Wealth & Money Quote by Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Douglas isn’t praising south Florida so much as putting it on trial. By anchoring the region’s “meaning and significance” in “black muck,” she drags the conversation away from boosterish visions of beaches and real estate and back to the soil itself: wet, fertile, vulnerable, and already being treated as a commodity. The sentence performs a quiet reversal of priorities. “Wealth” is acknowledged, then immediately demoted; what matters is the deeper logic that will decide the region’s fate.

That logic arrives disguised as inevitability. “The inevitable development of this country” is a loaded phrase in early- and mid-20th-century Florida, when drainage schemes, land speculation, and agricultural expansion were sold as progress with a moral halo. Douglas uses the rhetoric of destiny the way a skilled journalist uses a quote from a politician: to expose it. The promise of becoming “the great tropic agricultural center of the world” carries a faint whiff of triumph, but it also reads as warning: once you declare a landscape’s purpose to be production, you give yourself permission to remake it, regardless of ecological cost.

The subtext is that south Florida’s identity is being manufactured as much as its canals. Douglas is gesturing toward the Everglades not as empty wilderness but as the foundational system that makes all this “wealth” possible - and that can be destroyed by the very development claiming to fulfill the region’s destiny. Her intent is to puncture romantic mythmaking and force a reckoning with what prosperity is built on, and what it erases.