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

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

I had not long been exploring the possibility of writing the biography of a busy, fascinating woman who lived during busy, fascinating times—and indeed, for a long time—when I learned something surprising. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a writer by profession, did not leave behind a comprehensive diary, journal, or great cache of letters that would allow for a classically constructed biography. Excavating those kinds of rich materials makes the venture of a biography more pleasant for both the biographer and the reader. Fat books that give a blow-by-blow account of an individual’s life and activities, especially details that affirm or disprove juicy speculation and innuendo, make some of the best reading around, in my opinion. This book is fat, to be sure, and I hope, in light of the labor required to write and read it, that it contributes to knowledge and facilitates the memory of an important person, with a juicy tidbit or two thrown in. It offers as complete a biography as my limited energies and the available sources allow. It is more comprehensive than Douglas’s eloquent autobiography (and corrects a few of the mistakes she made in her account), and it provides a historical context for her life not found in her own writing. This book is not solely a biography but is also a comprehensive history of the Everglades. It is as much one as the other. To date, many books have been written about the Everglades, including Douglas’s 1947 landmark Author’s Note and Acknowledgments xx ] author’s note and acknowledgments The Everglades: River of Grass. Relying on original research, this volume covers much of the same ground as the others. That simply cannot be avoided. But to write about a woman whose life was so wrapped up with the Everglades without telling the full story of the Everglades simply does not make sense. This seems expressly true since no individual had a more enduring relationship with the Everglades, tracking the busiest years in their history from the decades of tenacious exploitation to the beginning of atoning ecological restoration. Unlike other Everglades books, this one emphasizes the literary and the conservation/environmental-activist sides of the Everglades narrative, the sides to which Douglas belongs. It is written to capture the subject’s perspective of the Everglades, taken from numerous angles in multiple shades of light, from the reflective to the witty to the didactic, and across a long arc of time. Even outside her Everglades labors, Douglas led a full life, and this book explores in depth all its dimensions. Yet so much of her life beyond the Everglades was really not that far beyond the Everglades. It was the yeasty pretext of her rise as a multilayered scribe of her region, and it prepared her for the realistic transition (for her at least, although it came at a time when others her age had long been retired) to the sobering and full-time commission of environmental activism. It also helped her realize that in the Everglades was Nature’s providence, offered not just to the creatures and green growing things but to fellow folly-prone humans. In short, then, this book is two books in one: a biography of a woman and a biography of a place, both of surprising endurance, and the story of the mutually beneficial relationship they forged with one another. My journey across the sometimes disquieting but always rewarding landscape of biography and geography was assisted by many selfless individuals . The journey began almost twenty years ago, when I was in graduate school and my classmate, Jill Bennett, and I pursued independent readings in environmental history with David Hackett Fischer. David is not known as an environmental historian professionally but as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of hefty books on early America. He knows the history and historiography of environmentalism, though, and Jill and I author’s note and acknowledgments [ xxi spent two stimulating semesters dissecting books and articles with him, never in the dim confines of his office but always rattling about the backstreets , sauntering through wooded paths, or roaming across the hillside cemetery of Waltham, Massachusetts, with Fischer stopping to explain the cultural history of a “privy bush” (without its privy) or a crumbling race in the Charles River. Jill, brilliant in so many particulars, possessed an enthusiasm and knowledge that humbled me daily. During these adventure-filled semesters, we...