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

2 River of Life

It’s unclear when Douglas first learned about the Everglades. She conceivably knew of them when a child, living in the North. Much popular literature of the time told tales of the strange jungles and swamps of Florida, and as soon as she was old enough, Marjory read virtually everything that came into her hands. People talked, too, about faraway places they wanted to visit or where they wanted to resettle. Still, she apparently formed no early impression of the Everglades. She lived in Miami for five years before first seeing them. On one Sunday afternoon in 1920, she and friends went off on a fishing adventure, with Marjory stealing the time from the column that needed to be written for the Miami Herald’s Monday edition. They drove west beyond the city limits to the end of Tamiami Trail, still eight years away from becoming the first roadway to ford the Everglades. For now, the blacktop stopped where the water of the Everglades washed the creeping edge of civilization. Facing the open distance, her back turned against the developed fields of Dade County, Douglas was elevated by what unfolded before her. “The grass and the islands of hardwoods stood alone in the light and the beautiful air,” she River of Life [ c h a p t e r t w o 24 ] part one recalled years later. She also remembered the Everglades as “completely untouched.” This impression was not quite accurate, however. She and her friends were, after all, fishing from the spillbank of an Everglades drainage canal. People with restless dreams and ambitions had been tampering with the watery province since the nineteenth century. The region was to be for them what the Republic had been for others, a grand experiment in cultural unity and universal social and economic progress. How the natural endowments of the Everglades fit into this history is how nature was asked to fit everywhere in the nation—that is, as a symbol and source of democratic greatness. The Everglades therefore could not be kept in their original form, an unbounded sodden land. They were to be drained to bring a merchantable commodity to the surface. But like the region’s remaining Seminole resisters, residing not far from where Douglas and her friends fished, the enemy water would not be slain easily or completely. Land merchants had to settle for dry enclaves: to keep them dry, they diverted the water with dams, dikes, canals, and building-size electric-powered pumps, doing so with a mind toward growth. By the last years of Douglas’s life, the number of people living in South Florida had grown to six million, and the Everglades ecosystem was a great pumping heart at risk of arrest. In the name of flood control, state bureaucrats and the Army Corps of Engineers pumped 1.7 billion gallons a day from the Everglades watershed to the ocean, contributing to a 70 percent decline in downstream flow. One of the world’s most expansive and expensive water-control systems gave the corps near complete mastery over the wetland. The results were a boon for agribusiness and developers and a disaster for animal and indigenous plant communities and Everglades National Park, America’s rarefied subtropical park, consistently ranked as the most threatened in the national inventory. Humans were also imperiling the subtropical life they coveted. The region’s moderate climate and plentiful rainfall were the gift of the Everglades. Beginning with Frank Stoneman, Douglas’s father, experts had periodically warned that the gift would be withdrawn if Providence suffered irreparable harm. 2. river of life [ 25 The Everglades were a prime example of the human relationship with the environment gone awry. Just as Americans were achieving the upper hand over nature, they began to feel the effects of depleted and polluted resources. Beginning in the 1980s, a mildly contrite state legislature enacted into law one ecological restoration plan after another, all bringing minimal results. “Florida has made great strides,” Douglas wrote, “but the degradation of the environment has become institutionalized, embedded in the nature of things.” Finally, in 2000, Congress gave fervid bipartisan approval to the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which carried an estimated $7.8 billion price tag and a thirty-year timeline for completion . In terms of cost, logistics, bureaucracy, and science, the plan was portrayed as the most ambitious effort ever to bring an ecosystem back to a full...