Douglas, Marjory Stoneman

▪ 1999

      American author and environmentalist (b. April 7, 1890, Minneapolis, Minn.—d. May 14, 1998, Miami, Fla.), helped dispel the centuries-long revulsion that many had for the Everglades wilderness in southern Florida through her writings and environmental activism. In 1915, when Douglas arrived in southern Florida, the young Wellesley College graduate first encountered those negative attitudes, views that had little changed since the first Europeans set eyes on the region in the 16th century. In her influential 1947 book, The Everglades: River of Grass, she wrote of the beauty and the environmental usefulness of what had been described as "a series of vast, miasmic swamps, poisonous lagoons, huge dismal marshes without outlet, a rotting, shallow, inland sea, or labyrinths of dark trees hung and looped about with snakes and dripping mosses, malignant with tropical fevers and malarias, evil to the white man." Since its publication, The Everglades has been continuously in print. Before her death at age 108, Douglas witnessed a reversal of these attitudes, largely brought about by her own work. The daughter of the founding editor of the Miami Herald, Douglas wrote books and magazine articles with the intention of changing public perceptions of the attractiveness of the Everglades and of its ecological function as a vast recharge zone for southern Florida's freshwater supplies. Not content to watch the battle for the future of the Everglades from the sidelines, Douglas was a leading member of the committee that lobbied for the establishment of Everglades National Park in the 1940s. In 1969, to fight a proposal to build a jetport in the park, she helped to found Friends of the Everglades, a conservation group now numbering some 5,000 members. In the 1970s, when developers and farmers threatened to drain 622 sq km (240 sq mi) of the Everglades, an unflappable Douglas, dressed in her signature straw hat and formal string of pearls, defended the Everglades before a hostile audience. Almost deaf and already in her 80s, she boldly prefaced her remarks by urging the crowd to "Boo louder." The recipient of numerous honours, Douglas was referred to as Mother Nature by Pres. Bill Clinton during a 1993 White House ceremony in which her work on behalf of the Everglades was honoured with the Medal of Freedom.

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