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1 " New York City is finished," he said. " They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again." " What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. " We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway." " Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one." Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. " We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?" " We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said. " How's that?" " We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . . "
2 " What a beautiful country this must have been once, when you could hop in a coupe and buy a bag of burgers and drive, drive, drive, stopping to swim in a river or sleep in a grove of trees without worrying about intaking mutagens or having the militia arrest you and send you to the Everglades for eternity. "
― George Saunders
3 " If the devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it. "
― James Carlos Blake , Red Grass River: A Legend
4 " The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants, 350 birds, and 52 varieties of porcelain-smooth, candy-striped tree snails. It had bottlenose dolphins, marsh rabbits, ghost orchids, moray eels, bald eagles, and countless other species that didn't seem to belong on the same continent, much less in the same ecosystem. "
― , The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
5 " But as the Everglades continued to wither, a few of their colleagues began to wonder if conservation really should mean development more than preservation. These heretics did not believe that God had created man in order to 'improve' or 'redeem' nature; they found God's grace in nature itself. "
― Michael Grunwald
