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. 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. It would also educate children, provide a unique laboratory for scientists, protect rare flora and fauna from extinction, and “Startle Americans out of the runs which an exclusive association with he human animal produces in the mind of man.On December 11, 2000, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in George W. A secondary goal was half a million annual visitors, buts the botanist David Fairchild explained at a congresisonal hearing, the Everglades was not Yosemite, and its entertainment value would be only part of its appeal.

The primary goa was the preserve the ecosystems’ vast diversity of habitats in their primitive condition- pinelands and marshlands, estuaries and sloughs, dwarf cypress and elk horn coral. “Coe’s expansive boundaries encompassed more than two million acres of the southern Everglades, Florida Bay, Ten Thousand Islands, Big Cypress, and the upper Keys, stretching as far north as fifteen miles above the Tamiami Trail highway and as far east as the barrier reefs in the Atlantic. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise Flagler and other railroad barons, he complained, were “draining the people instead of the swamps” At a time when the richest one percent of Americans owned halfthe nation’s wealth, when forty-two corporate trusts controlled at least 70 percent of their industries, Broward wanted to turn the Everglades into a place where ordinary people could deprive their lot in life through hard work. His crusade for Everglades drainage was not just a fight for man against nature it was a fight for ordinary Floridians angst’s the “seductive and enslaving power of corporate interests” who monopolized state lands without improving them. The conservationist John Giford 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, bu the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”īroward was also a progressive- an anti railroad, anti corporation, anti-Flagler populist. Brossard never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. he supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and envelopment. “Broward had been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assautl on the everglades, but he was considered a staunch conversvationist in his day.

The swamp by michael grunwald