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

29 Grassroots

In the 1960s, Douglas still refused to get behind the wheel of a car. The prospect that she would ever do so had passed, though not because she was in her seventies. Miami’s roads had become treacherous. They had always been in some way or the other. She remembered when they were sand and limestone, dusty uncertain byways that gave little traction to cars that rolled over easily. The roads were eventually paved, and more land was bulldozed for new, more stable cars. But now there were too many cars, impatient surging rivers of them. Back in the 1920s, she “shudder[ed] to think” what Miami would be like with a rush hour and gridlock. Forty years later, Miami had permanent gridlock. The local governments were unable to build new roads or improve old ones fast enough. Construction was everywhere; it was a relentless roadway drama that slowed traffic to a hopeless crawl. To help ease conditions, the city created a bikeway system, one of the first in the country, but it hardly made a difference. The automobile traffic became so heavy that people feared riding bikes. The unfurling numbers of vehicles were a consequence of the mindless pursuit of growth, about which Douglas had warned in the 1920s. South Florida’s population was growing faster than anyplace else in Grassroots [ c h a p t e r t w e n t y - n i n e 29. grassroots [ 439 the state, and Florida was growing faster than any state in the country. Although Dade County had approximately the same land mass as Delaware, Dade had nearly one million residents in 1960, twice as many as Delaware . Close to half of them had arrived since 1950, coming from all over and bringing cars and different driving habits with them. And the cars created more than traffic problems. When Douglas looked out over the city’s skyline, growing taller, broader, and glassier with modern architecture, she saw a haze on wind-calm days. The local dumps burned bloated mounds of refuse. Industry supporting new construction , in particular asphalt and cement manufacturing, filled the air and the waterways with pollutants. The airports, accommodating more flights each year, did the same. But the trail to the main pollutant source led to Americans’ latest shining chrome and paint infatuation. “The automobile ,” wrote Douglas friend and resident activist Juanita Greene in 1971, “eats up space, uglifies the scene, pollutes the air, picks the pocketbook with heavy hand, and terrifies and kills at a routine, predictable pace.” Enabling these bad qualities, local government spent from five to ten times more on roads than on public transportation. By 1960, Miami had half a million cars, and photochemical smog. People began comparing the city with Los Angeles. At the time, Douglas was not standing in front of planning boards shaking a reproachful fist. She was aware, though, of the harmful imbalance developing between nature and expansive, technology-happy civilization . Florida’s east coast cities “sprang up like coral growths between sky and sea,” she wrote with derision. Her regionalist dream of an inspiriting Miami blending refreshing subtropical nature with a reciprocating culture had perished, dashed by ugly unplanned growth. Her disenchantment extended out beyond the city limits, too. The arcadia of tropical plenty she had wished for the Everglades had been plundered by corporate agriculture and servile government bureaucrats. In a 1959 article for The Rotarian, she turned against the Army Corps of Engineers for the first time. The paternal hand of flood control was beginning to show itself in all its worst manipulative ways. She had been convinced that the corps’ water-conservation areas would prevent development and agriculture 440 ] part three from consuming the entire upper Everglades around Lake Okeechobee. But she saw just the opposite happening now that the “great agricultural interests” were protected from flooding. There were reports of “too much fresh water” being sent down canals and “silting up the bays and destroying saltwater fishing,” just as Ernest Lyons had predicted, and fifteen years after Garald Parker identified the source of the trouble, saltwater was still seeping into Miami’s drinking wells. The national park too was “endangered by the loss of fresh water . . . being squandered,” Douglas said, two years before the unnecessary drought. Yet during the drought, ears did not ring with the noise of her protests. Wallace Stegner, an outsider, sounded the kind of discouraging voice she...