Who Was Marjory Stoneman Douglas?

Long before scientists fully understood how important the Everglades are to Florida's weather and ecosystem, Marjory Stoneman Douglas campaigned to preserve them. Learn about this journalist and activist in today's episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff.
Lauren boglebam here. After the horrific Parkland, Florida's school shooting
in February of eighteen, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas became a household
name for all the wrong reasons. But let's take a
look today at the woman for whom the high school
was named. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas undertook a legendary fifty year

(00:24):
crusade to save the Florida Everglades. Born in Minneapolis in
eighteen ninety and educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Douglas
moved to South Florida in nineteen fifteen after a brief
and disastrous marriage, to join her father, who was editor
and founder of the newspaper that would become the Miami Herald.
She was an accomplished journalist, short story writer, and an
outspoken advocate for women's suffrage, anti poverty campaigns, and ultimately

(00:48):
the cause that would make her famous, Everglades. Douglas's nineteen
seven ode to those wetlands, The Everglades River of Grass,
was published the same year that President Harry S. Truman
dedicated the Everglades National Park long before environmental scientists fully
understood the fragility and interconnectedness of the Everglades ecosystem. Douglas
railed against efforts by the U. S. Army Corps of

(01:10):
Engineers to drain and divert parts of the sprawling wetlands
to make room for agricultural and urban development. These efforts
continue today. The school was dedicated in nineteen ninety, when
Douglas was one hundred years old and still going strong.
With her book, Douglas provided a new way of understanding
the one point five million acre wetlands preserve. Rather than

(01:31):
seeing it as nearly a sprawling swamp, Douglas rightly described
the Everglades as a massive, slow moving river of shallow water,
draining north to south from Lake Okeechobee, down through the
Sawgrass prairies and emptying into the Florida Bay. In Moving Pros,
Douglas wrote of the hundreds of species of birds, fish,
and flora that thrived in the precariously balanced ecosystem of

(01:52):
the Everglades, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States.
She rightly recognized that this area was largely responsible for
the rainfall in South Florida. Her book begins there are
no other Everglades in the world. They are They've always
been one of the unique regions of the earth, remote,
never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them. A

(02:15):
tireless and often intimidating advocate, she founded the organization Friends
of the Everglades at age seventy nine to fight a
proposed jetport in the middle of the wetlands. The airport
plan was scrapped, and Douglas spent the rest of her
life defending the Everglades. John rath Child, who edited her
seven autobiography, Voice of the River, described her in the

(02:35):
book's introduction as she appeared at a public meeting in
Everglades City in ninety three. Mrs Douglas was half the
sides of her fellow speakers, and she wore huge dark
glasses along with the huge floppy hat that made her
look like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Igor Dravinsky. When
she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and more or less
came to order. Her voice had the sobering effect of

(02:56):
a one room schoolmarms. The tone itself seemed to tame
the rowtiest of the local stone crabbers. Plus the developers
and the lawyers on both sides. There are two seasons
in the Everglades, the dry winter and the monsoon summer,
and scientists now understand that seasonal fluctuations in water levels
are key to maintaining the delicate equilibrium between competing plant
and animal species, but that balance has been dangerously disturbed

(03:20):
by decades of habitat loss and short sighted water management tactics.
The River of Grass is no longer a free flowing
sheet of water, but sliced up and boxed in by
dams and dikes, creating floods in some areas and drought
in others. Congress passed the comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan back
in the year two thousand, but the funds to implement
the plan were never secured. In the meantime, Lake a Kochobee,

(03:44):
historically the water source that fed the southward flow of
the River of Grass, has become hopelessly polluted, largely by
agricultural runoff in. High levels of phosphorus and nitrogen in
the lake caused a toxic algae bloom that prompted the
governor to issue a state of emergency. Eric Eichenberg, CEO
of the Everglades Foundation and one time student at Douglas's

(04:04):
namesake High School, says that Congress will have to reauthorize
funding for the restoration, but that if everything goes well,
the River of Grass could be restored in as little
as eight years. He believes that Douglas, who died at
the age of eight, would be energized by the effort.
Among Douglas's many honors and awards was the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, conferred by Bill Clinton. In the year two thousand,

(04:27):
she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Douglas's ashes were scattered in the Everglades National Park over
the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area. Today's episode was written
by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff
is a production of I Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

(04:47):
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