by Reverend Dr Bob N. Wallace | Everglades Community Church
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was an American journalist, author, women’s suffrage advocate, and conservationist best known for her unwavering defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. She lived in a small cottage in Coconut Grove, Miami, Florida. This house, located at 3744-3754 Stewart Avenue, served as her home from 1925 until her passing in 1998. From there, she wrote her influential book The Everglades: River of Grass, which played a crucial role in saving the Everglades. Although the house is not currently open to the public, Florida State Parks are working toward limited visitation and offsite programming in the future. In April 2015, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas used her voice and writing to advocate for South Florida’s environment and people, leaving behind a powerful legacy of social change. According to Wikipedia, she became involved in the Everglades in the 1920s when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee, led by Ernest F. Coe dedicated to the idea of making a national park in the Everglades. By the 1960s, the Everglades were in danger of disappearing forever in the name of progress, real estate and agricultural development because of gross mismanagement. Encouraged to get involved in 1969 at the age of 79 by the leaders of environmental groups, Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades to protest the construction of a jetport in the Big Cypress portion of the Everglades. She said, “It is a woman’s business to be interested in the environment. It’s an extended form of housekeeping.”
She toured the state giving “hundreds of ringing denunciations” of the airport project and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 within three years. She ran the public information operation full-time from her home and encountered hostility from the jetport’s developers and backers, who called her a “damn butterfly chaser”. President Richard Nixon scrapped funding for the project due to the efforts of many Everglades watchdog groups.
After declaring “Conservation is now a dead word … You can’t conserve what you haven’t got” Douglas continued her activism and focused on restoring the Everglades. She directed her criticism at two groups she thought were doing the most damage to the Everglades: a coalition of sugarcane growers, named Big Sugar, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Sugarcane growers were polluting Lake Okeechobee by pumping water tainted with chemicals, human waste, and garbage into the lake which served as the freshwater source for the Miami metropolitan area. And the Army Corps of Engineers, she thought, was damaging the Everglades by diverting the natural flow of water. The Corps was responsible for constructing more than 1,400 miles (2,300 km) of canals to divert water away from the Everglades after 1947. When the Central & South Florida Project (C&SF), run by former members of the Corps of Engineers, was proposed to assist the Everglades, Douglas initially gave it her approval. It promised to deliver much-needed water to the shrinking Everglades; however, the project instead diverted more water away from the Everglades, changed water schedules to meet sugarcane farmers’ irrigation needs, and flat-out refused to release water to Everglades National Park, until much of the land was unrecognizable. “What a liar I turned out to be!” remarked Douglas, suggesting the motivation behind all the digging and diversion by saying, “Their mommies obviously never let them play with mud pies, so now they take it out on us by playing with cement.”
Douglas was not well received by some audiences. She opposed the drainage of a suburb in Dade County named East Everglades. The land had flooded for centuries. And when homeowners demanded the Army Corps of Engineers drain their neighborhoods, she was the only opposing voice. She was booed, jeered, and shouted at by the audience of residents at the hearing in 1983. “Can’t you boo any louder than that?” she said, eventually making them laugh. “Look. I’m an old lady. I’ve been here since eight o’clock. It’s now eleven. I’ve got all night, and I’m used to the heat,” she told them.
Later, she wrote, “They’re all good souls—they just shouldn’t be out there.” Dade County commissioners eventually decided not to drain. Florida Governor Lawton Chiles explained her impact, saying, “Marjory was the first voice to really wake a lot of us up to what we were doing to our quality of life. She was not just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren.”
