Marjory Stoneman Douglas

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Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Some of the legislation and policies implemented today are as a result of continued efforts and campaigns of particular individuals in history who made it their mission to fight for a better society. Despite the odds being against, such heroes stood their ground, and their legacy still lives on through the changes they brought to the community. The conservation of the environment has been a contentious issue for decades, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas was on the frontline fighting for the preservation of the Miami’s Everglades that were on the verge of encroachment by human settlement. She became influential in the 1900s, where through her articles and short stories she shone a light on the plans to drain and reclaim the region for housing and development purposes.
Although she spent the greater part of her adult life as an environmentalist and journalist in Miami, she was born in April 1890 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Throughout her childhood years, she showed her passion for stories and writing talents. Douglas received an award at the age of seventeen for a publication made in the Boston Herald. A few years after her birth, Marjory’s parents divorced following a sporadic mental condition that her mother Lillian contracted. The outcome of the split was that she had to move to her mother’s hometown of Taunton, Massachusetts where her talents manifested even the more (Douglas, 39). According to history, Douglas had a happily living with her mother, and the influence of well-educated women in her life ensured that she was educated.

After finishing high school, she enrolled at the Wellesley College for a degree in English and later graduated in 1912.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born at a time when male chauvinism was prevalent, and women were denied fundamental rights such as taking part in voting. Her life as an activist started when she was a young lady in her college years after she took up the fight for suffrage and racial injustice in America. Just like most girls in the early 1900s, she got married at a young age to Kenneth Douglas who was thirty years older than her. The marriage was an unhappy one and did not last longer forcing Marjory to seek divorce and relocate to Miami in 1915. It was here that her career as a journalist ensued after she rejoined her father, Frank to work in his newspaper called the Miami Herald. During this time, Miami was experiencing population explosion with more than people residing in the area that was a former wilderness.
At first, she found the job unsatisfactory, and this led to her enrollment in the army as the first female to ever enlist in the greater state of Florida. However, this was short-lived, and Douglas opted to join the Red Cross in 1918. She returned to Miami two years later after serving tours in Europe and embarked on her passion for writing. This time she became the assistant editor with a column dubbed The Gallery that focused on the cultural and the natural history of Florida. She was a local celebrity, and soon she became the public voice for the preservation of the Everglades. After a decade of freelance writing, she was approached to write a book on the environment that was published in 1947.
The book, The Everglades: River of Grass, was a compilation of her thoughts on environmental conservation and she was nationally known in different circles in America (Douglas, 105). She spent the remaining part of her life till her death in 1998 at the age of 108, advocating for alternatives to reclaiming the wilderness that was part of the ecosystem of the region. The Friends of the Everglades was established in 1969 to catapult her efforts of opposing the development. The impact of Marjory Stoneman Douglas has been beneficial over the years, and it has influenced the land policies in Florida. Bill Clinton recognized her environmentalist work by awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993.
Works Cited
Douglas, Marjory Stoneman, and Michael Grunwald. The Everglades: river of grass. Pineapple Press Inc, 2007.