Lady of the Everglades

By Anastasia Toufexis

Marjory Stoneman Douglas fights for Florida's wetlands

"It was like nothing else on earth. In Lake Okeechobee, the blue-and-purple water hyacinth was higher than our heads. On the coast, blue-and-green water, blue sky roofed with thousands and thousands of white birds overhead. You would be silent, and all you could hear was the wings rustling. One day we sat in our boats through such a sight, with the sun setting, then the moon, as the birds headed into their rookeries, like a bouquet of white flowers, before nightfall."

For nearly four decades, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, 92, has been the eloquent voice of South Florida's Everglades. As writer, she celebrated the mysteries of the swampy wilderness in the 1947 classic, The Everglades: River of Grass. As president of Friends of the Everglades, the 2,800-member organization she founded in 1970, she has battled civilization's encroachments in an effort to preserve and restore North America's only subtropical zone. Douglas and her recruits, dubbed Marjory's Army, have scored impressive victories, helping to block construction of an international jetport in the marshland, forcing the closing of two drainage canals and strengthening restrictions on real estate developers. Those successes are all the more impressive since they depend on a shoestring budget: the Friends of the Everglades' treasury currently contains only $12,000. Says Douglas of the powerful forces aligned against her: "We're fighting the Federal Government, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, water management, realtors and demographics."

Florida's Everglades, a unique mixture of rain forest, wildlife refuge and the world's largest cultivated organic soil bed, stretches 100 miles from Lake Okeechobee in the north to Florida Bay at the state's southern tip. Once the marshland measured an average 45 miles in width; today it extends 35 miles. Little of the land is in its pristine state. Huge tracts have been drained for agricultural and residential development, and thousands of miles of man-made canals have diverted the water from natural channels. Even much of the 62% of land lying within the Everglades National Park, though it remains covered with hardy saw grass, is in sorry condition.

The effect has been devastating. At least 50% of the soil has oxidized and eroded, in some places exposing the barren lime rock. Buried septic tanks on Lake Okeechobee's shores have surfaced. The lake itself has receded, from a depth of 17 ft. in the 1960s to 9 ft. last year. Alligators have lost most of their eggs to artificial flooding in three of the past five years. Flooding also led to the deaths of 5,000 deer last year. The region's spectacular wading birds, many of them rarities, are equally threatened. Wood storks, for example, have successfully nested in only three of the past 18 years. "The wetlands are sending up enough smoke signals to set off anyone's alarm system," warns Research Biologist Bill Robertson, who has been studying the Everglades for a quarter-century. Predicts Arthur Marshall, Florida's leading ecologist: "The Everglades has only 20 years of survival left."

The manager of the fight to preserve this threatened enclave is herself a rara avis. Born in Minneapolis in 1890, Douglas was reared near Boston and graduated from Wellesley in 1912. Caught in an unhappy marriage, she fled in 1915 to Florida to become a reporter on the Miami Herald, where her father was the editor in chief. Miami was then a bustling pinelands town, and the region was primitive: few roads, duckboard walks between shanties, mules plowing in burlap "muck shoes." Douglas rambled widely, collecting material for newspaper articles and later for short stories, living through terrifying events like the 1928 hurricane that destroyed a mud dike and killed nearly 2,000 people. "I've seen it," she snaps in her patrician accent. "I've seen it all."

And that is what she constantly reminds bureaucrats and county commissioners in private lobbying sessions and in theatrical public hearings. Her frail, 5-ft. 1-in. frame swaddled in flowery dresses, her head topped with floppy hats, thick-lensed spectacles perched on her bird-beak nose, Douglas is an arresting figure who explains her mission in mischievously simplistic terms: "It's women's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping, isn't it?" She is also a master manipulator. "I'm just a tough old woman," she avows. "They can't be rude to me. I have all this white hair. I take advantage of every thing I can--age, hair, disability--because my cause is just." Says Hydrologist Jim Hartwell, one of Douglas' advisers: "Marjory has stage presence. I look at the expressions on the faces of decision makers. She grabs them." A frequent and respectful adversary agrees. Says John Maloy, executive director of the region's water management district, which has authorized large-scale drainage projects: "Mrs. Douglas has had a great effect on people like me. We've closed the gap between how far out in front she is and how far behind I am."

Marjory's Army is currently appealing a zoning decision that would allow a condominium development in Upper Key Largo. Environmentalists contend that it will destroy the only living coral reef in the U.S. Douglas' main goal, however, is a $60 million scheme to buy and restore 30,000 acres of drained land above Lake Okeechobee. The project's chances are slim; it is caught in a jurisdictional dispute between the Corps of Engineers and the state. Beyond that, the future of the Everglades is threatened by the conflicting interests of seven county governments. Marjory Douglas presses on, however, exhorting the troops with a favorite line from Thomas Babington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome: "And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers,/ And the temple of his gods?" What keeps her spirits buoyed is visits to the Everglades, like one on a recent early evening. Recalls Douglas: "There was still a faint light. The first star still hadn't come out. The horizon was very far away, and there it was stretching dark and quiet but breathing and still alive." --By Anastasia Toufexis. Reported by William McWhirter/Miami

With reporting by William McWhirter This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.