The Nature of The Everglades: By Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Marjory Douglas describes The Everglades, and discusses just how unique this land is as there is no other one like it in the world. I find it incredible myself how the weather, soil, water all work in balance to create it. Marjory begins discussing the everglades by describing the plant life. “The truth of the river is the grass.” The grass is called Cladium Jamaicensis, or otherwise known as saw grass. This plant does exists in other places in the world but what makes it unique  for the Everglades is that there is the greatest concentration of it than anywhere else. This tells me that the weather and climate must be perfect for it here, and that it is truly native to Florida. But there is more to the everglades that makes it so interesting. Florida it seems, doesn’t follow the natural pattern of what science would predict to happen. “This land by the maps is in the temperate zone. But the laws of the rain and of the seasons here are tropic laws…men who draw maps draw lines across deserts, mountains, and equatorial rainforests to show where the Temperate Zone is cut off sharply from the middle equatorial belt.” By nature we should be a desert, but the rain and the Gulf Stream allow Florida to flourish and enabled the growing of the Everglades. But “It is clear that rainfall alone could not have maintained the persistent fine balance between wet and dry that has created and kept the Everglades the long heart of this long land. If Lake Okeechobee and the lakes and marshes north that contribute to it, if rivers and swamps and ponds did not exist to hoard all the excess water in a great series of reservoirs by which the flow was checked and regulated, there would have been no Everglades.” This right here makes me realize how intricate and special the land I live on is. I find it crazy to comprehend just how perfect timing and the weather were to create it, and how if one thing was different then so would my home.