Everglades Forever

By Tim Padgett/Miami

The fifth-graders at Embassy Creek Elementary School in Cooper City, Fla., north of Miami, raised $1,000 this year to help save the Everglades. And they spent weeks studying who should get it. Not surprisingly, last month they handed the check to the Everglades Foundation and its chairwoman, Mary Barley. "The Everglades is one of our most important natural cathedrals," she told them. "It will be your legacy to the country."

Legacy is what drives Barley, 53, the widow of the foundation's founder, George Barley. An Orlando real estate tycoon turned environmentalist, Barley died in a 1995 plane crash before he could see his beloved Everglades restored. That 18,000-sq.-mi. "river of grass" sustains life in marshes, coral reefs and cities, but its freshwater flow has been scrambled and sullied by decades of human plunder. This month President Clinton set out a 20-year plan to revitalize the Everglades, prodded in large part by local activists like Mary Barley--and her commitment to her husband's legacy.

Taking over the foundation in 1995, Mary was unprepared for the bruising playing field of enviropolitics, even though she had helped George run his business. A proposal she supported that would have helped clean up the wetlands with a penny-a-pound tax on Florida's sugar industry, widely seen as a major Everglades polluter, lost in a statewide referendum. But Barley and her allies won a state constitutional amendment that requires polluters, not taxpayers, to bear the bulk of cleanup costs. "The money that Everglades damage costs us in areas like tourism," she pointed out, "could be 10 times more than what industries like sugar contribute to the economy." This year she helped persuade a sugar corporation to sell more than 50,000 acres of Everglades land to the restoration cause.

Barley insists she is "not even a seed in the same garden" with Everglades champions like her husband and the late Marjory Stoneman Douglas. But cultivating future conservationists may be her own bright legacy, as she fights to get Everglades education planted into Florida's state school curriculum. If the fund raising at Embassy Creek Elementary is any indication, the kids are totally behind her.

--By Tim Padgett/Miami