Environment: Lady of the Everglades

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The manager of the fight to preserve this threatened enclave is herself a rara avis. Born in Minneapolis in 1890, Douglas was reared near Boston and graduated from Wellesley in 1912. Caught in an unhappy marriage, she fled in 1915 to Florida to become a reporter on the Miami Herald, where her father was the editor in chief. Miami was then a bustling pinelands town, and the region was primitive: few roads, duckboard walks between shanties, mules plowing in burlap "muck shoes." Douglas rambled widely, collecting material for newspaper articles and later for short stories, living through terrifying events like the 1928 hurricane that destroyed a mud dike and killed nearly 2,000 people. "I've seen it," she snaps in her patrician accent. "I've seen it all."

And that is what she constantly reminds bureaucrats and county commissioners in private lobbying sessions and in theatrical public hearings. Her frail, 5-ft. 1-in. frame swaddled in flowery dresses, her head topped with floppy hats, thick-lensed spectacles perched on her bird-beak nose, Douglas is an arresting figure who explains her mission in mischievously simplistic terms: "It's women's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping, isn't it?" She is also a master manipulator. "I'm just a tough old woman," she avows. "They can't be rude to me. I have all this white hair. I take advantage of every thing I can—age, hair, disability—because my cause is just." Says Hydrologist Jim Hartwell, one of Douglas' advisers: "Marjory has stage presence. I look at the expressions on the faces of decision makers. She grabs them." A frequent and respectful adversary agrees. Says John Maloy, executive director of the region's water management district, which has authorized large-scale drainage projects: "Mrs. Douglas has had a great effect on people like me. We've closed the gap between how far out in front she is and how far behind I am."

Marjory's Army is currently appealing a zoning decision that would allow a condominium development in Upper Key Largo. Environmentalists contend that it will destroy the only living coral reef in the U.S. Douglas' main goal, however, is a $60 million scheme to buy and restore 30,000 acres of drained land above Lake Okeechobee. The project's chances are slim; it is caught in a jurisdictional dispute between the Corps of Engineers and the state. Beyond that, the future of the Everglades is threatened by the conflicting interests of seven county governments. Marjory Douglas presses on, however, exhorting the troops with a favorite line from Thomas Babington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome: "And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers,/ And the temple of his gods?" What keeps her spirits buoyed is visits to the Everglades, like one on a recent early evening. Recalls Douglas: "There was still a faint light. The first star still hadn't come out. The horizon was very far away, and there it was stretching dark and quiet but breathing and still alive." —By Anastasia Toufexis. Reported by William McWhirter/Miami