|
There may not be alligators in Nebraska, but Michael Grunwald believes Nebraskans can appreciate plans for habitat restoration and water conservation anyway. After all, the state does sit on the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world's largest.
Grunwald, a former reporter for the Washington Post and currently writing for Time Magazine, spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's east campus last week to promote his book "The Swamp."
 "As you know here, water is what makes life," Grunwald said. And what troubles Grunwald is that half of the southern Florida swampland known as the Everglades is gone, and the other half is an "ecological mess." He is unsure what will happen to the millions of species that inhabit the area.
Sam Tobin, a senior environmental studies major, said, "[Grunwald] had an interesting perspective on human and environmental interactions, especially how population growth is affecting the Everglades."
Tobin attended Grunwald's lecture for his stream ecology class. He thought almost everything Grunwald said about the Everglades can be applied to other failing or stunted ecosystems.
"There is a booming industry for restoration and preservation. From what I hear, it's a multi-million dollar industry," Tobin said.
A wasteland worth saving
Restoration wasn't always in the works for southern Florida's ecosystem. For centuries, people have thought the Everglades to be beautiful but so utterly useless.
A motion even went before the U.S. Congress in 1848 to drain water from the Everglades to make the land livable and economically prosperous. Grunwald said the leader behind this plan, Buckingham Smith, concluded that it would take only $500,000 to rid southern Florida of such useless swampland.
But who could blame them? Grunwald asked.
"This was the age of Manifest Destiny. Americans believed that they were destined to overspread the continent and conquer the wilderness. Exploiting nature wasn't just a right; it was a biblical duty," Grunwald said.
"We all remember that God told us to be fruitful and multiply ... ‘and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowls of the air and over every living thing that moveth over the earth.' And that includes the mosquitoes, right?"
Grunwald said he got interested in the Everglades about the time when former President Bill Clinton signed the Everglades Restoration Act, a 30-year and $7.8 billion project to revive the swamp - a project that hasn't yielded much for results.
After writing a story for the Washington Post about the Army Corps of Engineers' destruction of the wetlands and waterways of the Mississippi River, Grunwald looked to the problems it could cause the Everglades. This was a largely reported issue at the beginning of the millennium.
 After visiting southern Florida, Grunwald discovered that while the government has been attempting restoration of the Everglades for decades, no progress has been made, except considerable amounts of money down the swampy drain. To Grunwald's initial shock, scientists think the restoration efforts are pointless.
One Grunwald story about the Everglades turned into a series of stories, which finally turned into a book. And Grunwald's interest in the swamp hasn't stopped since his book was published. He still wants to see the Everglades restored and preserved.
"If we can't save that place, it's pretty hard to imagine what we can save," Grunwald said.
Letting nature take its course
However, Grunwald still stresses that the swampland never will be restored to its natural condition. That's especially true when housing developments and golf courses keep building so close to America's only subtropical wilderness.
"Southern Florida is where we are going to find out if man can really ever live in harmony with nature," Grunwald said.
And with years of research, plans of restoration and billions of dollars, Grunwald just wants people to see that nature isn't fragile. It can prosper without our help and without our money. Humans just need to back off.
Michael Jess, a professor at UNL's School of Natural Resources and associate director of the UNL Water Center, said he was intrigued by the many parallels the Everglades and Nebraska waterways share.
Currently, the central portion of the Platte River is undergoing restoration efforts, which Jess said he helped promote while working for the state government.
Jess said, "We experience the same issues as far as commercial and human development. A shortcoming is that the Platte is a western river and there are a great deal of diversions [for irrigation and human consumption] to what would otherwise reach the Platte."
He said reducing water consumption is key to restoring the natural habitat of the Platte River Valley, but the hardest part about water conservation in Nebraska is that water is economically important to farmers.
"[It's a] hard thing to do. It's like backing up the train ... backing off will certainly help, but how do you even leave it alone? Water is essential for your livelihood," Jess said.
Regarding the Everglades, though, Grunwald said, "You get out of nature's way, and she comes back."
Click here to see the UNL College of Journalism's report about the Platte River Valley.
Book has its own story
Written by Spencer Powell, NewsNetNebraska
It was supposed to be a two-part series on how the Army Corps of Engineers was destroying rivers. But after a year of reporting, Michael Grunwald decided the Corps was responsible for projects resulting in environmental disasters.
 Grunwald, a reporter who has worked for the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and, currently, Time magazine, recently published his book "The Swamp." The book chronicles the environmental disaster that is the Florida everglades.
The Everglades have had a long, at times bloody and conflict-filled past. Grunwald brings all of these elements, including what he identifies as expensive errors made by the Army Corps of Engineers, into this book.
But the story of "The Swamp" starts a little farther north. Grunwald was reporting on crop insurance in Minnesota when one of his sources told him, "Crop insurance is the worst thing for rivers except for the Army Corps of Engineers."
This accusatory statement struck Grunwald, and in 2000 he wrote a 50,000-word series for the Washington Post on the frequent failures of the Army Corps of Engineers' attempts to protect floodplains and control rivers. The series took Grunwald to the Mississippi River in Missouri and also highlighted Corps projects in New Orleans and the Everglades.
Five years before Hurricane Katrina, Grunwald's articles reported that New Orleans was incapable of protecting itself from an inevitable hurricane.
Grunwald wrote another story a month after the hurricane.
"The work I'm most proud of at the Post was my work with Susan Glasser," Grunwald said. "We wrote [a story] The Slow Drowning of New Orleans, the history of how the city had been betrayed."
That article, published in October 2005, outlines the failed attempts to protect New Orleans starting with a 3-foot high levee built by the French in 1718. 
The story ends with the now haunting quote from former Lousiana Representative W.J. "Billy" Tauzin as he left Congress in 2004: "Please don't let's have a commission where all of us, red-faced, say we saw it coming and didn't do anything. Please don't let that happen."
Grunwald said the reporters were determined to make the story accurate.
"As much as possible, I'd like to just say what happened," Grunwald said. "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts."
This mantra is echoed in "The Swamp." Grunwald spent years researching and reporting on the Everglades. From the Seminole wars to the Army Corps of Engineers who are still spending billions of dollars on what he calls questionable projects, the hardest part of book was knowing when to stop writing, Grunwald said.
"You could go on forever. Each thing could be a book," Grunwald said. "I want to justify every sentence in the book."
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
