It wasn’t warm and fuzzy last night when Michael Grunwald spoke at the Festival of the Arts Author series. He was not the elder statesmanlike Richard Ford, or the cozy and jocular Doris Kearns Goodwin, Nope, he was young, direct and completely on point: The Everglades is in peril, and with it, so are we.
Period.
Much in the same way he crafted his impressive tour de force, The Swamp, he outlined in historic detail what has happened to the Everglades, what can be done, and what the status report is—and it ain’t real good, folks. The water is slowly getting more pure (but not pure enough) and there’s no place to store it. Lake Okeechobee flushes are destroying the estuaries, no one has been willing to take on Big Sugar (although he credits the industry with enormous strides in clean water practices) or spend the money to buy enough land to reverse what the Army Corps of Engineers did to Florida.
It is a highly complex issue, and one that Grunwald covered masterfully in The Swamp, arguably the best book about Florida, in my opinion, and one which should be required reading for anyone who steps foot in the state—and tattooed on the eyelids of our elected officials.
Grunwald is no impassioned tree hugger; he doesn’t even seem to much like the Everglades (“It’s no Yosemite,” he says) But he recognizes it as essential to Florida’s future, through water retention as well as sea level rise. Plus there’s no other place like it. On earth.
Our ability to reverse its collapse is not only essential to saving Florida, but a moral imperative as well. And I quote him:
“The Everglades restoration is now the model for restoring the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes and the Louisiana coastal wetlands but also the Okavango Delta in Africa and the Garden of Eden marshes that Suddam Hussein destroyed in Iraq. There really is a sense that if Broward county and Miami-Dade can’t figure out how to save this place—how to share water so there some for the people and some for the otters—then it’s kind of hard to figure out how Israel and Syria are going to be able to do it.”
The Author series at the Festival has become increasingly more compelling—with Richard Ford, Grunwald and Thomas Friedman among the speakers this year. I only wish everyone could have heard Grunwald’s talk. It might not have been a feel-good message, but it is one we all need to hear—again and again.
Don’t miss Boca magazine’s full interview with Michael Grunwald in our May-June issue.
