Saint of the Everglades
Although not native to the southernmost state, Marjory Stoneman Douglas took to the Florida Everglades like a “duck to water,” becoming since 1927 the great champion of this rare habitat. She was born to lake country in Minnesota in 1890, during one of her father’s many failed business ventures, which kept the family moving around the country. On a family vacation to Florida at the age of four, Marjory fell in love with the Floridian light and vowed to return.
Marjory escaped her unstable home life in the world of books. An extremely bright girl, she was admitted to Wellesley College when higher education for women was still quite uncommon. Her mother died shortly after her graduation in 1911. Feeling unmoored, she took an unrewarding job at a department store, and shortly thereafter married a much older man, Kenneth Douglas, who had a habit of writing bad checks.
Leaving for Florida with her father for his latest business pursuit seemed like the perfect way to get away from her petty criminal husband and sad memories. Frank Stoneman’s latest ideas, however, seemed to have more merit: founding a newspaper in the scruffy boom town of Miami (the paper went on to become the Miami Herald). Marjory eagerly took a job as a cub reporter. Opinionated, forward-thinking, and unafraid to share unpopular views, both Stonemans found their niche in the newspaper trade. One of the causes they were in unswerving agreement on was Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward’s plan to drain the Everglades to put up more houses. Father and daughter used the paper as their soapbox to cry out against this ghastly idea with all their might.
Roused to action, Marjory educated herself about the facts surrounding the Everglades issue and discovered many of the denizens of Florida’s swampy grassland to be in danger of extinction. The more she learned, the more fascinated she became. When decades later she decided to leave the newspaper to write fiction, she often wove the Everglades into her plots. Marjory learned that the Everglades were actually not a swamp, but rather wetlands. In order to be a swamp, the waters must be still, whereas in the Everglades water flows in constant movement. Marjory coined the term “river of grass” and in 1947 wrote a book about this precious ecosystem entitled The Everglades: River of Grass.
More than anything else, Marjory’s book helped people see the Everglades not as a fetid swamp, but as a national treasure without which Florida might become desert. After the publication of her book, Harry Truman designated a portion of the Florida wetlands as Everglades National Park. The triumph was short-lived, however. The Army Corp of Engineers began tunneling canals all over the Everglades, installing dams and floodgates. As if that weren’t enough, they straightened the course of the Kissimmee River, throwing the delicate ecosystem into complete shock.
At the age of seventy-eight, Marjory Stoneman Douglas joined in the fight, stopping bulldozers ready to raze a piece of the Everglades for an immense jetport. Almost blind and armed with little more than a big floppy sun hat and a will of iron, Marjory founded Friends of the Everglades, going on the stump to talk to every Floridian about the devastation to this rare resource and building the organization member by member to thousands of people in thirty-eight states. “One can do so much by reading, learning, and talking to people,” she noted. “Students need to learn all they can about animals and the environment. Most of all, they need to share what they have learned.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas and “Marjory’s Army” as her group came to be known, stopped the jetport in its tracks, garnered restrictions on farmers’ use of land and chemicals, saw to the removal of the Army’s “improvements,” and enjoyed the addition of thousands of acres to the Everglades National Park, where they could be protected from land grabbing developers. In 1975 and 1976, Marjory was rewarded for her hard work by being named Conservationist of the Year two years in a row. In 1989, she became the Sierra Club’s honorary vice president. Protecting the Everglades became Marjory’s life work, a job she loved. She never considered retiring and continued living in the same house she’d been in since 1926 and worked every day for Friends of the Everglades until her passing in 1998 at 109 years old. She saved millions of acres.
“Find out what needs to be done and do it!”
— Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Join Marjory’s Army!
You can contact Friends of the Everglades and continue her work: www.everglades.org
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Bard of the Backwood
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings used to play “Story Lady” in Washington, D.C., as a girl, making up stories to tell the boys from her neighborhood. As an adult, she and her husband moved to Cross Creek, Florida, where she fell in love with the unique people of south Florida and their hearts in the face of hardship, poverty, and starvation, which she immortalized in her memoir Cross Creek. Like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rawlings helped focus the nation’s attention on an area previously disregarded as a “wasteland” through her O’Henry award-winning short stories, like “Gal Young Un” and “The Black Secret,” and her novels—South Moon Under, The Sojourner, and the children’s classic, The Yearling. The Yearling shows Rawlings at the top of her craft, with her beautifully rendered story and sense of place winning a Pulitzer prize award in 1939. The Yearling was made into a film that received both critical and popular acclaim; both the novel and the film are regarded as classics for their sensitive portrayal of life in the Florida Everglades.
Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness
Born in 1901, pioneer rainforest activist Gertrude Elizabeth Loertsher’s fascination with native peoples began as a child in Switzerland when she read about American Indians and acted out the stories with her friends after school. She didn’t feel the same pull toward academia, however, and pursued horticulture and social work rather than a more traditional educational career. She spent a year in England with a Quaker family whose way of life and pacifist philosophy she found imminently appealing. After a failed marriage to a neighbor’s son back home in Bern, Trudi, as she liked to be called, traveled to Germany in the 1930s, where she was shocked by the rise of fascism. The daughter of a Jewish mother and a Protestant minister father, Trudi’s own sensibility toward peace and justice was poles apart from the Nazi party. Upon Hitler’s election as chancellor in 1933, the Nazis’ power was dominant; any actions or talk against it were treated as treason.
Trudi’s sympathies were entirely anti-Nazi, and she risked her life many times to get information about Nazi horror stories to the newspapers in her native Switzerland, outsmarting the ruling party of martinets and murderers again and again. Times got harder and getting out of Germany became increasingly difficult; Gertrude finally inveigled passage to France, where she worked for the Resistance, traveling to the United States to aid other European refugees. Upon returning to France, she was put in prison after the Nazi takeover.
Ultimately the Swiss government got her out of France, and she made her way to Mexico to rest and get some distance from political strife. She developed a new interest in photography, making women factory workers her subject. Her photographs were compelling, filled with both a beauty and depth in the faces weathered by difficult lives. Mexico itself filled Trudi with awe; it was both a new home and a muse catapulting her toward discovery. She traveled the vast country in search of the meaning she knew lay in the land. Her first sight of the Mexican jungle was an epiphany: “This jungle filled me with a sense of wonder that has never left me,” she noted many years later. The mysterious forest and Lacandon Indians who lived there showed her a way to live in the world that was vastly different from her European background. Trudi learned from these people, studying their traditional ways only to discover their life in the jungle was in jeopardy; Mexican peasants were being relocated to the rainforest state of Chiapas bordering Guatemala and left to scratch a living from the dirt.
Trudi’s
