In the early 1940s, while working as a journalist at the Miami Herald, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was asked to contribute to the Rivers Of America Series by writing about the Miami River. She was unimpressed by the river, so asked if she could instead write about the Everglades. She researched the Everglades for five years at a time where little scientific knowledge existed about the area, and in 1947, the year that the Everglades was designated a national park, The Everglades: River Of Grass was published. The book’s first line is one of the most famous written about the good ol’ Glades:

There are no other Everglades in the world.
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, 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 meaning the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.

Stoneman helped to educate the public and protect the park until she died in 1998. She 108 years old. What a pretty little bird.

MP3: Lonnie Mack – Florida