Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an author, journalist, and environmental advocate. Also known as the “Guardian of the Glades,” she is credited with helping save the wetlands from development. She was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame in 1986 and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton in 1993.
Stoneman Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass in 1947. The nonfiction book highlighted the wetlands’ rich natural ecosystem, focusing on the unique plants and animals living there. Her book led to more public appreciation for the land, which many people previously regarded as worthless. That same year, she served on a committee to establish Everglades National Park.
Two decades after her book, Stoneman Douglas took action again. This time, it was because developers targeted a site in the heart of the Everglades to build the world’s largest jetport. It would have been five times the size of JFK International in New York City.
The Dade County Port Authority (DCPA) ultimately acquired 24,960 acres of land straddling the Dade-Collier County line, about 55 miles west of downtown Miami.
Another environmentalist involved in saving the Everglades, Joe Browder, alerted Stoneman Douglas about DCPA’s plans.
“The (southeastern regional) representative here of the National Audubon Society came to me to tell me that he needed help to fight a proposed jetport out on the Tamiami Trail that would have, with its industrial development, polluted all of the Everglades’ water,” Stoneman Douglas said.
She, along with Browder and other environmental advocates, founded an organization to stop construction and save the wetlands.
“When (Stoneman Douglas) was 79 years old, she felt compelled to create a group, Friends of the Everglades, because of a really dire threat facing the Everglades, which was the Everglades Jetport,” Eve Samples, who leads the organization today, said.
"There must be progress, certainly. But we must ask ourselves what kind of progress we want, and what price we want to pay for it,” Stoneman Douglas said. “If, in the name of progress, we want to destroy everything beautiful in our world, and contaminate the air we breathe, and the water we drink, then we are in trouble."
The battle begins again
Now, the organization Stoneman Douglas founded to save the Everglades is involved in a lawsuit over development on the same property – a 39-square-mile piece of land along the Tamiami Trail in the Big Cypress National Preserve. What was once a small training airport now serves as a detention center for immigrants. State officials call the facility “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The name reflects both the infamous former federal prison, Alcatraz, and one of the most well-known inhabitants of the Everglades, the alligator.
Friends of the Everglades filed suit along with the Center for Biological Diversity on June 27, before the facility even opened. The groups seek to shut down operations at the center, alleging officials violated state and federal laws during the construction of the new immigrant detention center.
And how apropos the same group Stoneman Douglas founded is one of the plaintiffs in the current lawsuit to protect the same site.
Gov. Ron DeSantis called the lawsuit “frivolous.” He took control of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport from Miami-Dade County via emergency powers to build the facility. The airport was built in eight days, thanks, in part, to Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie.
“The site here at the Dade Collier airport in the heart of South Florida was a unique opportunity because while it was an existing footprint with a massive runway, it was something that was not necessarily full or being used all the time,” DeSantis said at a press conference.
It was designed to detain up to 3,000 people and has an estimated annual operating budget of $450 million, according to the Florida Policy Institute. Since its opening, thousands of immigrants from all over the country have been detained there.
“Marjory would be outraged,” Samples said. “She would be giving hell to the powers that be.”
“I'm confident that she would be vocal, she would be relentless, and she would be pointing out that these battles were fought and won in the late 60s, early 70s, and the public has spoken, and the public does not want intense development in this very sensitive region of the Everglades, and that the political leaders who are doing it are doing it in defiance of what the public wants,” she added.
The current lawsuit says the detention center could harm the entire ecosystem. And advocates like Samples said they won’t stop fighting to shut it down and protect the Everglades.
Where it all began
Former U.S. Sen. Henry M. Jackson (D-Washington) introduced the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, in early 1969.
It was signed by former President Richard Nixon the following year.
The law requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of proposed actions before making decisions. It also created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which still exists today. The CEQ was established within the Executive Office of the President and works with federal agencies to develop policies and initiatives.
Senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, Elise Bennett, calls it a “look before you leap” type of law. And it’s the same legislation that environmental groups are suing under now.
An environmental impact study of the Everglades Jetport by Dr. Luna Leopold and his team was a factor in Nixon's decision to sign the legislation.
Leopold found that development at the site would have caused irreparable harm to the fragile ecosystem.
“It's such a striking tale of our origin story at Friends of the Everglades, but also the origin story of NEPA and the environmental protections we stitched together as a country at that time,” Samples said. “In the late 60s, early 70s, it was an environmental awakening, and now all of those protections are being tested, just about all of them, and it's happening again in the Everglades.”
Samples’ organization has documented at least 20 acres of newly paved asphalt for the detention center, and she’s worried that without documented or vetted stormwater systems to treat runoff, the Everglades will be more susceptible to pollution.
The detention center has no electricity; generators power all the lights. Water and sewage systems do not exist; water and jet fuel are trucked in, and sewage is trucked out.
“So all of that intense activity in what used to be a pretty quiet area, really a training runway, brings a lot of risk to the ecosystem,” Samples said. “With each passing day, that risk and the threat to the ecosystem is amplified.”
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This story was produced by WUSF as part of a statewide journalism initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
