page_title: Draining and development of the Everglades
section_title: Conservation attempts
hierarchical_section_title: Draining and development of the Everglades / Drought / Conservation attempts
caption_attribution_description: Harry Truman dedicating Everglades National Park (L-R: Admiral Leahy, President Truman, Secretary of the Interior J.A. Krug, Senator Claude Pepper, Mrs. Jennings, and August Burghard.)
context_page_description: The history of draining and development of the Everglades dates back to the 19th century. A national push for expansion and progress toward the latter part of the 19th century stimulated interest in draining the Everglades for agricultural use. According to historians, "From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the United States went through a period in which wetland removal was not questioned. Indeed, it was considered the proper thing to do."
  A pattern of political and financial motivation, and a lack of understanding of the geography and ecology of the Everglades have plagued the history of drainage projects. The Everglades are a part of a massive watershed that originates near Orlando and drains into Lake Okeechobee, a vast and shallow lake. As the lake exceeds its capacity in the wet season, the water forms a flat and very wide river, about 100 miles long and 60 miles wide. As the land from Lake Okeechobee slopes gradually to Florida Bay, water flows at a rate of half a mile a day. Before human activity in the Everglades, the system comprised the lower third of the Florida peninsula.
context_section_description: Conservationists concerned about the Everglades have been a vocal minority ever since Miami was a young city. South Florida's first and perhaps most enthusiastic naturalist was Charles Torrey Simpson, who retired from the Smithsonian Institution to Miami in 1905 when he was 53. Nicknamed "the Sage of Biscayne Bay", Simpson wrote several books about tropical plant life around Miami. His backyard contained a tropical hardwood hammock, which he estimated he showed to about 50,000 people. Though he tended to avoid controversy regarding development, in Ornamental Gardening in Florida he wrote, "Mankind everywhere has an insane desire to waste and destroy the good and beautiful things this nature has lavished upon him".
  Although the idea of protecting a portion of the Everglades arose in 1905, a crystallized effort was formed in 1928 when Miami landscape designer Ernest F. Coe established the Everglades Tropical National Park Association. It had enough support to be declared a national park by Congress in 1934, but there was not enough money during the  Great Depression to buy the proposed 2,000,000 acres (8,100 km²) for the park. It took another 13 years for it to be dedicated on December 6, 1947.
   One month before the dedication of the park, the former editor of The Miami Herald and freelance writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas published her first book, The Everglades: River of Grass. After researching the region for five years, she described the history and ecology of the south of Florida in great detail, characterizing the Everglades as a river instead of a stagnant swamp. Douglas later wrote, "My colleague Art Marshall said that with [the words "River of Grass"] I changed everybody's knowledge and educated the world as to what the Everglades meant". The last chapter was titled "The Eleventh Hour" and warned that the Everglades were approaching death, although the course could be reversed. Its first printing sold out a month after its release.
caption: President Harry Truman dedicating Everglades National Park on December 6, 1947
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