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In Honor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Guardian of the Everglades

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In Honor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Guardian of the Everglades I I lr4sTIluTEFOn SCientifiC IN f0t7MAT10N@ I 3501 MARKET ST, PHILADELPHIA, PA 191Cd In Honor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, I Guardian of the Everglades [ Number 33 Auizust 14, 1989 This essay considers the life and work of Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890- ), an authority on the Florida Everglades whose writings and advocacy have made her one of the most celebrated defenders of that subtropicalregion, Also discussedis a bronze sratue of a Ftorida panther by Philadelphia scufptor Eric Berg, which ISI@ has commissioned for installation in the Everglades NationaI Park. Activism on behalf of the environment, tually, we visited the Everglades National at least on a broad scale, seems a relatively Park together, where I purchased her books. recent phenomenon. The late- 1960s’ ‘‘ecol- I then asked Len to arrange a meeting with ogy” movement, which probably reached his old tilend. The three of us met at her its height with the observance of Earth Day home in Coconut Grove last summer. in 1970, gave rise to a new popular con- When I spoke with this remarkable wom- sciousness of environmental issues. While an, she shared many insights into her own this consciousness may have waned at times life, the problems facing the Everglades and in succeeding years, there is no doubt that surrounding areas, education, politics, and in the late 1980s, with headlines being made a host of other topics. In tits essay, in honor by oil spills, toxic waste, polluted beaches, of Douglas, I’d like to describe briefly some- disappearing rain forests, and the green- thing of her life and work, present a few ex- house effect, concern for the environment cerpts from our conversation, and discuss has returned to the forefront as an intern- one small way in which ISI@ is helping to ational priority. pay tribute to the Everglades and those who For a few individuals, however, the con- have worked to save it. servation of nature has been a deeply felt, lifelong commitment, quite independent of The “Voice of the River” social trends or politicaf appeal. Last year I had the pleasure of meeting a woman who Douglas began her life far away from the has made conservation her lifework. She has subtropical region with which she has be- become celebrated for waging—almost sin- come so closely associated. She was born gle-handedly at times-a battle for a unique, in 1890 in Mimeapolis, Mimesota, and fragile, and irreplaceable ecosystem in the grew up near Boston, Massachusetts. In southeastern US. That woman is Marjory 1912, having majored in English, she was Stoneman Douglas, and the region that she graduated from Wellesley College, Massa- has dedicated much of her life to preserv- chusetts. Three years later, fleeing an un- ing is the Florida Everglades. happy marriage, she traveled to Florida to I had heard about Marjory Douglas for join her father, Frank Bryant Stoneman, several years from my friend Len Green- founder and editor of the Miami Herald tield, former chairman of the Biology De- (Marjory’s parents had separated when she partment at the University of Miami. Even- was six). She became a reporter and cohsm- 223 nist, covering everything from society to the had little formrd scientific training-although plight of migrant workers. The pressures of a Wellesley course in what she refers to as constant newspaper deadlines took their toll “environmental geography” exerted a sig- on her health, however, and in 1925 she nificant influence on her thinking. “I ‘m just turned her talents to full-time fiction and a writer, ” she observed last summer dur- magazine writing. (Readers interested in a ing our talk. “I’m a writer first, Writing im- more complete account of Douglas’s life are plies research in a great many cases. If you directed to her autobiography, written to- want to write about something you have to gether with John Rothcbild, entitled Marjory know it thoroughly. And I was so fortunate, Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River, pub- you see, in that the Everglades had not been lished in 1987.1) written about. Nobody had done the work In 1943 the editors of a book series on before. There were a couple of early pamp- American rivers approached Douglas to do hlets that were very inadequate, and that a book on the Miami River. Instead, she was all. So I did a lot of research nobody convinced them to let her write about the else had. I had to run around and talk to peo- Everglades. After nearly five years of re- ple who worked in it. I discovered the Ever- search and writing, 77re Everglades: River glades, you might say.”3 of Grass was published in 1947.2 Still in Unfortunately, in Florida’s boom days at print some 40 years later, the book is a rich the turn of the century, others had dis- work, describing centuries of natural and hu- covered the Everglades. The latter sections man history in a style that is as poetic as it of l%e Evergkdes: River of Grass describe is replete with factual detail. Douglas’s the begimings of the region’s slow demise masterstroke was the book’s three-word sub- at the hands of human ambition and heed- title, which cast the Everglades in a Iight that lessness. Under the leadership of developer few had chosen to see: not simply an inert Hamilton Disston and, later, Florida gov- swamp or marshland, but a moving, thriv- ernor Napolean Bonaparte Broward and ing ecosystem—a river, As she writes: numerous successors, programs were begun to dredge, drain, rechamel, and otherwise h stretches as it has always stretched, in coerce the wetlands into the capacity for one thick enormous curving river of grass, to the very end. This is the Everglades. more “profitable” uses. Concluding her It reaches one hundred miles from Lake book with a depressing chronicle of the ad- Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico, fifty, vent of developers, farmers, and cattlemen sixty, even seventy miles wide. No one and the subsequent alteration and shrinkage has ever fought his way along its full of the Everglades, Douglas ends on a dim- length. Few have ever crossed the north- ern wilderness of nothing but grass. Down ly hopeful note, “Perhaps even in this last the atmost invisible slope the water moves, hour, ” she writes, “in a new relation of use- The grass stands. Where the grass and the fulness and beauty, the vast, subtle, and water are there is the heart, the current, unique region of the Everglades may not be the meaning of the Everglades, The grass and the water together make utterly lost.’ ‘z (p. 299) the river as simple as it is unique. There Even as Douglas was writing those words is no other river like it, Yet withhr that in 1947, however, the damage was worsen- simplicity, enclosed within the river and ing, as it would continue to worsen for the bordering and intruding on it from each next few decades. The concerns of devel- side, there is subtlety and diversity, a crowd of changing forms, of thrusting opment, population, and commerce pre- teeming life. And aft that becomes the vailed, and the US Army Corps of Engin&rs region of the Everglades. 2 (p. 5) embarked on a billion-dollar program of “flood control” that saw the constmction The achievement of the book is all the of 1,400 miles of canrds, levees, floodgates, more impressive considering that Douglas and pumps for the draining and development 224 of the wetlands. As writer Sue Douglas (no The Kissimmee Bosin/Lake Okeechobee/ relation) notes in Oceans, environmentalists Everglades System point to this program as the greatest travesty Lake Kissimmee humankind ever worked against natured ‘Q The most notorious part of the Army proj- ect, by all accounts, was the straightening of the Kissimmee River in the early 1960s. The Kissimmee, which had meandered 100 miles over a wide floodplain, carried water slowly southward to Lake Okeechobee, the main body of water in the Everglades. Along the route, the marsh grass served as a mtural filter, scrubbing pollutants from water that flowed down from Orlando and surrounding areas. The Corps ‘ “improvement” project consisted of diverting the river into a straight, 50-mile, 150- to 300-foot-wide canal that now speeds polluted water into the lake in just two days.d The marshlands, once home to a rich variety of wildlife, dried up. The cumulative effect, as writer Steven Yates detailed in Audubon magazine, has been to upset the fragile aquatic balance not ? only in the Everglades proper, but in the en- tire ecosystem of southern Florida, the sys- tem known as Kissimmee Basin&ake Okee- Em ‘i’simmeeRiverm FakahakheeStmnd~ chobee/Everglades, or KLOE for short. s (See map at right.) ~ %%xvation.mms ‘E21 R%l%ark : Today, the original Everglades region is m %x%r%ts E21 ‘as’E’e@ad* j long gone—half of it drained for farmland, most of the rest kept unnaturally flooded for water storage. s Myriad problems—water in National Wildlife magazine, called for ac- levels, pollution, soil erosion, endangered quisition by the state of new land, more ef- wildliie, encroaching development—still im- fective management of the deer population peril the Everglades. Complex lines of con- and other wildlife, the restoration of the flict and alliance have been drawn between water flow across the Everglades, the pro- legislators, wientists, developers, engineers, tection of the endangered Florida panther bureaucrats, conservationists, and others— ~more on that later), and the dechameliza- all of whom have differing ideas on what’s ;ion of the Kissimmee River.
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