The Indians, before anyone else, knew that the Everglades were being destroyed. During the war there was less and less rain, in one of those long, un… - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

(The Indian Re-Organization Act) was like the small beginning of new hope, in the century-long history of man's destructiveness here, by which long ago the parakeets and the ivory-billed woodpecker had been exterminated, the egret and the white ibis only just saved by the Audubon Society that was still trying to protect the last of the roseate spoonbill, the Everglades kite and the almost vanished crocodile.

But the white man, in all his teeming variety, men of the farms and the Glades, men of the cities and of the sea, whose inertia and pigheadedness, greed and willfulness had caused all this, as if for the first time seeing what he had done, now, when it was almost too late, the white man was aroused. For the first time in South Florida since the earliest floods, there were mass meetings and protests, editorials, petitions, letters, and excited talk. Thousands, choking in acrid smoke, saw for the first time what the drainage of the Glades had brought to pass.

In 1928 Mr. Ernest F. Coe, a landscape architect who was fascinated by the strange beauty of this wilderness, conceived the idea that it should be made a national park. He fought almost single-handed, through years of depression and of disinterest, to gain public backing. His tall, spare figure, his suave voice, the absent gaze of his blue eyes as he talked and wrote and argued and lectured and, as he said, "made a nuisance of himself," was the very figure of a man obsessed. He was laughed at and he laughed at himself. He sacrificed his career to keep the hope of the park going.