Over the course of a lifetime, people can wear many hats though finding success in all or most of those aspects of one's life tends to be rare. Most people would consider it a full life to have "worn the hat" of being
- an assistant editor of a major newspaper
- a yeomen in the U.S. Navy
- a volunteer for the American Red Cross
- a daily columnist with an almost cult like following in a major newspaper
- an activist in the Woman's Suffrage movement
- an O. Henry award winning author of short stories with numerous bylines in the venerable Saturday Evening Post
- an award winning playwright of one act plays
- an essayist for social justice and equality
For Marjory Stoneman Douglas, that was just her first two decades after graduating college.
Life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.--Marjory Stoneman Douglas
In the 1940's, Douglas, who had lived in the Miami areas since 1915 and was already well known in South Florida from her time as the incisive and poetic daily columnist for the Miami Herald and her influential short stories, poems, essays and plays focusing on social justice for women, minorities and the poor, was approached by her friend Hervey Allen, an editor with the Farrar & Rinehart publishing house (now Holt, Rinehart & Winston), to write for a series he was publishing called the Rivers of America, a look at American rivers told not by historians, but rather by literary figures. Allen asked Douglas to produce a piece on the Miami River. Douglas accepted, but was bemused by Allen's interest in a river she described as being no more than "an inch long."
But as with most things in her life, Douglas dove headlong into research for the piece. She soon realized, however, there was a far more interesting river in South Florida that she could write about, a river whose waters were the life blood of the region, a river that was the subject of a decades long conservation battle little noticed outside of South Florida. For five years Douglas labored in research and writing about her river and in 1947, Rinehart & Company (the successor of Farrar & Rinehart) published her book on that river... The Everglades: River of Grass.
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There are no other Everglades in the world.
They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.
Douglas' book was released at a critical time for the Everglades. For two decades, Ernest Coe, a New England landscape architect who moved to South Florida at the age of 60, had struggled to save and preserve the entire Everglades as a national park. Douglas had joined Coe's initial efforts in 1928 serving as a founding board member of the Everglades Tropical National Park Association, a group dedicated to the national park's creation.
Coe's park effort was occurring in a time of incredible population growth in South Florida. As the population grew, more and more of the Everglades' wetlands were drained for agricultural and commercial use. He was determined to put an end to it. In 1930, he had convinced officials from the National Park Service to tour the area, hoping to convince them of the worthiness of a park. The three day tour included one day floating above the Everglades in the Goodyear blimp, though Coe became so air sick, he spent most of the flight vomiting. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was there beside him in his endeavor, not just figuratively, but literally on the blimp tour. The tour convinced the NPS delegation of the Everglades' worthiness as a national park. After two failed attempts in Congress to designate Everglades National Park, a bill successfully passed in 1934 only after reducing the area that would ultimately be protected by the park and limiting the use of federal funds to acquire the land right within the new park.
It would be thirteen years before the pieces were in place for Everglades National Park to be established. In a ceremony one month after Douglas' book was published, President Harry Truman dedicated the park.
But the park's dedication was not an end of the story for Douglas. While at the same time the park was officially established, flooding from a series of hurricanes and tropical storms that year lead to increased canal dredging, diverting more and more of the water that overflowed from Lake Okeechobee to the ocean before it had the chance to filter slowly through the saw grass marshes of the Everglades. The life force of the newly established park was being choked off just at the time it supposedly gained protection.
But Douglas' book was striking a cord with people. Through her words, people began to understand the importance of the flow of water from Lake Okeechobee through the pristine wetlands, how it filtered the water and replenished the aquifer that provided South Florida with every drop of fresh drinking water it had. They learned of the market hunting of birds for their plums to be used in things such as hats. She explained the abused the landscape suffered from the Everglades' use as a bombing test range for the military, of the attempts at oil drilling, and the man-mande fires started by smokers. She explained the history of people in the Everglades, the native Americans, the indian wars with the white man and the white man's encroachment of the wetlands. In the final chapter, entitled the Eleventh Hour, she laid bare the future of the Everglades down the path man was taking, a path that would lead to disappearance of the Everglades.
The first printing of the book sold out in that first month and would ignite a ever growing movement to protect the area. Douglas meanwhile continued writing on a plethora of topics, mostly on Florida history, but her connectedness to the Everglades preservation movement was comparatively slight. She even at one point supported some canal work to improve the drinking water for Miami. As the project developed, Douglas realized her mistake, seeing that the true purpose was to drain more of the land for development. "What a liar I turned out to be!" she would later remark.
In 1969 at age 79, she founded Friends of the Everglades and began a campaign of activism on the Everglades behalf. She started speaking tours to promote the Everglades and its preservation remarking she'd "talk about the Everglades at the drop of a hat" to anyone that would listen. And then, she said, "I'd tell them more than they wanted to know." She was the feisty voice for the movement. At one such speech she gave, an Army Corps of Engineers colonel responsible for canal work in the Everglades was present and made the mistake of dropping his pen on the floor as she spoke. When the colonel reached down to pick the pen up, Douglas stopped her speech and admonished the him: "Colonel! You can crawl under that table and hide, but you can't get away from me!"
Whereas Ernest Coe was only able to secure protection for one quarter of the original Everglades, Douglas took up the struggle to add more protected areas. Areas Coe wanted part of his vision for the Everglades would eventually get some of the protection he had wanted. Big Cypress National Preserve, the first national preserve, would be formed in 1974 to protect an area north of the western part of Everglades National Park. The state had already created a state park in the northern keys to protect some of the islands and coral reefs. After Douglas' leadership and activism for the cause in the late 1970's, Biscayne National Monument, which had been set aside as a national monument in 1968, was given greater protection as it was upgraded to a national park by President Carter in 1980.
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But it still wasn't enough for Douglas. She kept pressing and speaking out even as she advanced to an age where most people would slow down. When the state of Florida named the new headquarters of its Department of Environmental Protection after her, she used speech at the dedication ceremony to deliver jabs at President Reagan and Interior Secretary Watt for their failures on the environment. She lead the charge for several pieces of state legislation to protect the environment such as Coastal Barrier Resources Act.
More land and protection was added to the Everglades National Park in 1989 when George H.W. Bush signed the Everglades National Park Protection and Expansion Act. The law required the restoration of water flow into the park "in order to maintain the natural abundance, diversity, and ecological integrity of native plants and animals, as well as the behavior of native animals, as part of their ecosystem". In his speech at the signing, Bush remarked that "Through this legislation that river of grass may now be restored to its natural flow of water." Douglas was still around for it. In 1990 she entered her second century, still speaking out on the Everglades behalf even though time and age had robbed her of her sight and most of her hearing. That year, she was the spokeswoman for a successful referendum in Dade County that raised $90 million in tax revenue to purchase threatened pineland areas in the county for protection. In 1991 her work to secure more funding for protecting Biscayne Bay resulted in additional state funds including a $1.8 million for a new nature center on Key Biscayne that bears her name.
In 1993, at age 103, President Bill Clinton honored Marjory Stonemen Douglas with the nation's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. She would live for another five years, finally earning her rest at age 108.
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- Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine
- Capitol Reef National Park
- Petrified Forest National Park
- Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks
- Dry Tortugas National Park
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