Toby Muir

Partial Transcript: I’m Toby Muir. I met Marjory, or I guess, more accurately, Marjory met me on my first day of life in 1946 when she came to the hospital to see me in the maternity ward where I was on display and she came, of course, to visit my mother and celebrate the occasion. And my mother was a writer; she had begun her writing in Miami in 1935 when she came down to do publicity for the Roney Hyatt Plaza Hotel……. and the Biltmore Hotel – and married my father and stayed. And my father had come earlier than that in 1926 and he had met Marjory. And Marjory was one of the group of his friends - Marjory’s friends were mostly educated, literary people, people who were involved in the arts – music, writing, generally, very well-known, very popular, she was. So, that’s when my acquaintance with Marjory began. And certainly, over the next ten years, Marjory was sort of an aunt to me, growing up. She spent lots of time in our house, visiting with my parents. She did not have a telephone in her early years on Stewart Avenue. She needed to have access to the world through a telephone, so she would come and borrow and use the telephone at our house. My father was a lawyer so naturally he and my mother had a telephone. So that’s the way I became acquainted with Marjory. She was simply always a presence in my life, always an aunt, always a family member, and a loved friend and neighbor.

Partial Transcript: When Marjory wrote the book in 1947 it actually made people aware that the swamp in south Florida, central and south Florida, actually was an ecosystem, not simply a swamp and by pointing out that it actually was a river, she created a new awareness that there was actually flow, from Lake Okeechobee south from the Kissimmee river north of Lake Okeechobee all the way down to Florida Bay, and that that flow carried with it nutrients, provided fresh water for bountiful wildlife, birds and all sorts of creatures -and by reason of the geology the fact that there are sort of retaining clay layers between the oolite layers of rock that make up the substrate in south Florida, it created a unique water source. The water from the Everglades would recharge this water-bearing zone of oolite that could transmit water and clean it up too and it would flow with pressure towards the east and that meant that early sailors could go to Biscayne Bay and find places where the water could bubble up in the bay and they could dip buckets into it for fresh water. The pressure on that aquifer, known as the Biscayne aquifer, provided this, what appeared to the early settlers, to be an unlimited supply of fresh, good water. So the Everglades is a complete ecosystem; in ancient times when the Spanish first arrived, there was a population of people in south and southwest Florida that were well-fed and healthier than most Europeans because of the bountiful seafood, all of the resources available, as well as having fresh water near where they could get the fish from the sea.

Now for agriculture, the Everglades also proved to an attractive target, and that, of course, is part of the reason for the destruction; as canals were dug in order to drain the Everglades, there was a loss of the habitat, loss of that fresh water, and a loss of the flow to Florida Bay in the south. In fact, when Marjory came to Florida in 1915 there was just a, the Everglades was pretty much still untapped, but today there is less than half of the original area of the Everglades remaining.

Partial Transcript: When the idea of an Everglades jetport was proposed, people who were aware of the importance of the Everglades were simply astounded that any rational developer could contemplate placing an industrial facility over the water supply, because clearly the people who proposed that did not understand that the water from the Everglades was the water that came into the homes of south Floridians as drinking water and with the expectation of large growth it certainly did not make sense to build an industrial facility with all of its poisons and toxins to be introduced to the water supply and we’ve certainly seen that with the airports the polychlorinated biphenyls , PCBs, that were used to retard fire in transformers, those are toxins that do not biodegrade and it took a great deal of education and that was one of those things that Marjory with her wonderful elocution and her ability to sort of have that dignified, or of the strong older woman, she was able to command respect that other spokesmen might not have commanded.

Partial Transcript: Well, local people in Miami can remember a time when every afternoon the rains came through like clockwork about 3:00 pm. And what happened with development, in particular the westward movement of the concrete and the development, is that those thunderclouds that formed with the evaporation over the Everglades and then moved east over the coastal zone became less regular and dropped their rain further west. And I think that clearly whenever you take a natural space and develop it with concrete, with roads and people and so forth, it is going to increase the temperature, it’s going to reduce the transpiration and the rain, the precipitation that would fall so, yes, I think it has had an impact on local climate.

Partial Transcript: Marjory always felt that Ernest Coe had not received enough credit and, of course, she wrote the book and became the “one who wrote the book” but she always gave credit to those people who had come before and were interested, generally, in the preservation of the Everglades, the people who were crying to a non-listening political population and, certainly, Ernest Coe would be the person you would have to identify as a primary spokesman.

Partial Transcript: Yes; well Marjory told my mother, when she was very old, so my mother was around 20 years younger than Marjory, she said “I wonder what would have happened to me if I had not written that book”. And remember that when she wrote the book in 1947 she was pretty far along in years, she was I think approaching, well she was born in 1890, so she was 60 approximately. And the book was something that she wrote because she had an opportunity to earn some money for the book and it was a topic that interested her generally, but it wasn’t for the purpose of making an environmental statement. It was for the purpose of earning an income and writing a good piece of work that would be accurate and would be perceived by people who knew about the Everglades as a good source book. So, she was motivated I believe more by the desire to write a good book and do her best and she was a good craftsman, a good writer. But then, at a later time, when people were having a trouble advocating and explaining the importance of the Everglades, people like Joe Browder who was certainly an environmental hero, essentially came to Marjory and said “Marjory, you wrote the book, you have a presence, you are a recognized individual , we need you, won’t you please join us as an advocate for the protection of the Everglades and the opposition to this very bad idea of building this industrial facility, this airport, right over our watershed, the source of our water”. So, Marjory, at that time, was about 80 years old and she was at a time when many people would not take up a challenge like that, but she was a person who was filled with enthusiasm for lots of things, she was curious about what the next chapter would show, she always wanted to know what was happening and so forth. So, she took it up; she said “What can I do for you?”.

And then she became a wonderful weapon in the toolbox of those people who were developing the strategy for opposing that really dumb, destructive idea. And it brought her new life because suddenly she had more excitement, she had a new generation of people who didn’t know her, who were appreciating what she was saying, she was inspiring young women, she was creating this stir. And she did it because of her sheer competence, her wonderful ability to express herself, and, of course, the fact she was an authority. She had written the book.

So a lot of her impact was based on the book, and then when the time came for her to advocate for the Everglades, her Wellesley College debating experience and her literary experience all came together to enable her to be simply a powerful spokesperson for the Everglades.

Partial Transcript: When Marjory started the Friends of the Everglades it was largely at the encouragement of Joe Browder, terrific guy, former TV guy, passionate advocate for Everglades protection. And the concept was to get a sufficiently large group that could respond and attend hearings and to be an advocacy group for the Everglades. And Marjory always had capable people to help her in making it work – Joe Podger, Michael Chenoweth, Pam Pierce who was a law school class mate of mine, and they’re a married couple, Mike and Pam, although she doesn’t have the same last name. As a result, they were, as a group, although small, were able to project a presence that was greater than their numbers and have a significant effect on the public perception of the Everglades and its importance. So that’s really the story of the origin and purpose of the Friends of the Everglades and I think it was, and has been extremely successful in educating the public, making people aware that the Everglades is an important geographic feature, a true river bringing fresh water to south Florida, needing protection.

Partial Transcript: Pretty much everything, pretty much everything that was a threat, she would respond to. She would speak before commissions, she would go to Tallahassee, she would instruct politicians, and the wonderful thing about being a woman in her eighties was that people had to be kind to her. Anyone who disagreed with her, even forcefully, would lose in that encounter. And many people who completely disagreed with her ideas of environmental protection and preserving the Everglades were people who nevertheless understood they that they should not get into a debate with her because she could make them look silly.

Partial Transcript: Well, Marjory was, first, a product of her New England heritage; she was very much a person who was imbued with the New England philosophy, the sort of transcendental ideals of harmony. And she was not a Unitarian, she was not an Episcopalian, but she had a lot of that sort of concept of the integration of nature and humankind and the need for harmony there. So as a New Englander who moved to Miami in 1915, she was very much a person who had that New England heritage that included fairness, her people were abolitionists, they were not on the other side. And in Miami there was a sort of shorthand way of identifying which side people belonged to in that mix. The people who generally came from the south and from Georgia pronounced the name of the city “Miam-uh”, while the people who came from New England and the north pronounced the name Miami (“miamee”). So, there was this dividing line, and Marjory, as a reporter for the early Miami Herald, learned to negotiate those different, those different populations in Miami. And she was always curious, she was a person who was humorous, and I think that people that see her as an environmental firebrand in her older years don’t perceive or remember the young Marjory who was a lot of fun. Her friends, my parents, of course I was much younger, and I got to know her as an adult probably around 1970, well in the mid-60’s, the 70’s. But she was funny, she was a person of great erudition, she was good company and that’s why she had such a large group of good friends, in fact, people just in this neighborhood - my parents, Marion Manley, Florida’s first architect, first registered architect who worked with some of the leading architects that developed Miami in the 20’s and 30’s - they were friends and that group of literary, scientific people.

Miami, although it was a small community in those days, attracted, through the years, a good many quite sophisticated literary people; Philip Wylie was one, Robert Frost wintered here; the New England winters were too cold for him too after, well, after about 1940 or so. So, she was known for being fun and entertaining, good company, a writer, interested in current affairs, interested in what was going on and interested in talking with her friends. Her mission though, she didn’t have the mission that came to her with Joe Browder’s request that she help with this new cause. She’s always believed in it; she had always believed in protecting wildlife and so forth, but it had not been her mission and it became her mission and I think that it probably preserved and extended her life because it made her part of current events and important things.

Partial Transcript: Well, in Miami in the early days you had always had a population of educated, intelligent women who held their own and because of social status, commanded respect. William Jennings Bryan came to Miami to work in the real estate industry where he was a great salesman and his daughter Ruth Bryan Owen became a congresswoman from south Florida. There were always Miamians, women who had that kind of authority, perhaps in part due to their relationships with men who would back them up, but nevertheless, people who were outstanding spokesmen and were not intimidated. Marjory was certainly one, Marion Manley was another, Alice Wainwright, a city commissioner, my mother who was a newspaper reporter and writer also, lots of people of that kind were spokesmen for one cause or another. Marjory’s good friend Elizabeth Virrick, who was the wife of an architect, was known for advocating for clean, safe housing and sewerage systems for the black area of Coconut Grove, where the streets were unpaved and septic tanks were not provided, sanitation was poor – all of those kinds of discriminatory things had occurred, and she was a good friend of Marjory’s. So, Marjory, my mother, other women of that sort, were all closely connected with one another with respect with issues of the day. And I think she had a place and was respected in that role that she had, and I think that was one of those things that made her kind of a unique individual. It was a combination of education, even though she did not have lots of money she had lots of influential friends and she was extremely well-regarded.

Partial Transcript: Actually no; because I worked for Florida Power and Light Company during the years when there were some issues about Florida Power and Light and I was, did work to help Florida Power and Light comply with new environmental requirements of the day and the new environmental requirements that they had to meet and what those requirements were, were sometimes in conflict with Marjory’s principles. I liked to believe that I was an advocate for good policies, both within the company and out, but for that reason, I was not actually doing legal work for Marjory in the environmental area. Now we remained as a family very close

we were very close through all those years. My father, who was a lawyer, had done work for the Tropical Audubon Society through the early years, and he was, so we were all, as a family, strongly supportive, but I was not active in the cause of Marjory, in the Friends of the Everglades. I did work for Marjory on a personal level, so I did personal legal work for her that was not part of the Friends of the Everglades work.

Partial Transcript: Well, Marjory’s legacy, Marjory’s legacy begins with her inquiring adventuresome spirit and the way she shared with other people her thoughts and her writings through the years. So, she was an influential individual with her writing and so forth through her friends and her community contacts before she wrote the book, the Everglades: River of Grass, but the book started a new perception of the Everglades. It started, just the name of the book, the title of the book, created a kind of understanding that people had not previously had. It educated people on the nature of the Everglades, and I think that its appearance in that series, the Rivers of America, its appearance as part of that, helped create that concept. So that was there when it became necessary. You had that growing awareness that toxins everyplace were killing Americans. You had Charlie Brookfield, Charles M. Brookfield Jr., who was the Audubon Society person down here in Florida who tried to educate people by taking people on tours of the Everglades during the birding season and so forth. He had been the one to search eagle nests in Maine and determine that it was DDT, the pesticide, that was actually causing the thinning of eggs, that prevented the bald eagle from reproducing. So, the bald eagle might well have been extinct but for that appreciation of the impact of those toxins. Charlie was close to Marjory, Charlie was close to my parents, and all that community of people who wanted to do the right thing with respect to South Florida.

So Marjory’s legacy involved sort of packaging those concepts and making people aware of the importance and then when the time came for Marjory to advocate, she was the person with the knowledge.

So let me start that again. So, when the time came for Marjory to advocate she was ready. She knew south Florida, she had had years of preparation as a reporter and writer on local things. She understood the birds, understood the nature of south Florida, understood the nature of the Everglades and she was able to lecture in a learned way any group of people, including people who were expert on the nature of the Everglades and its importance. And I think during that same time it wasn’t just the way she advocated, but she also helped educate a new generation of younger people, especially young women who were inspired by what she represented. And when you talk to some younger women who came in contact with that enthusiasm and that intelligence and that ability to advocate and, also, that poise, her ability to stand before a crowded room and deliver a message so effectively, I think that that is the thing that made the impression that people would carry away after an encounter with Marjory. So, I think that ultimately it was the fact that she was an environmental hero by reason of being the right person, in the right place, at the right time with the right training and preparation so that she could carry that banner and deliver that message and fight that war. And, of course, it was a wonderful thing that she had, in particular, Joe Browder, as the person who was able to enlist her and get her fired up about this cause that meant everything to her over the remainder of her life and meant everything to the people who saw what she did and the young women and a generation that were influenced by her, sort of the way a great teacher inspires a new generation.

Partial Transcript: Miami in 1946, you had a building boom; soldiers and airmen that had trained in Miami, remembered their time in Miami with affection and wanted to come down here to live and you had a sudden boom in construction. Smaller houses for these new, young families who were aided by the Veteran’s Administration in obtaining loans, and they were coming down to return to school. Many of them enrolled in the University of Miami, which increased its population significantly. And you had this rapid growth and with the rapid growth you began to have some concerns about the nature of the growth. Was the growth reasonable and prudent, was it in the right place? Was it causing damage? And in general, those who favored building and developing were the ones who were in control. And there were very few voices saying “now wait a second - are there not some resources that are a heritage, that we should preserve and maintain?” And there were some voices and after the book was published in 1947, Marjory was one of them. But there were a lot of other people who were allies in that great war.

You had some other women like Marjory Carr who came to the fore as she was struggling against the Cross Florida Barge Canal which was to short circuit the trip by water around the Florida Keys and would do significant damage to that environment. You had Rachel Carson with her book The Silent Spring was making people aware of the poisons and the toxins that were killing animals and having a serious, adverse impact on human beings as well. There were a good many people all enlisted in different part of that important picture, protecting Americans from poisons and toxins and protecting our heritage of trees, and plants and wildlife and so forth. So, Marjory fit into that by being an additional voice, and in particular a voice with respect to the southern Everglades and the jetport and that process. Now you had others who were involved with the Kissimmee River Basin. Marjory, of course, was able to advocate for the protection of the Kissimmee River; the Kissimmee River was channelized by the Corps of Engineers to make it deliver waste water more efficiently into Lake Okeechobee where it could better produce algae blooms and, interestingly enough, the education reached the point where ultimately that process of channelizing the Kissimmee River has been partly reversed.

So I think that Marjory was known as the Everglades lady; that was her place and the other allies in the movement had other particular things. Marjory Carr’s husband Archie was a scientist and his field was the sea turtles and he made people aware of the importance of protecting the sea turtles which were approaching extinction, as so many other species were. So, Marjory fit into that picture like a piece of the puzzle; all allies, all struggling to educate the public, all struggling to try to prevent the kind of rampant overdevelopment that would ultimately end up soiling everybody’s nest.

Partial Transcript: Well Marjory’s importance to the Everglades was as much recognized when the Department of Environmental Resources building in Tallahassee was named the Marjory Stoneman Douglas building. And the Marjory Stoneman Douglas area of the Everglades National Park was named for her. And in Miami you have a number of other recognitions, having a street, the high school where tragic events occurred. So, she is one of those famous people that many people remember the name but don’t remember exactly what it was that she stood for. Now the good thing about having the name remembered that way is people will ask that question – “Who was Marjory Stoneman Douglas?” – spelled with a “Y” - Marjory. And I think when they take the time to find out who she was they will take inspiration from that character who, in her eighties, launched a new venture, advocacy for a natural resource. And did it successfully and had an impact. And it’s not just the impact that is important, not just the destination but also the journey, who she was , how she got there, how she expressed herself and what she did with the time remaining to her.

I don’t think she ever understood that she would live to the age of 108. But think how long her productive years were. Until she was 100 she was still able to take care of herself at home. And later, of course, after that, she was blessed to have a number of wonderful helpers - Martha Hubbard, Sharon Richardson, people who acted as her secretary and helper and continued to enable her to be effective after the age of 100. So, what does she stand for? She stands for so many things it is hard to encapsulate in one word, but she was effective with respect to preservation of the quality of water in south Florida and she was an inspiration to more than one generation of people.

Partial Transcript: That’s hard for me to say because, personally, she was a family member, personally, she was an aunt to me. She was always there, she was always present. She was, from the time I was a little boy, dropped off there by my mother, to the time I ran errands to drop things off, visiting with Marjory and so forth she was a family member. So, I think that the fact that I knew her from the day I was born until the day she died, and she was just always present part of my family and life. So how do you say what a person like that mean to one. She was just Marjory. I called her “Jarjee” when I was a little boy so that name sort of took with some people who had trouble saying the name Marjory. It’s just hard to say what she was.

Partial Transcript: I think that the range of Marjory’s interest over her life make her an inspiration to people in lots of different areas. Certainly, not everyone gets to live to 108, not everyone gets to live to be 100 and be effective for so many years, as Marjory. But she had so many lives all wrapped up in one. She had the education that enabled her to understand the world in a way that many young women did not understand it when she graduated in, I think, around 1910 from Wellesley. And, so, she served in the Red Cross in France during World War I, she was a writer, she covered events, she led that life of a reporter and writer. She was widely interested in all kinds of topics. And then, after the book Everglades: River of Grass, then she sort of had the whole thing together. And was ready for the opportunities that came along next. And, so, as an inspiration she represents the value of the life of preparation. One can never tell what’s going to come along in the way of an adventure. She was always learning, she was always reading, she was always communicating. And I think that if you remove the environmental component where she had the greatest impact at the end of her life, she remains inspirational just from being a person who led a life of such learning and curiosity.