Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren boglebam here. After the horrific Parkland, Florida's school shooting
Speaker 1: in February of eighteen, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas became a household
Speaker 1: name for all the wrong reasons. But let's take a
Speaker 1: look today at the woman for whom the high school
Speaker 1: was named. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas undertook a legendary fifty year
Speaker 1: crusade to save the Florida Everglades. Born in Minneapolis in
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety and educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Douglas
Speaker 1: moved to South Florida in nineteen fifteen after a brief
Speaker 1: and disastrous marriage, to join her father, who was editor
Speaker 1: and founder of the newspaper that would become the Miami Herald.
Speaker 1: She was an accomplished journalist, short story writer, and an
Speaker 1: outspoken advocate for women's suffrage, anti poverty campaigns, and ultimately
Speaker 1: the cause that would make her famous, Everglades. Douglas's nineteen
Speaker 1: seven ode to those wetlands, The Everglades River of Grass,
Speaker 1: was published the same year that President Harry S. Truman
Speaker 1: dedicated the Everglades National Park long before environmental scientists fully
Speaker 1: understood the fragility and interconnectedness of the Everglades ecosystem. Douglas
Speaker 1: railed against efforts by the U. S. Army Corps of
Speaker 1: Engineers to drain and divert parts of the sprawling wetlands
Speaker 1: to make room for agricultural and urban development. These efforts
Speaker 1: continue today. The school was dedicated in nineteen ninety, when
Speaker 1: Douglas was one hundred years old and still going strong.
Speaker 1: With her book, Douglas provided a new way of understanding
Speaker 1: the one point five million acre wetlands preserve. Rather than
Speaker 1: seeing it as nearly a sprawling swamp, Douglas rightly described
Speaker 1: the Everglades as a massive, slow moving river of shallow water,
Speaker 1: draining north to south from Lake Okeechobee, down through the
Speaker 1: Sawgrass prairies and emptying into the Florida Bay. In Moving Pros,
Speaker 1: Douglas wrote of the hundreds of species of birds, fish,
Speaker 1: and flora that thrived in the precariously balanced ecosystem of
Speaker 1: the Everglades, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States.
Speaker 1: She rightly recognized that this area was largely responsible for
Speaker 1: the rainfall in South Florida. Her book begins there are
Speaker 1: no other Everglades in the world. They are They've always
Speaker 1: been one of the unique regions of the earth, remote,
Speaker 1: never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them. A
Speaker 1: tireless and often intimidating advocate, she founded the organization Friends
Speaker 1: of the Everglades at age seventy nine to fight a
Speaker 1: proposed jetport in the middle of the wetlands. The airport
Speaker 1: plan was scrapped, and Douglas spent the rest of her
Speaker 1: life defending the Everglades. John rath Child, who edited her
Speaker 1: seven autobiography, Voice of the River, described her in the
Speaker 1: book's introduction as she appeared at a public meeting in
Speaker 1: Everglades City in ninety three. Mrs Douglas was half the
Speaker 1: sides of her fellow speakers, and she wore huge dark
Speaker 1: glasses along with the huge floppy hat that made her
Speaker 1: look like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Igor Dravinsky. When
Speaker 1: she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and more or less
Speaker 1: came to order. Her voice had the sobering effect of
Speaker 1: a one room schoolmarms. The tone itself seemed to tame
Speaker 1: the rowtiest of the local stone crabbers. Plus the developers
Speaker 1: and the lawyers on both sides. There are two seasons
Speaker 1: in the Everglades, the dry winter and the monsoon summer,
Speaker 1: and scientists now understand that seasonal fluctuations in water levels
Speaker 1: are key to maintaining the delicate equilibrium between competing plant
Speaker 1: and animal species, but that balance has been dangerously disturbed
Speaker 1: by decades of habitat loss and short sighted water management tactics.
Speaker 1: The River of Grass is no longer a free flowing
Speaker 1: sheet of water, but sliced up and boxed in by
Speaker 1: dams and dikes, creating floods in some areas and drought
Speaker 1: in others. Congress passed the comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan back
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand, but the funds to implement
Speaker 1: the plan were never secured. In the meantime, Lake a Kochobee,
Speaker 1: historically the water source that fed the southward flow of
Speaker 1: the River of Grass, has become hopelessly polluted, largely by
Speaker 1: agricultural runoff in. High levels of phosphorus and nitrogen in
Speaker 1: the lake caused a toxic algae bloom that prompted the
Speaker 1: governor to issue a state of emergency. Eric Eichenberg, CEO
Speaker 1: of the Everglades Foundation and one time student at Douglas's
Speaker 1: namesake High School, says that Congress will have to reauthorize
Speaker 1: funding for the restoration, but that if everything goes well,
Speaker 1: the River of Grass could be restored in as little
Speaker 1: as eight years. He believes that Douglas, who died at
Speaker 1: the age of eight, would be energized by the effort.
Speaker 1: Among Douglas's many honors and awards was the Presidential Medal
Speaker 1: of Freedom, conferred by Bill Clinton. In the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1: Douglas's ashes were scattered in the Everglades National Park over
Speaker 1: the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other persevering topics,
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