"Conservation is now a dead word"
About this Quote
"Conservation is now a dead word" lands like an obituary notice for a national virtue. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the journalist who spent decades translating the Everglades from "swamp" into living system, isn’t being poetic here; she’s indicting a culture that has taken a once-actionable ethic and hollowed it into PR.
The line works because it’s blunt to the point of refusal. No qualifiers, no nostalgia for a lost golden age of environmental stewardship. "Dead" doesn’t mean unfashionable; it means unusable, politically inert, stripped of urgency. Douglas is poking at the way language can be killed without anyone firing a shot: by letting "conservation" become a feel-good label, a government department, a fundraiser’s slogan, anything except a constraint on development.
The subtext is that the battle isn’t only over wetlands and water flow; it’s over what society permits itself to call progress. If "conservation" dies as a word, the policies follow: draining, dredging, paving, and then shrugging at the consequences as though they were natural rather than engineered.
Context matters: Douglas wrote against a Florida boom culture that treated land as inventory and water as plumbing. As a journalist, she understood that public will is built out of vocabulary. Her warning is linguistic and strategic: when an idea loses its name, it becomes harder to defend, easier to dismiss, and almost impossible to fund.
The line works because it’s blunt to the point of refusal. No qualifiers, no nostalgia for a lost golden age of environmental stewardship. "Dead" doesn’t mean unfashionable; it means unusable, politically inert, stripped of urgency. Douglas is poking at the way language can be killed without anyone firing a shot: by letting "conservation" become a feel-good label, a government department, a fundraiser’s slogan, anything except a constraint on development.
The subtext is that the battle isn’t only over wetlands and water flow; it’s over what society permits itself to call progress. If "conservation" dies as a word, the policies follow: draining, dredging, paving, and then shrugging at the consequences as though they were natural rather than engineered.
Context matters: Douglas wrote against a Florida boom culture that treated land as inventory and water as plumbing. As a journalist, she understood that public will is built out of vocabulary. Her warning is linguistic and strategic: when an idea loses its name, it becomes harder to defend, easier to dismiss, and almost impossible to fund.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Marjory
Add to List
