What would Marjory do?

Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived to be 108 years old, and she never stopped fighting for justice--for minorities, for women, for children, for the land itself. In her 90s she appeared in a hearing where she was the lone voice opposing a plan to drain a portion of the Everglades in Dade County, and when she was booed, she reportedly responded, "Can't you boo any louder than that?"

"Look, I'm an old lady," she said. "I've been here since eight o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat." She persisted--and the county commissioners cancelled their plan to drain the wetland.

In her youth she fought for women's right to vote and later she worked to provide safe drinking water to residents of Miami's segregated slums. She fought to improve conditions for Florida's migrant workers and to provide them legal services, and she fought to earn her voice as a writer in the predominantly male world of journalism.

But her most sustained and intense fight was her decades-long campaign to protect south Florida's waterways, especially the Everglades, from overdevelopment, drainage, and pollution. In her 1947 book The Everglades: River of Grass, she elegantly portrays the wonders of the massive wetlands that had long been viewed as a barrier to development. Where others saw a virulent swamp, Douglas saw beauty:

The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass.

Her research for River of Grass led her to look beneath the surface, to consider the peculiar geology of south Florida, the interdependence of fragile species in the wetland's unique ecosystems, and the natural cycles of rain and drought that could transform lush green growth into kindling:

The saw-grass stands drying to old gold and rustling faintly, ready, if there is a spark anywhere, to burst into those boiling red flames which crackle even at a great distance like a vast frying pan, giving off rolling clouds of heavy cream-colored smoke, shadowed with mauve by day and by night mile-high pillars of roily tangerine and orange light. The fires move crackling outward as the winds blow them, black widening rings where slow embers burn and smolder down into the fibrous masses of the thousand-year-old peat.

Then the spring rains put out the fires with their light moving tread, like the tread of the running deer, and the year of rainy season and of dry season has made its round again.

In River of Grass, the Everglades emerges as a character in itself, a misunderstood but fascinating entity with a complex history and an uncertain future. Douglas was among the first to proclaim that the destruction of the Everglades by drainage or pollution would be a disaster for the state as a whole, to see the health of wetlands as a harbinger for the health of the nation. "The Everglades is a test," she once said. "If we pass it, we may get to keep the planet."

Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived 108 years but, thankfully, not long enough to see a school carrying her name polluted by senseless violence and bloodshed. She saw environmentalism as a practical way to care for the weakest among us, claiming that providing clean water and clean air demonstrates our love and concern for children and those marginalized by poverty or other problems. When we love the land, we love our children, and if we fail to pass that test, our children bear the wounds of our neglect.

Today we face another kind of test: can we develop a sensible, workable plan to keep the most lethal weapons out of the hands of murderers? If we can't pass this test, we don't deserve to keep the planet.

As I hear more painful details about the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I mourn for the families and I mourn for the victims and I mourn for a culture that can't find a way to make these shootings stop, but I also mourn for Marjory. She doesn't deserve this, I tell myself, and neither do we.