Everglades documentary explores wondrous place

Because understanding the Everglades is crucial to living in Florida, “The Swamp” is indispensable viewing.

The two-hour “American Experience” documentary, debuting at 9 p.m. Tuesday on PBS, provides a history lesson and a celebration of the unique wilderness.

“A lot of Florida ecology looks like no other state,” said Leslie Poole, a Rollins College professor who appears in the film. “It’s a subtle environment. It’s not like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. The Everglades is filled with mosquitoes and vermin. You have to be taught to appreciate the Florida environment.”

Randall MacLowry, producer, director and writer of “The Swamp,” calls the Everglades “a wondrous and quite beautiful place.”

The film is based in part on Michael Grunwald’s 2006 book “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise.” The film’s title, however, is ironic.

“We’re trying throughout the film to actually debunk the idea the Everglades is a swamp. That was traditionally and historically how it was seen,” MacLowry said.

Through maps, the film explains the ecosystem. Fed by rainfall, the waters start their journey to the Everglades just south of Orlando. Yet in the late 1800s and early 20th century, wetlands across the country were seen as a menace to be drained, and the film explains how Philadelphia industrialist Hamilton Disston was the first to try to drain the Everglades.

In 1881, Disston bought four million acres from the state for $1 million. “I wanted a plaything,” he said. He died a failed businessman in 1896 at age 51.

Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who took office in 1905, thought draining the Everglades would be simple. It wasn’t, but a misleading federal report helped spur land sales.

In 1911, many buyers arrived in Florida to learn their land was still under water and that they had been swindled. “I have never bought land by the gallon,” one buyer said.

“The important thing about the story, to a degree, is it is a bit of a cautionary tale,” MacLowry said. “There’s always this desire to improve things. That was sort of the mantra that by developing and draining the Everglades that it would be improving things.”

The film examines the impact of the Tamiami Trail, the 1920s boom, the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928, the farming industry and the battles over the state’s drainage project. The Everglades also has inspired tenacious activism. The Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs fought to save Paradise Key, 45 miles south of Miami, and in 1916, Royal Palm State Park opened. It was the nucleus of Everglades National Park.

“It took people who recognized the value of the Everglades and who worked tirelessly, sometimes obsessively, to protect a resource a lot of people didn’t appreciate,” said Poole, author of “Saving Florida: Women’s Fight for the Environment in the 20th Century.” “The women fighting to create the first state park couldn’t vote but rallied grass-roots efforts to create power. They were not going to be deterred. They teach us a lot of lessons. If you want to get something done, apply constant pressure on decision makers to make a good decision.”

Marjory Stoneman Douglas changed attitudes through her lyrical writing and exhaustive research in “The Everglades: River of Grass,” published in 1947. That same year, Everglades National Park was established. The film ends with stirring calls to preserve the Everglades.

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