Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1973
Jack E. Davis |
An Everglades Providence:
Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century
By Jack E. Davis
» Coming Feb. 15 from the University of Georgia Press. See Amazon listing.
In the late 1960s, the Dade County Port Authority began bulldozing a swath of the Everglades to build what was to be the largest airport in the world. Dubbed the Everglades jetport, the facility drew angry criticism from around the country and stirred local environmentalists into organized protest. It also turned a petite, grey-haired woman, who with faux-pearl necklace and a wide-brim sun hat looked like everyone’s grandmother transplanted to south Florida, into a full-time activist.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas eventually leaped into the national consciousness as the most vivid spokesperson for Everglades protection. She became one of the more important environmentalists of the late twentieth century and surely the longest living (she died in 1998 at age 108). Her sympathies for the beleaguered wetland dated to the 1920s, when she was part of a local committee lobbying for the creation of Everglades National Park, and she masterfully articulated those sympathies in her "The Everglades: River of Grass," published in 1947, one month before the park’s dedication. But more than two decades would elapse before she would commit herself as an activist. Many of her friends got involved in the early 1960s, when the modern environmental movement was taking root, but her first love and profession had always been writing, and she was hesitant to put down her pen and join the struggles. Finally, in 1969, Joe Browder, the southeastern representative of the national Audubon Society and leader of the ground-level fight against the jetport, came literally knocking at her door. She was seventy-nine years old when she founded Friends of the Everglades to stop the jetport, which she, Browder, and others managed to do, and she remained a full-time activist until she retired as president of her organization at age 100.
Excerpt from Chapter 31, “The Conversion.”
Joe Browder was a principal strategist for efforts to protect Everglades National Park. He led campaigns to secure a permanent water supply for the park, to prevent development of a destructive commercial airport in the Everglades and add more than a million acres of Everglades and Biscayne Bay lands, and waters to the National Parks system. |
The story has become legendary, a part of the irreducible public persona that came to be the woman of the Everglades, told countless times in newspapers, magazines, speeches, and interviews. No one remembers the exact date of the event other than that it occurred sometime in 1969, but the other essential facts are clear. One evening around 11:00, sometime in 1969, Douglas was shopping at a Coconut Grove convenience mart, the Quick & Easy Food Store, when someone called her name. It was Judy Wilson, Joe Browder’s assistant at the regional Audubon office. Amid the night-owl customers straggling in to buy cigarettes, milk, and other piecemeal shopping items, both women were there for cat food. They paused for a quick chat.
Douglas was connected well enough through the daily news and civic-minded friends to be fully aware of Audubon’s decisive role in the environmental campaigns of recent years. The proposed oil refinery in Biscayne Bay and the jetport under construction in the Everglades impressed her as tragically stupid and grotesque. If someone had been challenged to propose the best way to destroy a place’s rootstock of beauty and unique character these two projects would have taken top prize. . . . She found comfort in the labors of others to instill in small-minded government and industry leaders the value of environmental civility. She most admired the stamina of activists, especially Joe Browder, the good soldier of nature who stood on the front lines of each successive battle. When she saw Wilson in the grocery store, she offered an elder’s approval. “What a good job you are doing,” she said.1
Wilson had known Douglas for many years and admired her tremendously. They had met at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Julie and Henry Field. . . . The Fields spent part of their year at the Coconut Grove estate of Henry’s mother, an old friend of Douglas, and were members of the local crowd whose intellectualism was the boiling cauldron of enlightening political thought, sometimes turned to action. Wilson had worked as the Fields’ assistant, and after being introduced to the writer from Florida, whom she found smart and irresistibly mirthful, Wilson borrowed the Fields’ copy of "River of Grass." She saw Douglas again in 1966 at the annual meeting of the Florida Audubon Society, which was presenting her with its Special Award of Merit. The Fields moved to Coconut Grove permanently the same year, and Wilson came along with them. Under the imprint of the Field Research Projects, Henry published "Adventures in a Green World," Douglas’s book about David Fairchild and Barbour Lathrop, Field’s great uncle. Douglas was a regular dinner guest . . . and her infectious humor and keen intellect made an impression on everyone, including the Fields’ daughter Juliana, who volunteered in Audubon activities that Wilson often supervised.2
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