Grassroots Resistance

HUMAN VALUES—INSIGHTS, IMPLICATIONS, APPLICATIONS Grassroots Resistance Marjorie Harris Carr, Ecology, and the Battle to Stop the Cross Florida Barge Canal Leslie Kemp Poole Rollins College n the 1960s the U.S. government began construction of a long-held dream—creating a watery transportation canal I across north Florida to shorten treacherous trade routes. The project promised an infusion of federal dollars and new jobs in this mostly rural area and was considered a “done deal.” That is, until Marjorie Harris Carr (1915–1997) led Florida’s first major grassroots crusade to stop the project from harming the state’s fragile environment. Using facts and the science of ecology, and by engaging the media, Carr and company achieved the seemingly impossible—stopping a major federal public works project in its tracks and setting the stage for future environmental skirmishes across the state and nation. They proved that a skeptical citizenry well-armed with data and determination could overcome the questionable promises of politicians and bureaucrats, leading to a court decision and presidential edict that supported their contention that the potential for environmental damage needs to be assessed before boondoggle projects are undertaken. Since the early days of Spanish occupation in Florida, settlers shared a dream of building a canal across the peninsula to link the Gulf of Mexico with the Atlantic Ocean. This canal would greatly improve the passage of the Spanish treasure fleets that might avoid the treacherous Straits of Florida to the south, an area of shallows, coral reefs, hurricanes, pirates, and “wreckers.” Canal fever continued into the ensuing centuries, and the first U.S. study for Copyright © 2019, Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs. Confluence such a canal was approved as early as 1826 with 28 possible routes studied thereafter. Actual construction, with federal funding, of an 87-mile shipping canal began in 1935 and was lauded because it would put people to work during the Great Depression. Construction halted a year later for fiscal and political reasons with only three percent built—but also with the lingering concern that it would have cut deep into the Floridan Aquifer, the underground drinking water reservoir for 90 percent of Florida.1 The advent of World War II and the realization that Nazi submarines were lurking along the state’s coast revived the canal concept. But this time it would be shallower (and supporters argued, would not damage the aquifer) and would be used for passage of cargo barges. Canal campaigners in the 1950s moved to economic arguments in favor of the project, noting that barge tonnage was increasing. The Florida canal, they believed, would become part of a “national integrated system of inland waterways.” In 1958 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (hereafter referred to as the Corps) completed a study that gave boosters what they wanted, determining that the project would have a positive benefit–cost ratio, albeit a slim one. No consideration was made for the environmental damage that would occur to the St. Johns, Withlacoochee, and Ocklawaha rivers that would be used for the canal’s path.2 By 1960, Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba brought the Cold War closer to Florida’s shoreline, furthering concerns about dangerous enemies near the state’s coast. And, as historian Lee Irby notes, so did Florida’s rising population and its electoral votes—a fact that helped make presidential candidate John F. Kennedy a “staunch canal advocate. One pro-Kennedy advertisement announced: ‘A Vote for Kennedy is a Vote for the 1 Leslie Kemp Poole, “Florida: Paradise Redefined: The rise of environmentalism in a state of growth.” (master’s thesis, Rollins College, 1991), 83–87. 2 Steven Noll and David Tegeder, Ditch of Dreams: The Cross Florida Barge Canal and the Struggle for Florida’s Future. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 132–133, 151; Lee Irby, “’The Big Ditch’: The Rise and Fall of the Cross-Florida Barge Canal.” In Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida, eds. Jack E. Davis and Raymond Arsenault. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 386. Note: spelling of Ocklawaha has varied but this version will be used for this article with the exception of direct quotes. 14 Vol. XXV, No. 1 cross-Florida Canal!’” Once elected, Kennedy “lived up to his word and pushed for actual construction funds” which were approved in 1962 by the U.S. House of Representatives. President Lyndon Johnson, inheriting Kennedy’s project, pushed for it and on February 27, 1964, he celebrated the birth of the Cross Florida Barge Canal with the explosion of 150 pounds of dynamite.3 For Johnson it was a perfect mesh of politics and conservation, the latter of which meant scientific utilization and manipulation of natural resources for human benefit.4 At the rainy ceremony, Johnson stated: God was good to this country. He endowed it with resources unsurpassed in their variety and their abundance. But in His wisdom the Creator left something for men to do for themselves. He gave us great rivers, but He left them to run wild in the flood, and sometimes to go dry in the drought—and sometimes to rain when we have a celebration. But He left it to us to control these carriers of commerce. Johnson added: The challenge of a modern society is to make the resources of nature useful and beneficial to the community. So this is the passkey to economic growth, to sensible and to valid prosperity; to create a value where none existed before is to enlarge the hoard of Nature's bounty and to make it serve all of our citizens.5 Johnson was clear—to his thinking and to that of state boosters, there was no value in nature unless it was doing 3 Irby, “‘The Big Ditch,’” 386–387; Noll and Tegeder, Ditch of Dreams, 142–143. 4 The term conservation in the early twentieth century referred to the Progressive Era movement that stressed scientific “wise use” of resources for the benefit of humans. Today the term is used interchangeably with environmentalism and indicates preservation and safeguarding of resources. 5 Lyndon B. Johnson, “198 - Remarks at the Ground-Breaking Ceremony for the Florida Cross-State Barge Canal.” The American Presidency Project. Accessed Feb. 10, 2018 at http://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26085 15 Confluence humankind’s bidding. But pro-canal supporters soon met their match in a grassroots group of academics and nature lovers, led by Marjorie Harris Carr, who believed that a beautiful, functioning ecosystem was of inestimable value. Carr, write historians Steven Noll and David Tegeder, embodied the economic, environmental, and scientific opposition that would eventually prove the canal’s undoing. Representing a new environmental ethos, Carr would fuse sentimental attachment to the preservation of wild land with a scientific understanding of the fragile nature of ecological systems.6 Carr fell in love with the outdoors during her childhood in southwest Florida. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 26, 1915, Marjorie Harris moved at the age of 3 to the Bonita Springs area of southwest Florida with her parents. She credited her New England heritage and its “sense of stewardship” with inspiring her later environmental activism. Her father, a teacher, and mother collected insects and loved the luxuriant Florida outdoors. “I grew up…out in the woods, on the Imperial River,” she recalled in a 1990 interview. “We used to be on the river nearly every day in a canoe.” Sadly, no birds or animals populated the river’s banks because “it was the custom for men to come down, hire a boat, take a gun and stand up in the front of the boat and shoot anything that made a moving Marjorie Harris Carr. 19--. Black & white photoprint. State Archives of target. Alligator, red bird, heron, Florida, Florida Memory. Accessed 21 what have you. Anything that Dec. 2018. https://www.florida moved was the sport.”7 memory.com/items/show/144623. 6 Noll and Tegeder, Ditch of Dreams, 146–147. 7 Marjorie Harris Carr oral history interview with author. Gainesville, Florida, on Oct. 18, 1990, 1–2, 6. In possession of author. 16 Vol. XXV, No. 1 As a result of such wanton wildlife destruction, particularly of wading birds whose plumes were used to adorn hats, Audubon societies developed across the United States to protect birds and lobby for laws to save them. The Florida Audubon Society was established in 1900 to do just that, with the recognition that the state was ground zero for much of the slaughter. Audubon societies were among the few groups that welcomed both male and female members, and their influence would broaden throughout the coming century. Carr’s love of the natural world took her to Tallahassee and the Florida State College for Women (now Florida State University), where she graduated in 1936 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology. Carr, an honors graduate and Phi Beta Kappa member, soon found that her applications to graduate programs in zoology and ornithology were turned down because of her gender.8 And jobs in science also were hard to find; as Carr’s biographer Peggy Macdonald notes, many female would-be scientists were “funneled into the ‘feminine’ field of home economics” which in the early twentieth century “was the only academic field in which women could be promoted to full professor, department chair, or dean.” The new graduate’s options for “full-time employment in the sciences were limited,” however she did land a job at the federal Welaka Fish Hatchery, located on Florida’s St. Johns River. There she would come to love the nearby Ocklawaha River and would be inspired to study large-mouthed black bass.

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