitan area, obliterating almost every patch of green space between the Atlantic and the perimeter levee. Postwar Everglades suburbs such as Coral Springs, Hialeah, Miami Gardens, Miramar, Pembroke Pines, and Sunrise have all attracted 100,000 residents, and are approaching build-out. Southeast Florida’s office sprawl is just as intense; one study declared the region “the most centerless large office market in the U.S.,” the ultimate “Edgeless City.”

Everglades activists still dream of converting the sugar fields into reservoirs, and perhaps even flowways reconnecting Lake Okeechobee to the River of Grass. But in the coming years, their top priority will be preventing the conversion of sugar fields into bedroom communities. There are already 30,000 residents in eager-to-expand Everglades Agricultural Area communities such as Belle Glade, South Bay, and Pahokee, and the fast-growing horse town of Wellington—where Tommy Lee Jones plays polo, and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Bloomberg take their daughters to equestrian competitions—is also maneuvering to expand west. U.S. Sugar and the Fanjul interests are developing plans for new subdivisions and rock mines, and Governor Bush is convening a commission to study the future of development in the agricultural area. As strange as it sounds, environmentalists may come to yearn for the days when Big Sugar ruled the upper Glades.

You could have made a ton of money if you’d read this book in 2007 and acted on the advice of “some observers”:

Some observers warn that Florida real estate is as overvalued now as it was before the 1926 hurricane, but the bubble didn’t burst after the four Florida hurricanes of 2004. People are still flocking to the sunshine, and the land rush is expected to accelerate as heat-seeking baby boomers reach retirement age. The Hoover Dike leaks when Lake Okeechobee gets high, and the Corps say it could fail if lake levels rise seven feet above normal, unleashing the monstropolous beast on millions of people. Hurricane forecasting has improved dramatically since 1928, but it’s not perfect, and the unexpected failure of Corps floodwalls during Katrina was a reminder that federal engineering isn’t, either. CERP is designed to feed south Florida’s growth addiction, not to cure it. The project aims to supply enough water to help the region double its population, which will increase the demands on aquifers and wetlands that prompted the project in the first place.

The author’s conclusion:

But most of all, the Everglades is a moral test. It will be a test of our willingness to restrain ourselves, to share the earth’s resources with the other living things that moveth upon it, to live in harmony with nature. If we pass, we may deserve to keep the planet.

Based on the descriptions of contemporary Republicans, my guess is that the author, a former writer for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, is a Democrat. However, guess who passes the author’s “moral test”? Ron DeSantis! See Ron DeSantis and Big Sugar, for example.

From reading this book, you’d infer that water is the big limit on continued development in Florida. New Yorkers and Californians who want to escape progressivism will have to go elsewhere for want of water. But our neighborhood is irrigated with reclaimed water of some sort (treated sewage?!?). And maybe another 20 million people can be crammed into Florida if they live like Israelis: household water from a desalination plant and no lawns.

If you’re curious about how Florida got to be the way that it is, I recommend reading The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise!