100 The Environmental Debate
Document 85: Marjory Stoneman Douglas on the Everglades (1947)
The Florida Everglades, so eloquently described by the writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas as a “river of grass,”
are a unique area. This 1,700-square-mile wetland is part a of a 9,000-square-mile ecosystem that includes the
Kissimmee River basin and Lake Okeechobee and provides the biologic and hydrologic foundation for south
Florida’s economic prosperity.
Douglas posited that the draining, diking, channeling, and manipulation of the waters of this system to
make way for agricultural lands, homes, and roads—which had been official state policy since the late 1800s—
was a recipe for destroying the ecosystem. Although she felt that the newly designated Everglades National
Park would inhibit further changes to the southern part of the system, she feared the power of special interests.
Her warnings were largely ignored until the 1980s [see Document 132].There are no other Everglades in the world.
They are, they have always been, one of the
unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly
known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their
vast glittering openness, wider than the enor-
mous visible round of the horizon, the racing free
saltness and sweetness of their massive winds,
under the dazzling blue heights of space. They
are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the
related harmony of the forms of life they enclose.
The miracle of the light pours over the green and
brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining
and slow-moving below, the grass and water that
is the meaning and the central fact of the Ever-
glades of Florida. It is a river of grass.
[H]istory, the recorded time of the earth and
of man, is in itself something like a river. To try
to present it whole is to find oneself lost in the
sense of continuing change. The source can be
only the beginning in time and space, and the
end is the future and the unknown....
So it is with the Everglades, which have that
quality of long existence in their own nature.
They were changeless. They are changed.
They were complete before man came to
them, and for centuries afterward, when he was
only one of those forms which shared, in a finely
balanced harmony, the forces and the ancient
nature of the place.
The most important single recommenda-
tion of the Everglades Project Reports [issued
in 1946] was for a single plan of development
and water control for the whole area, under the
direction of a single engineer and his board.
Only in that way could the conflicting demands
of local areas be equalized, so that the soil fit for
high cultivation could be used and maintained
without detriment to the water supply of the
lower areas. It would maintain areas for water
conservation. It would control salt intrusion. A
well-planned system of canals that would dis-
charge excess lake water into the open Glades
would permit the river of grass to flow again
with sweet water.
The report was... studied by the thought-
ful men in the growing cities. Its recommen-
dations received wide attention and support,
although there was opposition by local inter-
ests with political power. The growers about
the lake were still afraid of floods, and they
felt that water control would endanger the
lands already under production. The cattlemen
of the west were still resentful of an over-all
control. Many owners of great areas of muck-
lands, draining and diking and pumping their
irrigation ditches full from the seaward-flow-
ing canals, refused to consider anything more
important than their own immediate profits
and would fight more fiercely than any others a
co-ordinated control.
It was too soon to expect that that all these
people would see that the destruction of the
Everglades was the destruction of all.Source: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River
of Grass (New York: Rinehart, 1947), pp. 5-6, 8-9, 383.