Why Restore the Everglades - Part 3
America's Everglades
are in Serious Peril
There are no other Everglades in the world.
— Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
River of Grass captures the beauty of the Everglades and the rich complexity
of its landscapes and seascapes, sawgrass sloughs, cypress swamps and coastal
lagoons and bays. The greater Everglades ecosystem, called the south Florida
ecosystem, stretches south from Orlando through the Chain of Lakes, the Kissimmee
Valley, Lake Okeechobee, the remaining Everglades, and on to the waters of Florida
Bay and the coral reefs. This south Florida ecosystem is much larger than what
most people see when they visit the "Everglades" — usually just
Everglades National Park.
The Everglades of today are not the same place that Mrs. Douglas wrote about in 1947. People in great numbers have encroached upon the ecosystem that once was the domain of panthers, alligators and flocks of birds so vast that they would darken the sky. With the arrival of people came the desire to manage the water, to tame the free flowing River of Grass from Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Keys.
They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, and the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.
— Marjory Stoneman Douglas in The Everglades: River of Grass
