Marjory Stoneman Douglas: A River, Not a Swamp

In the fall of nineteen forty-seven, two events happened in Florida within days of each other. President Harry Truman dedicated Everglades National Park, the first national park established primarily for its ecological rather than its scenic value. And a writer named Marjory Stoneman Douglas published a book called The Everglades: River of Grass.

The book's central argument was simple and, at the time, radical: the Everglades was not a swamp. It was a river. A slow-moving, vast, shallow river of fresh water flowing south from Lake Okeechobee through a hundred miles of sawgrass to Florida Bay. Calling it a swamp, Douglas argued, was a political choice, not a hydrological one. Swamps are wastelands. Rivers are living systems. The difference in language determined whether the Everglades could be drained for development or had to be preserved as a functioning whole.

Douglas said she had the phrase 'river of grass' from the Miccosukee people, who described the sawgrass waterway in those terms long before she arrived. She credited them in the book.

She was fifty-seven when River of Grass was published and had no particular intention of becoming an activist. She became one anyway. She lived to be one hundred and eight years old, dying in nineteen ninety-eight, and she was still testifying before Florida legislative committees in her nineties, wearing her signature enormous hat, speaking in complete paragraphs, reminding people that they had not yet fixed the problem she first described in nineteen forty-seven.

The Everglades she described is still in crisis. The restoration project, one of the largest environmental engineering efforts in human history, is still underway.