Grunwald, Michael 1970-

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Grunwald, Michael 1970-

PERSONAL:

Born 1970; married Cristina Dominguez (an attorney). Education: Harvard College, A.B., 1992.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Washington, DC. Office— Washington Post, 1150 15 St. N.W., Washington, DC 20071. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Boston Globe, Boston, MA, reporter, c. 1992-98; Washington Post, Washington, DC, Justice Department and U.S. Congress reporter, beginning 1998, enterprise reporter, 2000—, New York City bureau chief, New York, NY.

AWARDS, HONORS:

David Brower Award, Sierra Club, 2000, for reporting on the Army Corps of Engineers; Society of Environmental Journalists award, 2002, for in-depth reporting on the Everglades; George Polk Award, for national reporting; Worth Bingham Award, for investigative reporting.

WRITINGS:

The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (history), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2006.

Also contributor to New Republic and Slate.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist Michael Grunwald's first book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, tells the story of the eight-billion-dollar effort to save the nation's greatest wetlands. Three million acres of swamp, explained Bret Schulte in U.S. News & World Report, once covered the entire peninsula of Florida south of Lake Okeechobee. "Today," Schulte wrote, "half the Everglades is gone, thanks to a massive mid-20th-century flood-control and drainage project by the Army Corps of Engineers and a booming agricultural economy, which together with other changes brought 7 million residents to south Florida."

Grunwald traces the history of mankind's up-and-down relationship with the Everglades in The Swamp. The journalist "proves to be a surprisingly deft historian," declared Larry Lebowitz in the Miami Herald, "interweaving the natural history of the last American frontier through the massive cast of characters who struggled to conquer, drain, farm and develop the once impenetrable Everglades." Attempts to drain the great marshes backfired, causing heavy environmental damage. "The Corps' concrete-lined canals so disrupted the natural flow of sediment that former fisherman's paradises such as the St. Lucie River became trenches of mud," stated New Republic contributor Gregg Easterbrook. "When sugar plantations spread across much of the reclaimed Everglades land, chemical runoff, especially farm nutrients, began to kill downstream fish."

The most recent turnaround in the fate of the Everglades came in 2000, when local and national officials pledged a huge sum—the largest ever committed to a conservation project—to restore the land to its natural state. "There is a saying among environmentalists that the Everglades is a test and if we pass, we get to keep the planet," Grunwald told Will Rothschild in the Sarasota Herald Tribune. "I started to believe it (during the research). I don't come at this from an environmental background. But I really started to see the Everglades as a test case of whether man can live in harmony with nature."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Audubon, March-April, 2006, Jesse Greenspan, review of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, p. 100.

Booklist, February 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of The Swamp, p. 17.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2006, review of The Swamp, p. 170.

Miami Herald (Miami, FL), March 8, 2006, Larry Lebowitz, "The Swamp: Reporter Explores the Plight of the Everglades from the Pioneer Days to the Present."

New Republic, November 15, 2004, Michael Grunwald, "Swamp Things," p. 33; March 13, 2006, Gregg Easterbrook, "Marshes and Moguls," p. 32.

Publishers Weekly, December 19, 2005, review of The Swamp, p. 51.

Sarasota Herald Tribune (Sarasota, FL), March 12, 2006, Will Rothschild, "River Politics Of; Issues of the Environment and Development Flow through The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise," p. G4.

U.S. News & World Report, March 13, 2006, Bret Schulte, "Trouble in the Swamplands," p. 26.