MSD: Nature is urban culture
The story of a newspaper columnist who believed that a city's growth should arise first from its natural surroundings
“You cannot begin with economics or industries,” wrote The Galley columnist in the Miami Herald in 1922. It was a column about the “new geography” that could shape the growth of then-tiny Miami. “You cannot begin with people, you cannot begin with groups or societies or systems of government.” South Florida then saw itself as the nation’s last frontier. Even the vast dry expanses of the West had proven easier to develop than this place of swamps and bugs and heat. But boosters like the author of The Galley (who usually signed the columns “MSD”) believed that Miami could develop—and could do so uniquely, learning from the mistakes of elsewhere to develop a meaningful culture. It could be one of the grand cities of the world.
But where to begin? Here’s where The Galley was so radical. American boosters had always started with a way to make money, and with people. People then worked to build institutions like the ones Alexis de Tocqueville so admired. But MSD was arguing that this wasn’t really the way the world should work. You shouldn’t start with any of those factors “until you have first considered the earth on which the whole rests and which conditions everything… The geography and the botany of south Florida are the two most important studies for any development of south Florida.”
To be a world-class city, MSD argued, Miami needed to perceive itself in its subtropical setting. It needed parks and tropical plantings. This was not an argument about preservation as opposed to development. MSD moonlighted as a copywriter for a real-estate developer, back when journalistic ethics were less well developed than they are today. Indeed, MSD’s employer, the Herald, was a frontier newspaper favoring growth to boost advertising revenues and thus profits.
MSD also argued that Miami needed to grow because it deserved to out-compete nearby cities such as Palm Beach for regional supremacy. Something of a regional snob, MSD believed that Miami was better than Palm Beach. Palm Beach was all artificial formality, stuffy hotels full of overdressed Northerners. But why bother to be in Florida if you’re going to import “all the restrictions of northern life”? The point of south Florida should be that “we don’t have to worry about cold and heat and coal and heavy clothing.” And thus that, “if we choose to have it so, thought can be freer here than in many other places. We should develop into freer communities, freer personalities, living here.”
Such a regional culture should arise from nature, MSD said. So should the regional economy: “The wealth of south Florida, but even more important, the meaning and significance of south Florida,” according to another The Galley column, “lies in the black muck of the Everglades and the inevitable development of this country to be the great tropic agricultural center of the world.” Driven by unique regional natural conditions, farmers would grow pineapples, mangos, and citrus that wouldn’t grow elsewhere in the US. MSD was not a strict regionalist favoring only native plants, but instead urged importation of “plants that are indigenous to India and China and Africa, fruits and vegetables, medicinal herbs and condiments now being imported to America at great expense.” In other words, MSD would transform nature. Nevertheless, “We simply must begin with our geography, our regional geography.”
Likewise, at the founding of the University of Miami, MSD argued that it should be a “product of its own place, and an interpreter of it.” It should train architects, developers, and landscape designers to incorporate regionally unique natural features into their work. Architecture should express the region’s values, and express how those values originated in the natural setting. “We are so wedded to our northern ideas of roofs and walls and ceiling,” MSD wrote in another The Galley column. “All we need is a floor, a roof and some wire screening and we can forget about storm doors and sodding the cellar. All we need, really, is a change from a near frigid to a tropical attitude of mind.”
To the extent that these writings are known at all today, it’s because of events that took place many decades later. MSD was the young Marjory Stoneman Douglas. In 1947, she published The Everglades: River of Grass, one of the all-time great natural history books. It captured that natural setting, the unique ecology of south Florida and the fascinating cultural history it had generated. Then in the 1970s and ‘80s, Douglas became a political advocate, testifying on behalf of the Everglades at hundreds of hearings across the region. That the Everglades still exist at all—much less that they are now seen as the world model for large-scale ecosystem restoration—is due in large part to Douglas’ extraordinary 108-year life.
It’s thus fun to watch the story of her youthful evolution. In An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (from which I’ve quoted Douglas here), Jack E. Davis chronicles her growth beyond community-boosting attitudes. Douglas, a lifelong learner, once believed that the Everglades’ destiny was to be farmed. She was such a booster that she even bought a remote piece of swamp as an investment (and lost money at it). Her life story provides hope that people can grow and change.
But that’s only one way to see her story. Another way, I’d like to suggest, is to celebrate those early writings for their own merits.
South Florida has grown absurdly fast in the past century. It’s easy to argue that Miami has failed to sufficiently incorporate the parks and plantings and zoning schemes and tropical attitudes for which Douglas advocated. Then again, Miami today is something approximating a world-class city. And, as Douglas rightly predicted, it owes that status in large part to an awareness of its subtropical setting, an ability to celebrate rather than ignore the benefits of its natural surroundings. If Miami culture had been out-competed by Palm Beach culture, it’s hard to see how the world would be better.
In other words, maybe Miami did follow MSD’s advice, at least at some small level. And everyone was better off for that effort.
It’s remarkable because in many ways MSD’s advice seems impossible to implement: in a world dominated by politics and economics, how do you “first consider the earth”? To consider the environment at all, don’t you have to begin with people, with “groups or societies or systems of government”? What exactly did she want Miami leaders to do?
Douglas was a storyteller. She told stories in The Galley. She later published dozens of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post. Her mastery of both natural-history books and public-hearing testimony came in part from the way she turned them into opportunities for storytelling.
How do you inspire people to first consider the earth? Douglas lived this advice: you tell natural stories.
Notes:
For a discussion of Everglades restoration, see Kurt Repanshek, “National Academy Of Sciences Remains Concerned Over Everglades Restoration,” National Parks Traveler, Jan. 24, 2023.
If you will be in the Cody, Wyoming, area on Nov. 2, I hope you’ll come to my free lunchtime talk at the Buffalo Bill Center at noon.