On May 14, 1998 the environmental conscience of South Florida passed from the scene. Marjory Stoneman Douglas died five weeks after her 108th birthday. Although she wrote eight books (including an autobiography) during her long life, it was her 1947 classic, The Everglades: River of Grass, that helped elevate her from writer to icon. Douglas is rightly compared with Rachel Carson, another environmental visionary whose 1962 exposé, Silent Spring, alerted the public to ecological folly. Douglas's tenacity, eloquence, passion, and yes, longevity, gave the Everglades a champion of unique authority. Those who contemplate an eight-billion-dollar Everglades restoration project would do well to heed her insistence that the area is best helped by removing canals and levees, not by constructing more of them. Despite blindness in her later years, the Coconut Grove matron never lost sight of one simple fact: Our own survival and that of the Everglades are inextricably bound.