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Readers: Last week’s column about the Everglades mentioned Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
She’s one of two women of the same first name – different spellings and operating at opposite ends of the state – who shaped Florida’s environmental legacy. The other, Marjorie Harris Carr, worked for years to block the Cross-Florida Barge Canal and protect the Ocklawaha River in North Central Florida (see our 2020 column).
Here’s more on the two from my 1998 obituary on Douglas and Carr’s 1997 obituary in our Gannett partner newspaper, the Florida Times-Union:
Marjory Stoneman Douglas came to Florida when the Everglades stretched to the shores of Lake Okeechobee. In her lifetime, she watched it dwindle to a fenced-off polluted jewel, a fraction of its breadth. At a time when most people’s lives were winding down, she started a crusade to save what was left.