The Everglades, A River of Grass

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was fifty-seven years old in nineteen forty-seven when she published a book called The Everglades: River of Grass. It changed the way Americans understood the southern tip of Florida. Before Douglas, the Everglades were widely regarded as a swamp, waste land to be drained, surveyed, and made productive.

After Douglas, the Everglades were something else: the largest subtropical wetland in North America, a system so finely calibrated that altering any part of it sent consequences cascading through the whole. The Everglades are not a swamp in the conventional sense. They are a shallow river, sixty miles wide and barely a foot deep, moving almost imperceptibly south from Lake Okeechobee across the sawgrass prairies toward Florida Bay.

The system once covered roughly four million acres of South Florida. More than half of that has been drained, diked, or converted to agriculture and urban development across the twentieth century. The draining began in earnest after eighteen eighty-one, when Hamilton Disston, a Philadelphia saw manufacturer, purchased four million acres of South Florida from a financially desperate state government at twenty-five cents an acre and began dredging canals to drain the Kissimmee basin.

Later, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a system of some one thousand eight hundred miles of canals and levees designed to move water quickly off the land during wet seasons and provide irrigation during dry ones. The result was efficient for agriculture and catastrophic for the ecosystem. Populations of wading birds in the Everglades declined by an estimated ninety percent over the twentieth century.

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, authorized by Congress in two thousand, is the largest environmental restoration project in American history, a multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar effort to rehydrate the system, remove some of the canal-and-levee infrastructure, and restore something closer to the original sheet-flow pattern. It is still in progress. The Everglades that exist today are reduced, stressed, and under continuous pressure from development, pollution, and rising seas.

They are also still extraordinary, a place where alligators and crocodiles share coastline, where roseate spoonbills nest in the mangroves, and where, on a still morning, the sawgrass runs to every horizon like a green sea.