WEBVTT - Who Was Marjory Stoneman Douglas? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:07.080 Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. 0:00:07.160 --> 0:00:11.800 Lauren boglebam here. After the horrific Parkland, Florida's school shooting 0:00:11.800 --> 0:00:15.560 in February of eighteen, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas became a household 0:00:15.600 --> 0:00:18.720 name for all the wrong reasons. But let's take a 0:00:18.720 --> 0:00:20.920 look today at the woman for whom the high school 0:00:20.920 --> 0:00:24.800 was named. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas undertook a legendary fifty year 0:00:24.840 --> 0:00:28.560 crusade to save the Florida Everglades. Born in Minneapolis in 0:00:28.640 --> 0:00:32.320 eighteen ninety and educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Douglas 0:00:32.320 --> 0:00:35.040 moved to South Florida in nineteen fifteen after a brief 0:00:35.080 --> 0:00:38.160 and disastrous marriage, to join her father, who was editor 0:00:38.200 --> 0:00:41.120 and founder of the newspaper that would become the Miami Herald. 0:00:41.720 --> 0:00:44.360 She was an accomplished journalist, short story writer, and an 0:00:44.360 --> 0:00:48.760 outspoken advocate for women's suffrage, anti poverty campaigns, and ultimately 0:00:48.800 --> 0:00:53.120 the cause that would make her famous, Everglades. Douglas's nineteen 0:00:53.440 --> 0:00:56.320 seven ode to those wetlands, The Everglades River of Grass, 0:00:56.600 --> 0:00:59.200 was published the same year that President Harry S. Truman 0:00:59.200 --> 0:01:03.920 dedicated the Everglades National Park long before environmental scientists fully 0:01:03.960 --> 0:01:08.240 understood the fragility and interconnectedness of the Everglades ecosystem. Douglas 0:01:08.280 --> 0:01:10.280 railed against efforts by the U. S. Army Corps of 0:01:10.319 --> 0:01:13.520 Engineers to drain and divert parts of the sprawling wetlands 0:01:13.760 --> 0:01:17.440 to make room for agricultural and urban development. These efforts 0:01:17.480 --> 0:01:21.440 continue today. The school was dedicated in nineteen ninety, when 0:01:21.440 --> 0:01:23.919 Douglas was one hundred years old and still going strong. 0:01:25.160 --> 0:01:28.039 With her book, Douglas provided a new way of understanding 0:01:28.040 --> 0:01:31.680 the one point five million acre wetlands preserve. Rather than 0:01:31.720 --> 0:01:35.280 seeing it as nearly a sprawling swamp, Douglas rightly described 0:01:35.280 --> 0:01:38.520 the Everglades as a massive, slow moving river of shallow water, 0:01:38.840 --> 0:01:41.520 draining north to south from Lake Okeechobee, down through the 0:01:41.600 --> 0:01:46.400 Sawgrass prairies and emptying into the Florida Bay. In Moving Pros, 0:01:46.480 --> 0:01:49.280 Douglas wrote of the hundreds of species of birds, fish, 0:01:49.320 --> 0:01:52.600 and flora that thrived in the precariously balanced ecosystem of 0:01:52.600 --> 0:01:56.559 the Everglades, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. 0:01:56.560 --> 0:01:59.440 She rightly recognized that this area was largely responsible for 0:01:59.480 --> 0:02:03.680 the rainfall in South Florida. Her book begins there are 0:02:03.720 --> 0:02:07.320 no other Everglades in the world. They are They've always 0:02:07.360 --> 0:02:10.440 been one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, 0:02:10.680 --> 0:02:15.280 never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them. A 0:02:15.400 --> 0:02:19.560 tireless and often intimidating advocate, she founded the organization Friends 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:21.800 of the Everglades at age seventy nine to fight a 0:02:21.840 --> 0:02:25.080 proposed jetport in the middle of the wetlands. The airport 0:02:25.080 --> 0:02:27.120 plan was scrapped, and Douglas spent the rest of her 0:02:27.160 --> 0:02:31.480 life defending the Everglades. John rath Child, who edited her 0:02:32.280 --> 0:02:35.440 seven autobiography, Voice of the River, described her in the 0:02:35.440 --> 0:02:38.000 book's introduction as she appeared at a public meeting in 0:02:38.040 --> 0:02:42.359 Everglades City in ninety three. Mrs Douglas was half the 0:02:42.400 --> 0:02:44.880 sides of her fellow speakers, and she wore huge dark 0:02:44.960 --> 0:02:47.640 glasses along with the huge floppy hat that made her 0:02:47.639 --> 0:02:51.320 look like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Igor Dravinsky. When 0:02:51.360 --> 0:02:54.079 she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and more or less 0:02:54.120 --> 0:02:56.639 came to order. Her voice had the sobering effect of 0:02:56.639 --> 0:02:59.640 a one room schoolmarms. The tone itself seemed to tame 0:02:59.639 --> 0:03:02.519 the rowtiest of the local stone crabbers. Plus the developers 0:03:02.680 --> 0:03:06.960 and the lawyers on both sides. There are two seasons 0:03:06.960 --> 0:03:09.720 in the Everglades, the dry winter and the monsoon summer, 0:03:10.000 --> 0:03:13.480 and scientists now understand that seasonal fluctuations in water levels 0:03:13.480 --> 0:03:16.600 are key to maintaining the delicate equilibrium between competing plant 0:03:16.600 --> 0:03:20.680 and animal species, but that balance has been dangerously disturbed 0:03:20.720 --> 0:03:24.360 by decades of habitat loss and short sighted water management tactics. 0:03:24.840 --> 0:03:27.160 The River of Grass is no longer a free flowing 0:03:27.160 --> 0:03:29.640 sheet of water, but sliced up and boxed in by 0:03:29.720 --> 0:03:32.840 dams and dikes, creating floods in some areas and drought 0:03:32.880 --> 0:03:37.960 in others. Congress passed the comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan back 0:03:38.000 --> 0:03:40.520 in the year two thousand, but the funds to implement 0:03:40.560 --> 0:03:44.080 the plan were never secured. In the meantime, Lake a Kochobee, 0:03:44.200 --> 0:03:46.680 historically the water source that fed the southward flow of 0:03:46.720 --> 0:03:50.040 the River of Grass, has become hopelessly polluted, largely by 0:03:50.080 --> 0:03:54.560 agricultural runoff in. High levels of phosphorus and nitrogen in 0:03:54.560 --> 0:03:57.080 the lake caused a toxic algae bloom that prompted the 0:03:57.080 --> 0:04:01.080 governor to issue a state of emergency. Eric Eichenberg, CEO 0:04:01.200 --> 0:04:04.360 of the Everglades Foundation and one time student at Douglas's 0:04:04.440 --> 0:04:07.600 namesake High School, says that Congress will have to reauthorize 0:04:07.600 --> 0:04:10.280 funding for the restoration, but that if everything goes well, 0:04:10.520 --> 0:04:12.480 the River of Grass could be restored in as little 0:04:12.520 --> 0:04:16.280 as eight years. He believes that Douglas, who died at 0:04:16.279 --> 0:04:18.960 the age of eight, would be energized by the effort. 0:04:20.160 --> 0:04:23.240 Among Douglas's many honors and awards was the Presidential Medal 0:04:23.240 --> 0:04:27.320 of Freedom, conferred by Bill Clinton. In the year two thousand, 0:04:27.400 --> 0:04:30.279 she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. 0:04:30.839 --> 0:04:34.200 Douglas's ashes were scattered in the Everglades National Park over 0:04:34.279 --> 0:04:42.919 the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area. Today's episode was written 0:04:42.960 --> 0:04:45.599 by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff 0:04:45.640 --> 0:04:47.520 is a production of I Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works. 0:04:47.880 --> 0:04:50.120 For more on this and lots of other persevering topics, 0:04:50.200 --> 0:04:52.680 visit our home planet how Stuff Works dot com, and 0:04:52.760 --> 0:04:55.000 for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the heart 0:04:55.080 --> 0:04:57.599 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your 0:04:57.640 --> 0:04:58.320 favorite shows.