Photographs by Jeremy Sachs-Michaels

"The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass." - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

The Everglades: River of Grass

In 1947 Marjory Stoneman Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass  a non-fiction title that explored the Everglades and redefined the area as essential to both the people and the wildlife of South Florida. Years later it continues to be an influential text on nature conservation and a defining reference for information on the area. It sold out within a month of it's printing and has since sold  over 500,000 copies.  Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American writer and environmentalist known for her defense of the Everglades.  The italicized text that appears on this page is cited from The Everglades: River of Grass. 

"There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them; their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of the their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space."  - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Watershed

The Everglades is a large watershed in the southern portion of Florida that stretches 60 miles wide and 100 miles long flowing southward across a limestone shelf into Florida Bay. Watershed is originally a geographical term: The area that drains into a single river is the watershed for that river. Watershed can also mean a ridge, like that formed by a chain of mountains, which sends water to two different rivers on either side. It's from this meaning that watershed came to mean a turning point or dividing line in social life.

Everglades National Park
Ernest Coe Visitor Center
40001 State Road 9336, Homestead