An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

13 By Violence

By the laws of nature, the Everglades, like any wholesome wilderness area, were a violent place, as Henry, the young protagonist in Douglas’s novel Alligator Crossing, recognizes soon after becoming acquainted with the region: “Everything that lived here—the alligator, the little fish and big fish, the turtles , the frogs, the dragonflies—lived on something else alive that was here, even the green plants in the clear brown water.” Killing was the essence of a healthy ecosystem and of life itself . Yet when humans entered, the salubrious contest for survival assumed a new and dramatically different dynamic that disrupted mutually supporting relationships between predator and prey as well as the natural cycle of birth, death, and regeneration . “But Man was different. Man frightened Henry,” says the narrator in Alligator Crossing. The measure of disruption depended on the culture of the entering group—its values, priorities, and dreams. When Western civilization appeared on the horizon in the square sails of Spanish galleons, major change in the elegant ecosystem was a matter of course. Europeans and their American offspring valued material things, prioritized a market economy, and dreamed of wealth and empire . Built around the cornerstones of science and reason, their By Violence [ c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n 164 ] part one society was supposed to have advanced, by the grace of God or by natural selection, well beyond the primitive cosmologies and mythologies of indigenous people, whose ecological footprint was comparatively light. But Western people unleashed an inorganic brand of violence against nature that culminated in ecological ruination of unprecedented measure. The unnatural violence came in many elemental forms and was enhanced by many technologies. Philadelphian Hamilton Disston, for example , employed surveys and dredges to impose civilization on wilderness. But sometime before his dredges first wolfed up muck, another, though older, market-driven technology was effacing the natural characteristics of the Everglades region. Men with guns took the lead over developers and farmers and bureaucrats in the conquest of the environment—a bloody conquest. Commercial hunters, sportsmen, naturalists, and Indians ransacked wildlife populations and brought the first human-induced ecological change to the Everglades. Florida and the Everglades had the fortune and misfortune of being endowed with remarkable specimens of exotic and highly extroverted wildlife. They formed part of the state’s living aesthetic—the flora, fauna, and climate that brought animation and color to the landscape and gave a place its character apart from human creations. Florida banked its early tourist trade of the nineteenth century on the living aesthetic. In what Douglas referred to as a “concerted flood of genteel advertising,” popular travel literature and magazines gave glimpses of a naturally beautiful Florida to a national reading audience. Each year, tens of thousands of warm-weather seekers flocked to the St. Johns River region, where they embarked on unhurried steamboat junkets to be awed by the wildlife and to bathe in crystal-clear springs. In their own nineteenth-century Victorian way, they were ecotourists, encountering real-life suggestions of the romanticized nature they discovered in the works of Virgil, Edmund Burke, James Fenimore Cooper, and Walt Whitman. During a visit to Jacksonville in 1905, Henry James said he had become “Byronically foolish about the St. Johns River.” Yet the gratified visitors who had been beguiled by original Florida also assisted in its destruction. Florida’s allure was harvested from nature and prepared for sale on local and global markets as fashion apparel and 13. by violence [ 165 souvenirs. The trade in nature’s novelties was a conspicuous public enterprise , nowhere more true than in Jacksonville, the hub city of nineteenthcentury Florida tourism, and in the storefront display windows along its Bay Street, known as Curio Row. A travel guide written by tubercular lyricist Sidney Lanier said of Bay Street’s inventory, “These curiosities are sea-beans, alligator’s teeth, plumes of herons and curlew’s feathers, crane’s wings, mangrove and orange[wood] walking canes, coral branches, coquina figurines, and many others.” The market for such items bred an army of commercial hunters. They penetrated the Everglades’ Fakahatchee Strand for orchids, combed the beaches of Southwest Florida for seashells, waded through nearby swamps to cut cypress knees, plundered the shores for sea turtles and turtle eggs, ambushed mangrove islands for plume birds, and followed the nocturnal bellowing of reptiles for alligator hides. “There is no season of...