Marjory Stoneman Douglas

River of Grass before putting pen to paper. One of her main sources and key advisors was Gerald Parker of the U.S. Geological Survey, who, at the time was conducting pioneering research into groundwater flow in South Florida.

Under his guidance, Douglas began to understand the interrelationships between the water flow, the Everglades and quality of life in the region.

River of Grass was released just a few weeks before President Harry Truman dedicated Everglades National Park on December 6, 1947. The title phrase caught people's attention, and Claude Pepper, Florida's senior senator at the time, used it in his speech at the dedication ceremony. Soon it was popping up in newspapers, and Douglas was inextricably linked with the unique ecosystem.

However, according to an article by Jack E. Davis, a University of Florida professor who is currently composing a biography of Douglas, it wasn't until the late 1960s that the "mother of the Everglades" became involved with public activism to protect these lands. After the 1947 hurricane forced the waters of Lake Okeechobee over its banks and levees, she was among the many who supported the Army Corps of Engineers' plan for flood control and water conservation, calling it "second in all our history only to the majestic scope of the Panama Canal."

Eventually, however, Douglas realized that the massive canal system built by the Corps was causing the Everglades to die of thirst. During a four-year drought, the ‘Glades received no water other than rainfall—while billions of gallons of Lake Okeechobee water were pumped into the ocean. Then came talk of oil exploration within the park and, in 1969, plans to build a jetport in its midst.

That was when local environmentalists turned to Douglas for help. She responded by forming the Friends of the Everglades, a grassroots organization that drew almost 3,000 members from 38 states in just a few years.

"I started making speeches to every organization that would listen to me," Douglas wrote in her autobiography.

"My college elocution training from 68 years earlier came in handy here.

I got 15 to 20 new members, at $1 a piece, every time I spoke."

The group mounted a public relations campaign against the jetport, which coincided with the leaking of a Department of the Interior report (by Senator Gaylord Nelson, the future founder of Earth Day) that predicted the death of the Everglades if the jetport was built.

The combined efforts prompted the Nixon administration to withdraw funding for the project.

By 1982, Douglas was in full activist mode, declaring, "Conservation is now a dead word. You can't conserve what you haven't got. That's why we are for restoration." She was in her early 90s by this time, but she wasn't about to slow down.

She gathered support and lobbied for the rerouting of the Kissimmee River to its original meandering path, backing up the need for such restoration with the best available science. She was even on hand to shovel dirt at the ceremonial start of the project.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded Douglas the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the government's highest civilian honor, and described her as Mother Nature herself. But Douglas would undoubtedly be more pleased by the action he took two years after her death, signing the $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Act in December 2000.

"I believe that life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that hopes for another life or of a longer life are not necessary," Douglas wrote at the close of her autobiography. Her own life provided a clear illustration of that philosophy.

Her ashes were scattered in the Everglades—undoubtedly just where she would want them to be.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas' autobiography, Voice of the River, is still available, as is a revised edition of The Everglades: River of Grass. Jack E. Davis' essay, "Conservation is now a Dead Word: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the Transformation of American Environmentalism," can be found online. For information on the Friends of the Everglades, visit www.everglades.org.

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