Marjory Stoneman Douglas and “Marjory’s Army” as her group came to be known, stopped the jetport in its tracks, garnered restrictions on farmers’ use of land and chemicals, saw to the removal of the Army’s “improvements,” and enjoyed the addition of thousands of acres to the Everglades National Park, where they could be protected from land grabbing developers. In 1975 and 1976, Marjory was rewarded for her hard work by being named Conservationist of the Year two years in a row. In 1989, she became the Sierra Club’s honorary vice president. Protecting the Everglades became Marjory’s life work, a job she loved. She never considered retiring and continued living in the same house she’d been in since 1926 and worked every day for Friends of the Everglades until her passing in 1998 at 109 years old. She saved millions of acres.
“Find out what needs to be done and do it!”
— Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Join Marjory’s Army!
You can contact Friends of the Everglades and continue her work: www.everglades.org
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Bard of the Backwood
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings used to play “Story Lady” in Washington, D.C., as a girl, making up stories to tell the boys from her neighborhood. As an adult, she and her husband moved to Cross Creek, Florida, where she fell in love with the unique people of south Florida and their hearts in the face of hardship, poverty, and starvation, which she immortalized in her memoir Cross Creek. Like Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rawlings helped focus the nation’s attention on an area previously disregarded as a “wasteland” through her O’Henry award-winning short stories, like “Gal Young Un” and “The Black Secret,” and her novels—South Moon Under, The Sojourner, and the children’s classic, The Yearling. The Yearling shows Rawlings at the top of her craft, with her beautifully rendered story and sense of place winning a Pulitzer prize award in 1939. The Yearling was made into a film that received both critical and popular acclaim; both the novel and the film are regarded as classics for their sensitive portrayal of life in the Florida Everglades.
Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness
Born in 1901, pioneer rainforest activist Gertrude Elizabeth Loertsher’s fascination with native peoples began as a child in Switzerland when she read about American Indians and acted out the stories with her friends after school. She didn’t feel the same pull toward academia, however, and pursued horticulture and social work rather than a more traditional educational career. She spent a year in England with a Quaker family whose way of life and pacifist philosophy she found imminently appealing. After a failed marriage to a neighbor’s son back home in Bern, Trudi, as she liked to be called, traveled to Germany in the 1930s, where she was shocked by the rise of fascism. The daughter of a Jewish mother and a Protestant minister father, Trudi’s own sensibility toward peace and justice was poles apart from the Nazi party. Upon Hitler’s election as chancellor in 1933, the Nazis’ power was dominant; any actions or talk against it were treated as treason.
Trudi’s sympathies were entirely anti-Nazi, and she risked her life many times to get information about Nazi horror stories to the newspapers in her native Switzerland, outsmarting the ruling party of martinets and murderers again and again. Times got harder and getting out of Germany became increasingly difficult; Gertrude finally inveigled passage to France, where she worked for the Resistance, traveling to the United States to aid other European refugees. Upon returning to France, she was put in prison after the Nazi takeover.
Ultimately the Swiss government got her out of France, and she made her way to Mexico to rest and get some distance from political strife. She developed a new interest in photography, making women factory workers her subject. Her photographs were compelling, filled with both a beauty and depth in the faces weathered by difficult lives. Mexico itself filled Trudi with awe; it was both a new home and a muse catapulting her toward discovery. She traveled the vast country in search of the meaning she knew lay in the land. Her first sight of the Mexican jungle was an epiphany: “This jungle filled me with a sense of wonder that has never left me,” she noted many years later. The mysterious forest and Lacandon Indians who lived there showed her a way to live in the world that was vastly different from her European background. Trudi learned from these people, studying their traditional ways only to discover their life in the jungle was in jeopardy; Mexican peasants were being relocated to the rainforest state of Chiapas bordering Guatemala and left to scratch a living from the dirt.
Trudi’s life was in flux, as well. She met and married Danish archeologist, cartographer, and traveler, Franz Blom, who shared Trudi’s fascination with the Mayan culture and Indian peoples. Together, they pursued their love of the rainforest and thirst for knowledge constantly, mapping the land and recording their findings in journals and Trudi’s photography, which they published. The husband and wife team came to a deep understanding of the Lacondan rainforest and its people. They perceived the fragility of this environment and sought to preserve it, founding Na Bolom, a research institution and center for visiting scholars, travelers, and anyone caring to learn about the Mayan civilization and its modern descendants.
Trudi also figured a practical way to undo some of the damage Lacandones had suffered. She invited tree experts to assist her in establishing a nursery to replant the rainforest, making the trees free to anyone who would plant them. Trudi worked diligently on the lecture circuit to pay for the seedlings, building the annual crop to 30,000 trees a year before her death in 1993 (her ninety-second year). Na Bolom carries on her work educating and reforesting the Mayan rainforest.
“The time has come for us to wake up to what we are doing and take steps to stop this destruction.”
— Gertrude Blom
Jane Goodall: Not Just Monkeying Around
Born in 1934, English zoologist Jane Goodall owes her career to the fact that her divorced mother couldn’t afford to send her to college. Instead, the amateur naturalist worked in offices and waitressed in order to pay for travel to feed her great curiosity. In 1960, she received an invitation to visit a friend whose family had moved to Kenya. While there, the young woman worked up the nerve to contact Louis and Mary Leakey, who were working there to find evidence of early humans in the Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift. The Leakeys found her to be an able companion, well suited to work in the field looking for fossil fragments or at Kenya’s National Museum of Natural History, reconstructing what they found. Despite the fact that she had no formal scientific training, Dr. Louis Leakey asked Jane to go to Tanzania to conduct a lengthy study of chimpanzees in the wild. He believed that by studying chimpanzees, we stand to learn much about the life of early humans.
Jane, who was much more interested in animals than in Stone Age ancestors, jumped at the change—this would be the first such long-term study of this animal in its natural habitat. When the African government refused to allow her to work alone in the animal refuge, Jane’s mother offered to accompany her. Despite her lack of training, Jane was well suited to the task of scientific observation; she kept meticulous notes and went to any length to find chimps, hiking miles into the forest each day. Goodall’s work was the stuff of scientific revolution. She disproved many erroneous beliefs about chimpanzees. For example, she learned that they are omnivores, not vegetarian; make and use tools; have elaborate social structures and a variety of humanlike emotions; and give their young unconditional affection. She has been decried by stuffy male zoologists for giving the chimps names, like Graybeard, instead of numbers in her papers. Jane did it “her way” and outdid all the uptight academics with her commitment, endurance, and plain smarts. In many ways, she received better treatment from her subjects than her peers, especially in the heartwarming moment when a male chimpanzee accepted a nut from Jane’s hand, clasping her hand soulfully before discarding the nut. Jane was touched at his attempt to spare her feelings about the unwanted nut.
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