ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
The Everglades are a vast wetland spanning millions of acres. The region is tremendously important to the ecology of southern Florida. It's also a place recently at the center of a national controversy. Last year, Florida's governor erected a massive tent city there, an immigrant detention center built to support the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign. The state called it Alligator Alcatraz, like an island prison in the heart of the marshlands. And activists have fought to shut it down.
But this is not the first battle over this exact piece of land. A new podcast, Defenders Of The Everglades, tells the story of the environmental activists who've been fighting for decades to protect it. It's hosted by Meghan Bowman of member station WUSF in Tampa, and she joins me now. Welcome, Meghan.
MEGHAN BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hi.
FLORIDO: So the fight over this remote patch of the Everglades did not start last year with Alligator Alcatraz. It started more than five decades ago. Tell us about that history.
BOWMAN: The story goes all the way back to the 1960s, when officials planned to build an airport in that very spot. And not just any airport but a super jetport. Back then, people thought the future of travel was supersonic jets, which break the sound barrier, and the sonic booms can damage houses and break windows. So officials chose the remote Everglades to build this massive jetport. It's important to note that while some people believe the land was worthless, it was actually incredibly important both to environmentalists and to Indigenous communities with a long history there. So the jetport broke ground, and it was met with incredible pushback.
FLORIDO: Tell me about that pushback.
BOWMAN: Well, people organized. They protested. They put pressure on local, state and federal officials, and they managed to stop construction. One of the central activists in this fight was Marjory Stoneman Douglas. So she was an author and a journalist who'd written a book about the Everglades called "The River Of Grass (ph)." For our podcast, we found an old recording of her talking about how she joined the fight.
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MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS: The representative here of the National Audubon Society came to me to tell me that he needed help to fight a proposed jetport out on the Tamiami Trail with its industrial development that would have polluted all of the Everglades water.
BOWMAN: She was 79 when she founded an organization called Friends of the Everglades to stop the jetport's construction.
FLORIDO: Right, but as you tell in your podcast, Meghan, it was stopped, but not before one of the runways had already been built. And so I'm really curious, you know, why you decided to dive deep into the story of that runway.
BOWMAN: Well, I, like a lot of journalists, started covering this controversial detention center last year. It was being built on this, you know, stretch of concrete in the middle of the Everglades. And I was like, why is this single runway even here? How did it get here? You know? So I called up a woman named Eve Samples. She runs the Friends of the Everglades today. She's been involved in the current fight to shut down Alligator Alcatraz.
So she pointed me to this decades-old environmental impact study about the jetport. And the study, back in the day, became one of the main tools activists used to stop the jetport. So I kind of got obsessed with what happened there. You know, I tracked down old pictures, congressional records, legal analyses of the project and interviews with people who were involved in that fight.
What we learned was that fight over the jetport had been the catalyst for an environmental awakening of the time. I mean, it led to landmark environmental laws, regional planning councils, and it brought protection to big swaths of the Everglades. It may have even helped lead to the first Earth Day.
FLORIDO: Well, the way you really tell this story in your podcast is through the voices of the people who led that fight. Tell me about another one of these figures.
BOWMAN: Yes. So Marjory Stoneman Douglas, while, you know, she was one of the leaders of these fights, was not alone. And that's why we called this podcast Defenders Of The Everglades. So we talked to a man named Franklin Adams. He was a boat captain, a ship captain. I mean, he's really one of the last true Gladesmen (ph), if you will. He knows that rugged terrain like the back of his hand. He also got in this fight after Stoneman Douglas brought him in. You know, she mentored him. Now, she did pass in the late '90s, but Captain Adams and a lot of the folks we talked to told us she was a force.
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FRANKLIN ADAMS: Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a prime example, you know, the prime troublemaker. And, you know, she always said, learn everything you can about the issue, speak up. Don't back off. Be a troublemaker. Be someone, you know? Like she was called, I've been called, a lot of people have been called, you know, environmental zealots, you know, and tree huggers and all that kind of stuff.
BOWMAN: What struck me the most when talking to Captain Adams, who's now in his upper 80s, was how daunting a task all these activists felt they were up against to try to stop the jetport because a lot of powerful people were behind it and behind a broader push to develop the Everglades.
FLORIDO: Meghan, let's bring it back to the present fight over Alligator Alcatraz in this very spot. After a lot of activism, a lot of accusations that immigrant detainees there have been treated harshly, that they've had to endure awful living conditions, it seems that officials are moving to shut it down. And I'm wondering how reporting this series about this earlier fight there, you know, made you think differently about the current fight.
BOWMAN: There are so many connections between the two fights. The activists today are fighting the same battles they did over 50 years ago, but now they're using the laws that came out of the jetport battle to make their case. Those protections were meant to stave off development there forever. Environmentalists and their lawyers are hoping those laws will be strong enough to help them shut down the immigrant detention center that many people consider inhumane. The story is not over. The environmental lawsuit over Alligator Alcatraz is ongoing, and there was another one brought up just in the past few weeks on air quality. So I will keep following this until it's over.
FLORIDO: Well, Meghan, thanks so much for joining me today.
BOWMAN: Aw, thanks for having me.
FLORIDO: Meghan Bowman's podcast, Defenders Of The Everglades, tells the stories of people who were there during an early battle to protect the Everglades. The entire limited series is available now. You can find it at wusf.org/defenders or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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