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In “The Nature of
the Everglades” Marjory Stoneman Douglas talks about the Everglades. She
discusses in such a way that it almost seems like a place you would see in a
fairytale. Every description she makes displays the Everglades as being a
beautiful, wonderful, and one of a kind place. For example, the quote “Then the
lion-colored light shuts down as the rain does, or the clouds fill with their
steely haze every outline of the visible world and water falls solid, in
sheets, in cascades” (Douglas 115). Douglas could have just said something like
‘when it rains here, it pours, one can hardly see two feet in front of them’,
but instead she made it beautiful, a work of art using literary devices and she
does this throughout the excerpt. Doing this leads me to believe this is a
place that is near and dear to Douglas, she cares about it and wants to
represent it in the best way possible.
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Douglas also goes
on to talk about the development of the earth, focusing on the development of
Florida and the Everglades. The section entitled “The River of Time” takes a
look at Florida from the time it only looked like an island to its emergence
from the ocean to the state we know it to be today. I enjoyed this section
because Douglas went through all of the different events that Florida endured
to form its shape and size, its lakes and rivers, and the formation of the
Everglades. To get to its current picture, Florida went through times of high
sea levels and low sea levels due to glaciation, which really formed Florida’s
shape, lake Okeechobee, rivers, the Everglades, and the Ten Thousand Islands. Douglas
ends this section with mentioning that even though Florida and the Everglades
seem established, over time there is going to be change both by man and the
earth. “Time moves again for the Everglades, not in ages and in centuries, but
as man knows it, in hours and days, the small events of his own lifetime, who
was among the last of the living forms to invade its shores” (Douglas 134).
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The last section
of Douglas’s excerpt is entitled “Life on the Rock” discussing the inhabitants
of the Everglades. First mentioned are the different plants that reside there,
what they look like and how they shape the environment. Then the animals and
how they interact with each other as well as with the habitat they live in.
Eventually the first humans come into the picture, Indians decided to settle
there where the pines are thin. Douglas discusses how they lived off the land
and eventually white men came to live there as well. Through the rest of the
section more plants and animals are discussed, how they live, what they do for
one another, how everything lives in harmony. This section in my opinion is
fantastic because you’re learning about how everything lives and thrives in the
Everglades, something you otherwise would not know, even if you visited the
place itself. “Where these mangroves came from, to this young mud over the
older rock, cannot be guessed…The mangrove here is at least as old as the Everglades,
of which it marks the end” (Douglas 149).
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