When one thinks of Florida, the Sunshine State, many images come to mind. First there is always the happiest place on Earth, Disney World; South Beach in the great city of Miami, made famous by shows like Miami Vice and the movie Scarface; Daytona Beach’s own Bike Week; Spring break in Ft. Lauderdale; the Florida Keys and all the snorkeling, dolphin swimming and sport fishing one could wish for, made famous by those infamous Beach Boys; Gasparilla in Tampa for all of you Pirates; the redneck Riviera across Florida’s panhandle where once can find a Bush family member that can in fact pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly.

With all of the ballyhoo and fun-in-the-sun advertised about this celebrated state, one rarely remembers that from about Orlando on southward, most of Florida used to be a swamp – a river of grass as it were. They called it the Everglades and it is one of a kind. The Everglades has been home to innumerable species of plants and animals. It was once the uncontested home of the Seminole Indian tribe. It was once and it remains today one of America’s greatest attempts to tame and control Mother Nature.

Now you might not find a book about the transformation of swampland to usable productive land and back to swampland very interesting but then you’d be missing out on one of America’s longest lasting near mythical saga’s. Like the Lewis and Clark expedition or the California gold rush, the taming of Florida’s Everglades is its own fantastic story with heroes, villains, twists and turns, tragedies and triumphs and a rare moment when Democrats and Republicans got together to do some actual good for our country.

That in essence is why Washington Post reporter Michael Grunwald chose to write “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise.” We are currently living in an age where our greatest inventions and quality of life resources are quickly becoming our undoing. What was once a testament to man’s ingenuity has become the harbinger of doom for the continuation of our society as we know it, such as the energy industry or the advent of nuclear technology. Grunwald catalogs the history of how we transformed the Everglades and why it is part of the general theme of man having to rehabilitate Mother Nature before she incinerates, drowns or blows us all back to the Stone Age.

Grunwald splits the book into three distinct sections. The first section describes the geological and ecological history of the Everglades. In painstaking detail he shows how and why there is no place like the Everglades anywhere else on Earth. For one, he shows that when the Pangaea split into 7 separate continents, North America took a piece of West Africa with it. That parcel of land came to be known as Florida, which would explain the temperate weather and lush greenery, not to mention the strange species of animals populating 2 thirds of our beloved peninsula.

Part one also deals with how the Native Americans came to occupy the land and live off it without having to become an agrarian society. Grunwald includes how the Seminoles, whom were not the original inhabitants of South Florida, came to be the dominant Natives, only to be displaced by European explorers and settlers. Grunwald points out that in our effort to exterminate the natives of the Everglades, we found ourselves bogged down in a quagmire of guerilla war with an enemy that was able to weaponize their home against us. As the author points out, this would be an allusion to conflicts in the future with an enemy in South East Asia that was equally elusive and cunning.

However, eventually we do come to claim the swamp for our own and like every good American, the early settlers realized they were sitting on a potential agricultural gold mine that was just waiting to be exploited. These efforts to capitalize on the land they had just fought so hard for make up the lions share of the book and are neatly cataloged in Part two of “The Swamp.”

Grunwald gives the reader intimate details of how early Floridians attempted to drain the Everglades so that it could be used for settlement and agriculture. Here one who is inclined to vote on the side of purism and environmentalism can have a great laugh at the many failures to change the dynamic of an entire eco-system. Many will try and many more will fail to drain the Everglades leaving an army of investors soaked to the bone and as miserable as anyone who lived through the stock market crash and Great Depression of the 1930’s.

“The Swamp” is also about the Army Corps of Engineers, the heroes of Everglades’s drainage. It was this group of men that finally claimed the Everglades for mass consumption and thus modern Florida was born. Cities like Miami, Naples, Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Springs seemed to appear overnight with more settlers than it could hold with more on the way to claim their piece of the American dream. The more settlers that came to South Florida, the more the Everglades needed to be drained and converted. It was this mass influx of investment that brought in the infamous BIG SUGAR. Much like its evil sister, BIG OIL, BIG SUGAR would come to singularly own Florida politics and development. It would foment even more drainage and change or at the very least maintaining the status quo in the face of the Everglades itself shouting “No Mas! No Mas!” while killing several thousand Floridians in the process. You have to have some chutzpa to challenge hurricanes and think you can win, but that is what makes the BIG companies who they are, impudence.

The last section of the book is societies mea culpa. When scientists realized that BIG SUGAR was ostensibly spoiling the ecosystem we need to maintain the states environmental integrity, many people on both sides of the political aisle came together to try and rehabilitate what is left of the Everglades.

I loved “The Swamp.” It’s a great resource for understanding the history of Florida’s development while being a clarion call for good people to come arms and understand that you cannot abuse nature with impunity. Florida is a textbook case of society trying to manipulate their environment rather than trying to live in conjunction with it. I would highly recommend this book for fans of Jared Diamond or any number of authors who can appreciate promoting business but with a green agenda. “The Swamp,” is the perfect companion guide for anyone wanting to make a case for overdevelopment while learning our infinitely interesting history.