Juanita Greene, former Herald reporter, environmentalist, and exemplary citizen leaves Miami ... by gimleteye

Former Herald reporter, environmentalist Juanita Greene is leaving Miami after a distinguished career as a journalist and a second career as one of Florida's most engaged and effective conservation leaders.

Juanita Greene was born on a south Louisiana rice farm in 1924. In 1945 she moved to Tampa where she started in the Tampa Times newsroom. It was her experience, a few years later, as a reporter for the Daytona News Journal that she began learning and writing about the issues of public access to Florida's magnificent coastline.

In 1956, the managing editor of the Miami Herald, George Beebe, called Juanita and invited her to join the newspaper. She calls it, "the most exciting phone call of my lifetime." For nearly a decade she covered the federal, City Hall, and Metro beat for the paper.

In the mid-1960's, a Cabinet meeting considered whether or not to buy a big tract of land in the middle of sugar fields in the Everglades Agricultural Area called the Holey Land. Johnny Jones of the Florida Wildlife Federation had been the biggest advocate for the purchase. At the hearing in Tallahassee, Juanita first met Marjory Stoneman Douglas. "She was this tiny old lady in a printed floral dress, a straw hat, and sandals. She could hardly see. She spoke for forty minutes to the governor and cabinet. When she finished there was dead silence. They then all rose and gave Marjory a standing ovation. She was a powerful woman."

Juanita would become one of Marjory's lasting friends. "She was just such good company. She could tell the best story and was filled with information about things I didn't know. Once we took a trip up to Belle Glade to talk to the nuns about childrens' education. She was nearly blind. As I drove I described everything I saw in the Everglades, all the way up Highway 27."

Around 1969-- she's not sure of the exact date-- Juanita reached out to the co-founder and publisher of the Miami Herald, John Knight, in the newsroom. She told Knight that the newspaper really should consider a series of stories to highlight the importance of protecting the Biscayne Bay waters and islands. Knight said he would discuss the issue with the editors. Soon after, the paper and Juanita began educating readers of the Miami Herald about Biscayne Bay. "Lloyd Miller and Art Marshall began the campaign to turn a big part of Biscayne Bay into a monument, first, and then a national park. It was John Knight and Larry Jinks, the public interest editor, who really supported this issue at the Herald."

Juanita served on the Herald editorial board before her retirement in 1987. After retiring she lived for a time in the Florida Keys and gravitated toward what would become her second career: environmentalist. She was active with the Izaac Walton League and, later, a long time board member of Friends of the Everglades, the organization founded by her friend Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1969.

Juanita was one of the most active leaders of Friends, especially in relation to supporting its litigation on clean water lawsuits in the Everglades. Her main contribution was as a tireless advocate for the common sense step of returning as much sugar land as possible to the historic Everglades in service of restoring our badly damaged public lands and national park. The recent efforts by Gov. Charlie Crist to purchase US Sugar lands in the Everglades Agricultural Area emphasize how much in the mainstream Juanita Green really was. But in her own down-to-earth style, short on patience and long on facts and a knobby Southern drawl, Juanita often found herself at odds with environmentalists and national organizations that tend to play the insider game; more concerned about access to the powerful than about doing right.

Looking back to the decades she spent as a journalist and activist, Juanita Greene laments the decline of the newspaper. "John Knight deserves a lot of credit," she says. "I don't know another publisher who made himself so accessible to the reporters. Once the newspaper gave me weeks, sometimes months, to research a story that might or might not even appear in print. It takes time and it takes money to really report the news, and without the news there's a lot of mischief that can get done. I worry how people are going to get information, without newspapers, for this country to be a successful democracy."