New PBS doc The Swamp explores how Florida land rush reshaped the state
The story of how Americans drained, developed, and eventually preserved the Everglades It was one of the nation?s last unpopulated frontier, a subtropical wilderness that seemed to many inhospitable, and certainly unbuildable.
But in the early decades of the 20th century, Southern Florida became the setting of one of the country?s most storied land rushes and development booms. A new PBS documentary, The Swamp, which premiered this week and is available online, explores the efforts to conquer, colonize, and eventually preserve, the Everglades.
While the engrossing episode of the American Experience series focuses its energy on one specific watery wilderness, it?s also a very American story that touches on themes of development and environmental destruction. Journalist and author Michael Grunwald, whose book The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise helped inform the show, told Curbed that in many ways, Florida has been built around the ?people-importation industry.? In what he calls ?a bewildering dreamscape forged by greed, flimflam, and absurdly grandiose visions that somehow stumbled into heavily populated realities,? the attempted transformation of swampland into promised land is a potent metaphor.
?The story of the repeated efforts to tame the Everglades?and the often deadly results of those attempts is a particularly cautionary tale in these days of increasingly violent natural disasters,? says American Experience executive producer M...
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