"Boo louder" - Marjory Stoneman Douglas - She knew how to handle "town halls" years ago

The National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame was established in 1963 to honor Americans who have made major contributions to the nation´s environmental and natural-resource protection efforts. In March, NWF added two new inductees to the list of 23 other people whose legacies were previously honored: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Morris King Udall.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was never anybody´s saccharine little old lady in tennis shoes. Five feet of feistiness topped off by a floppy hat, the influential writer and activist once acknowledged: "They call me a nice old woman, but I´m not."

For Douglas, all was fair in her fight to save every ounce and inch of the Everglades--a subtropical wilderness of water, wildlife and sawgrass covering millions of acres of South Florida. At contentious public meetings on the fate of the Glades, she was not above playing up her deafness when urged to yield the floor. She also knew how to scold the opposition into silence: "I knew your father and he would be so ashamed of you," she once told a representative of the Army Corps of Engineers.

In the second act of a life that ran 108 years (born in 1890, Douglas died May 14, 1998), the Floridian helped Americans fall in love with a place that many people had long dismissed as worthless swampland. She struck her first blow for preservation in 1947, with publication of her lyrical, best-selling book The Everglades: River of Grass, which fanned public opinion in favor of Everglades conservation. Decades later, when Douglas was pushing 80, she struck again, founding the conservation group Friends of the Everglades in order to fight the building of a jetport in the wetlands.
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"Boo louder," she told an audience of farmers and developers who were jeering the octogenarian as she walked to the dais at yet another meeting several years ago. She laughed. They booed. Then Marjory Stoneman Douglas spoke her mind.

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?articleId=271&issueId=29

Oh how I wish our politicians had half the stones that Douglas had!

We all should be so active!

I love this

she used to go to these raucous environmental meetings dressed like she was going to high tea. She wore her "Sunday go to meeting" dress and hat. She topped it off with white gloves. She was a tiny woman too.

Then when she got up to speak, she landed on them like a ton of bricks. I would love to see a clip of that.

President Clinton gave her "The Presidential Medal of Freedom."

Kick

A tribute to Marjory Stoneman Douglas, 'Mother of the Everglades'


She also reminds me of my dearly departed grandmother.


Member of the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame, March, 2000

She probably never even heard of Chris Wallace but she was prophetic beyond her own imagination.

And I have to wonder if she ever met Prescott Boosh. :eyes:

She's a heroine :hi:.

I love it :rofl:

:hi:

It was torturous to get through it because it's a 200 page book that got stretched out to 500 pages with these interminable descriptions. Not only that, but they keep adding to it.

If someone wants to revive interest in Douglas and the Everglades, he should produce an edited version.