Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, writer and environmentalist known for her staunch defense of the Florida Everglades against draining and development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, Douglas became a freelance writer, producing over a hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp; its impact has been compared to that of the influential 1962 book Silent Spring. Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, which she used to advance her causes.

Even as a young woman Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of many issues that included women's suffrage and civil rights. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 79 years old. For the remaining 29 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of the nature of South Florida. Her tireless efforts earned her several variations of the nickname "Grande Dame of the Everglades" as well as the hostility of agricultural and business interests looking to benefit from land development in Florida. Numerous awards were given to her, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she was inducted into several halls of fame.

Douglas lived until age 108, working until nearly the end of her life for Everglades restoration. Upon her death, an obituary in The Independent in London stated, "In the history of the American environmental movement, there have been few more remarkable figures than Marjory Stoneman Douglas."

The Everglades: River of Grass

Early in the 1940s she was approached by a publisher to contribute to the Rivers of America Series by writing about the Miami River. Unimpressed with it, she called the Miami River about "an inch long", but in researching it became more interested in the Everglades and persuaded the publisher instead to allow her to write about them. Her book The Everglades: River of Grass was published in 1947 after five years of research and sold out of its first printing a month after being released. The first line of the book, "There are no other Everglades in the world", has been called the "most famous passage ever written about the Everglades", and the statement welcomes visitors to the Everglades National Park website.  Douglas characterized the Everglades as an ecosystem of rivers worthy of protecting, and outlined its imminent disappearance in the last chapter titled "The Eleventh Hour":

Cattlemen's grass fires roared uncontrolled. Cane-field fires spread crackling and hissing in the saw grass in vast waves and pillars and billowing mountains of heavy, cream-colored, purple-shadowed smoke. Training planes flying over the Glades dropped bombs or cigarette butts, and the fires exploded in the hearts of the drying hammocks and raced on before every wind leaving only blackness ... There was no water in the canals with which to fight [the fires] ... The sweet water the rock had held was gone or had shrunk far down into its strange holes and cleavages.

It has gone through numerous editions, selling 500,000 copies since its original publication. It galvanized people to protect the Everglades and is compared to Rachel Carson's 1962 exposé of the harmful effects of DDT, Silent Spring, as both books are "groundbreaking calls to action that made citizens and politicians take notice". Its impact is still relevant as it is claimed to be a major reason Florida receives so many tourists, and "remains the definitive reference on the plight of the Florida Everglades". The Christian Science Monitor wrote of it in 1997, "Today her book is not only a classic of environmental literature, it also reads like a blueprint for what conservationists are hailing as the most extensive environmental restoration project ever undertaken anywhere in the world". The downside to the book's impact, according to one writer addressing restoration of the Everglades, is that her metaphor is so prevailingly dominant that it is inaccurate in describing the complex web of ecosystems within the Everglades: "River of Grass" describes one. David McCally wrote that despite Douglas' "appreciation of the complexity of the environmental system" she described, popular conception of the Everglades shared by people who have not read the book overshadows her detailed explanations.

Activism

In 1916 she traveled with Mary Baird Bryan, William Jennings Bryan's wife, and two other women to Tallahassee to speak in support of women's right to vote, an experience about which she wrote: "All four of us spoke to a joint committee wearing our best hats. Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all." Douglas was able to vote for the first time after she returned from Europe in 1920.

Using her influence at The Miami Herald, Douglas wrote columns about poverty: "You can have the most beautiful city in the world as appearance goes, the streets may be clean and shining, the avenues broad and tree lined, the public buildings dignified, adequate and well kept ... but if you have a weak or inadequate health department, or a public opinion lax on the subject, all the splendors of your city will have not value." In 1948 Douglas served on the Coconut Grove Slum Clearance Committee, with a friend of hers named Elizabeth Virrick. Virrick was horrified to learn that there was no running water or sewers connected to a part of the Coconut Grove that was called "Colored Town". They helped pass a law requiring all homes in Miami to have toilets and bathtubs. In the two years it took them to get the referendum passed, they worked to set up a loan operation for the black residents of Coconut Grove, who borrowed the money interest-free to pay for the plumbing work. Douglas noted that all of the money loaned was repaid.

Everglades work

Douglas began her interest in the Everglades in the 1920s when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee, a group led by Ernest F. Coe and dedicated to the idea of making a national park in the Everglades. By the 1960s, the Everglades were in imminent danger of disappearing forever due to gross mismanagement in the name of progress, land development, and agricultural development. Encouraged to get involved by the leaders of environmental groups, in 1969 (at the age of 79) Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades to protest the construction of a jetport in the Big Cypress portion of the Everglades. She justified her involvement saying, "It is a woman's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping." She toured the state giving "hundreds of ringing denunciations" of the airport project, and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 within three years. She ran the public information operation full time from her home and encountered hostility from the jetport's developers and backers, who called her a "damn butterfly chaser". President Richard Nixon, however, scrapped funding for the project due to the efforts of many Everglades watchdog groups.

Douglas criticized two entities she considered were doing the most damage to the Everglades. A coalition of sugarcane growers, named Big Sugar, she accused of polluting Lake Okeechobee by pumping water tainted with chemicals, human waste, and garbage back into the lake, which served as the fresh water source for the Miami metropolitan area. She compared Florida sugarcane agriculture to sugarcane grown in the West Indies, that she claimed was more environmentally sound, had a longer harvest cycle less harmful to soil nutrients, and was less expensive for consumers due to the higher sugar content. She was labeled as "the anti-Christ" by sugarcane growers for the attention she brought them.

Along with Big Sugar, Douglas spoke about the damage the Army Corps of Engineers was doing to the Everglades by diverting the natural flow of water. The Corps was responsible for constructing more than 1,400 miles (2,300 km) of canals to divert water away from the Everglades after 1947. When the Central & South Florida Project (C&SF), run by former members of the Corps of Engineers, was proposed to assist the Everglades, Douglas initially gave it her approval, as it promised to deliver much-needed water to the shrinking Everglades. But in application, the project instead diverted more water away from the Everglades, changed water schedules to meet sugarcane farmers' irrigation needs, and flat-out refused to release water to Everglades National Park, until much of the land was unrecognizable.  "What a liar I turned out to be!" remarked Douglas, then suggested the motivation behind all the digging and diversion in saying, "Their mommies obviously never let them play with mud pies, so now they take it out on us by playing with cement". Douglas was giving a speech addressing the harmful practices of the Army Corps of Engineers when the colonel in attendance dropped his pen on the floor. As he was stooping to pick it up, Douglas stopped her speech and said to him, "Colonel! You can crawl under that table and hide, but you can't get away from me!"

In 1973, Douglas attended a meeting addressing conservation of the Everglades in Everglades City, and was observed by John Rothchild:

Mrs. Douglas was half the size of her fellow speakers and she wore huge dark glasses, which along with the huge floppy hat made her look like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Igor Stravinsky. When she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and more or less came to order. She reminded us all of our responsibility to nature and I don't remember what else. Her voice had the sobering effect of a one-room schoolmarm's. The tone itself seemed to tame the rowdiest of the local stone crabbers, plus the developers, and the lawyers on both sides. I wonder if it didn't also intimidate the mosquitoes ... The request for a Corps of Engineers permit was eventually turned down. This was no surprise to those of us who'd heard her speak.

Douglas was not well-received by some audiences. She opposed the drainage of a suburb in Dade County named East Everglades. After the county approved building permits in the Everglades, the land flooded as it had for centuries. When homeowners demanded the Army Corps of Engineers drain their neighborhoods, she was the only opposing voice. At the hearing in 1983, she was booed by the audience of residents. "Can't you boo any louder than that?" she chided, eventually making them laugh. "They're all good souls—they just shouldn't be out there", she wrote. Dade County commissioners eventually decided not to drain.

Florida Governor Lawton Chiles explained her impact, saying, "Marjory was the first voice to really wake a lot of us up to what we were doing to our quality of life. She was not just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren."

Other causes

Douglas also served as a charter member of the first American Civil Liberties Union chapter organized in the South in the 1950s. She lent her support to the Equal Rights Amendment, speaking to the legislature in Tallahassee urging them to ratify the amendment. In the 1980s Douglas lent her support to the Florida Rural Legal Services, a group that worked to protect migrant farm workers who were centered around Belle Glade, and who were primarily employed by the sugarcane industry. She wrote to Governor Bob Graham in 1985 to encourage him to assess the conditions the migrant workers endured. The same year, Douglas approached the Dade County School Board and insisted that the Biscayne Nature Center, which had been housed in hot dog stands, needed a building of its own. The center received a portable building until 1991 when the Florida Department of Education endowed $1.8 million for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center in Crandon Park.