Marjory Stoneman Douglas's green streak seemed almost bred in the bone: at age 5, she sobbed inconsolably when her father read to her from ''The Song of Hiawatha,'' the part where the young brave commands the birch tree to give up its bark so he can build a canoe. Half a century later, that passionate empathy for nature had evolved into a fierce advocacy for the restoration of South Florida's fragile wetlands.
She was among the first to decry the draining of a half-million acres south of Lake Okeechobee, which Congress sanctioned 50 years ago to benefit sugar-cane growers. There would most likely be no Everglades wilderness without her. But of all her achievements as an advocate, her voice rang strongest in one towering book of environmental literature, ''The Everglades: River of Grass,'' which in 1947 changed forever the way Americans look at wetlands.
For those who've read her or who saw her standing tall against the big-sugar guys -- all 5 feet and 100 pounds of her -- it's hard to imagine that the first half of her long life was freighted with personal turmoil and contradiction.
She grew up in a religious household yet proclaimed herself an agnostic. She was briefly married to a ne'er-do-well who went to prison for passing bad checks. She wrote that he introduced her to sex -- and she ''enjoyed it while it lasted'' -- yet after they separated, she denied herself this pleasure for the rest of her life.
Douglas resented her father for abandoning his family but moved in with him after leaving her husband. The same high-minded Wellesley graduate who was an active suffragist and who had served in Europe with the American Red Cross in World War I worked for years as a society editor covering weddings, pink teas and personals for her father's newspaper (The Miami Herald), where she admitted to occasionally making up stories out of whole cloth on slow news days.
She resigned in 1923, during a series of nervous breakdowns that she variously attributed to deadline pressure and the traumas of her youth. She retreated to write fiction in a thatch-roofed ''sensible house, open to the breezes'' that she built in Coconut Grove.
But ever since Wellesley she had shown a militant streak -- she was an ardent civil rights proponent and a feminist long before the word was coined. In fact, in 1916 she joined Mrs. William Jennings Bryan and two others to argue for the women's suffrage amendment before Florida state legislators. ''All four of us spoke to a joint committee wearing our best hats,'' she wrote of the experience. ''Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all.''
Douglas was much upset by her father's death but in time felt somehow renewed, and she eventually found a defining theme that would consume the rest of her life: a deceptively unambitious book idea dropped in her lap. An editor asked her to write about the nondescript Miami River for a series on the rivers of America. But she rejected that notion in favor of an astonishing concept: a book about the Everglades, treated as a river. It took her five years to write it.
Douglas made her case in shimmering prose: ''Saw grass reaches up both sides of that lake'' -- above the Everglades -- ''in great enclosing arms, so that it is correct to say that the Everglades are there also. But south, southeast and southwest, where the lake water slopped and seeped and ran over and under the rock and soil, the greatest mass of the saw grass begins. It stretches as it always has stretched, in one thick enormous curving river of grass, to the very end. This is the Everglades.''
The book became an immediate best seller and quickly became a battle cry for preservationists everywhere. Douglas, meanwhile, kept on working for the Everglades until she died in May at the age of 108 in her sensible little house, open to the breezes.
Before her death, she stipulated that there be no religious ceremony since she didn't believe in an immortal soul. Even so, people all over South Florida have abundant reason to remember the little woman in the floppy hat.
Photo: A voice for the wilderness: Douglas turned her militant streak to the environment and got people to listen. (THE MIAMI HERALD)