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."