DURHAM, N.C. – Michael Grunwald, award-winning environmental reporter at the Washington Post, will read from his critically acclaimed 2006 book, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, on Sept. 28 at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at 91.

listen to the reading and q&a session >

Grunwald’s reading will take place at 4:50 p.m. at Love Auditorium in the Levine Science Research Center (LSRC) on Duke’s West Campus.  The event is free and open to the public. 

Following his reading, Grunwald will take part in a question-and-answer session on wetlands issues with Curtis J. Richardson, director of the 91 Wetland Center and professor of resource ecology at the Nicholas School. 

A reception will follow in the LSRC’s Hall of Science adjacent to Love Auditorium.  Copies of The Swamp will be available for purchase.

To research the book, Grunwald spent a year slogging through the Everglades and wading into south Florida’s often swampy political and natural history. His goal was to understand and document the unprecedented $8 billion effort to restore the dying 3 million-acre ecosystem, which once blanketed the peninsula south of Lake Okeechobee. What he found was an ancient tale of man vs. nature that predates the arrival of Europeans. Today, half the Everglades is gone, as a result of a massive mid-20th-century flood-control and drainage project by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a booming agricultural economy, which, together with other changes, have brought seven million residents to the once sparsely populated region.  As Florida’s restoration project continues – and as other states struggle with their own plans to restore wetlands lost to agriculture or human development – Grunwald's book “offers plenty of cautionary lessons about government efforts to fool with Mother Nature,” says U.S. News & World Report.

Among other praise, The Swamp was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.  It has garnered glowing reviews by critics nationwide for its meticulous research and gripping narrative style.  

Richardson is an award-winning researcher who has studied and published extensively on wetland restoration and ecology in the Everglades, southern Louisiana, the marshes of southern Iraq, and other environmental hotspots worldwide. 

The Nicholas School’s Office of the Dean is sponsoring the event.