Chris Wilhelm - From Swamp to Wetland: The Creation of Everglades National Park

From Swamp to Wetland

SERIES EDITORS

James C. Giesen, Mississippi State University

Erin Stewart Mauldin, University of South Florida

ADVISORY BOARD

Judith Carney, University of CaliforniaLos Angeles

S. Max Edelson, University of Virginia

Robbie Ethridge, University of Mississippi

Ari Kelman, University of CaliforniaDavis

Shepard Krech III, Brown University

Megan Kate Nelson, www.historista.com

Tim Silver, Appalachian State University

Mart Stewart, Western Washington University

Paul S. Sutter, founding editor, University of Colorado Boulder

From Swamp to Wetland

THE CREATION OF EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK

Chris Wilhelm

The University of Georgia Press

Athens

2022 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilhelm, Chris, 1978 author.

Title: From swamp to wetland : the creation of Everglades National Park / Chris Wilhelm.

Other titles: Creation of Everglades National Park | Environmental history and the American South.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2022] | Series: Environmental history and the American South | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021059117 | ISBN 9780820362380 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820362397 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820362403 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: National parks and reservesFloridaHistory20th century. | EnvironmentalismFloridaHistory20th century. | TourismFloridaHistory20th century. | Real estate developmentFloridaHistory20th century. | Everglades National Park (Fla.)History20th century. | Everglades (Fla.)History20th century. | Everglades (Fla.)Environmental conditions.

Classification: LCC F317.E9 W48 2022 | DDC 975.9/39dc23/eng/20211214

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059117

For Mom and Dad

CONTENTS

, by Erin Stewart Mauldin and James C. Giesen

A decade before the creation of Everglades National Park in 1947, the U.S. Department of the Interior produced a short film on the area of South Florida earmarked for preservation. The production does little to promote the Everglades as a destination for tourists. The camera pans across cabbage palms drooping over slivers of sand and impenetrable banks of mangroves. Water stretches toward a horizon marred by black clouds; long-necked waterfowl pick through stagnant pools and marshy grass. Seven minutes of soundless, flickering black-and-white footage captures no soaring vista, no Edenic oasisnothing that could be described as awe inspiring or even charming. Twenty years later, a slickly produced pamphlet advertising the south Florida experience ran into a similar problem. Despite leaning heavily on stereotypes of Florida as an exotic paradise, the booklet struggled to characterize the appeal of Everglades National Park for tourists. There is no single point of dramatic focus in the Everglades National Park, the writer admits, no bold prospect suitable for a postcard. No other national park demands more perception and patience of the visitor, for the beauty of the Everglades is not immediately obvious. It is a mysterious and ageless landscape that requires an appreciation of natures subtleties.

As federal agencies attempts at boosterism in the 1930s and 1950s demonstrate, the Everglades National Park fits poorly alongside the purple mountains majesty of Yosemite and Yellowstone. It was a place carved from neither water nor land but somewhere in between, a place devoid of obvious economic or aesthetic value. Why protect it? From Swamp to Wetland argues that changing views of what nature meant in the twentieth century and the growing influence of ecology on the postProgressive Era National Park Service motivated the creation of Everglades National Park. Advocates made it clear that preserving the Everglades from development safeguarded unique flora and fauna and the ecosystems that supported them. At the same time, supporters hoped that the space, its wildlife, and its landscapewhether or not it was suitable for a postcardcould be a potential source of profit through tourism. Like the Everglades themselves, the parks origin is a story full of contradictions and, as Chris Wilhelm argues, a story essential to understanding the history of nature in the American imagination.

Placing the Everglades at the center of debates over the value of wilderness, nature protection, and ecology in the twentieth century challenges environmental historians habit of looking to the West, rather than the South, for those developments. Although most places in the United States could never claim a truly wilderness past, the idea of the wild western frontier has long permeated much of the environmental history of conservation and preservation. In the South, one can rarely take the humans out of nature, thanks to the regions long connection to large-scale agriculture and millennia of human settlement. It takes a certain audacity to imagine a national park in such a place. Thus, southern environmental history lacks the dynamic scholarship on national parks that the American West possesses. From Swamp to Wetland, then, not only reorients the scholarly conversation about nature protection toward the South and away from the West but also gives much-needed attention to national parks in a region that cannot hide the continuous presence of humans.

From Swamp to Wetland resurrects the stories and actions of the men and women who both spearheaded and opposed the parks creation, introducing Floridian counterparts to the Muirs and Pinchots of other conservation narratives. Although once the site of vibrant indigenous communities, the Everglades encountered by Europeans was a landscape drained of its people. It was a derelict swamp, an unwanted expanse of land deemed suitable only for the Seminole refugees fleeing American expansionism in the nineteenth century. Later Floridians hoped to drain the Everglades of water, dreaming of an agricultural paradise, and when that failed, to use oil drilling as a shortcut to prosperity in Floridas wild interior. Only in the early twentieth century, thanks to the efforts of the devoted Yankee transplant Ernest Coe, did protectingrather than eradicatingthe Everglades become a viable outcome. Creating a national park took decades, however, and faced both local and federal hostility. Landowners, politicians, and even some Park Service employees pushed back against an Everglades National Park, and Wilhelm argues that their opposition foreshadowed modern conservatisms aversion to environmental regulation.

This book does not, however, have a happy ending. Although advocates succeeded in creating a national park in the Everglades by drawing attention to its wildlife and complex hydraulic systems, only a fraction of the Everglades is protected from agriculture and other development. Even within park boundaries, wildlife has declined precipitously; past and present drainage initiativesand other water conservation effortsfurther threaten the areas ecosystems. As Wilhelm shows, the very ecological dependencies that the Park Service sought to preserve has made the area more vulnerable to change, for Everglades ecosystems cannot be preserved as the landscape outside its boundaries diminishes. With this book as our guide, we are in a better place to understand whether Everglades National Park continues to protect a wilderness or creates a new one.