The Nature of the Everglades 

"There are no other Everglades in the world.

    They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass." (Douglas, page 104)

"So it is with the Everglades, which have that quality of long existence in their own nature. They were changeless. They are changed." (Douglas, page 107)

"Off and on for those four hundred years the region now called 'The Everglades' was described as a series of vast, miasmic swamps, poisonous lagoons, huge dismal marshes without outlet, a rotting, shallow, inland sea, or labyrinths of dark trees hang and looped about with snakes and dripping mosses, malignant with tropical fevers and malarias, evil to the white man." (Douglas, page 105)