Marjory Stoneman Douglas and an Everglades Environmentalism

Abstract

Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) moved to Florida in 1915, and over the course of the next seven decades, would become one of the sharpest voices campaigning for the protection of the tropic jungle of south Florida and the Everglades. Her Everglades environmentalism was forged in the offices of The Miami Herald where she worked as a journalist, with colleagues she served with on the Tropic Everglades National Park Association, an advocacy group for a proposed Everglades National Park, in a landmark contribution to and now classic of Everglades literature, her 1947 work, The Everglades: River of Grass, and in the environmental nonprofit organization she founded in 1969, Friends of the Everglades. This chapter examines the environmentalism of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and connects the development of Douglas’s bioregionalism ethic and support for Everglades protections with wider discourses of environmental sustainability.