Eight billion dollars.

Spending a dollar every second, 250 years would go by before you spent $8 billion. But Everglades restorers will hand out that much money over the next 30 years on 50-some projects to keep this unique and stunningly diverse wilderness from slipping away.

The Everglades is dying, but it isn't dead. The ecosystem begins at the headwaters of the Kissimmee River, traverses South Florida and takes in Florida Bay and the Keys. Satellite pictures of green teardrop tree hammocks show its southern path from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay and the state's wide, shallow southwest coastal shelf.

It is a River of Grass, as Marjorie Stoneman Douglas aptly described it in the title of her 1947 book. The Everglades is inextricably linked to the Gulf of Mexico, with Lake Okeechobee delivering yearly gentle flows of fresh water to the marsh and then to estuaries from Estero Bay to the Florida Keys. It has been a potent alchemy that made endless muck into a wilderness so rich with life it astounded Spanish explorers. They tried and failed to wrest the southwest coast from the Calusa in the early 1500s, a time when about 20,000 American Indians lived from Lake Okeechobee south to the Florida Keys.

In its pristine state, the Everglades saw sky-darkening clouds of birds, water alive with fish and reptiles and land inhabited by plentiful deer, panther, bear and myriad other wildlife. In the rainy season, water spilled from the southern lip of Lake Okeechobee and flowed slowly south to Florida Bay. Fish crowded waters during the dry season, making life easy for wading birds trying to feed their young.

Over the past century, humans drained and filled or otherwise erased half of the original 8-million-acre Everglades and disrupted the rhythms of rain and gentle flooding for the rest. Since canals came on line to drain the region for development in the 1960s, wading bird populations in the Everglades have plummeted to a tenth of their former numbers, cattails are winning a battle over sawgrass and the Everglades is in a general decline. But this wilderness is necessary not simply because it is beautiful and unique.

David Reiner, president of the Friends of the Everglades, an organization founded by Douglas, sees the restoration as both aesthetically necessary but also the keystone of Florida's economy. "Even if you don't consider the environmental love of the wetland itself, if you destroy the Everglades, you destroy the entire economy of South Florida," Reiner said.

Water: quality or quantity?

Man and machine are returning to the swamp, but this time it is ostensibly to fix the mistakes of the past. In a 50-50 venture between the federal and state governments, the $8.4 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Program — better known as CERP to lawmakers, lobbyists and bureaucrats — is supposed to rejuvenate this dying subtropical wilderness. Even in decline, the Everglades is the only natural system of its kind and size in the United States.

Reiner loves the idea of Everglades restoration, but he's not so sure the theory will actually become reality. He doesn't trust the developers, farmers and politicians who pull the strings on CERP, and he especially doesn't like its water priorities. "They are trying to address the human uses first," he said. "Then, 15 or 20 years from now, there will be a look at what's left over for the natural world." That's been the way all along.

Massive earth moving over the past 100 years was unabashedly called flood control. It was designed to drain the swamp so a growing population could put the land to use. Some critics of the current plan to restore the Everglades say the name is different, but the aim is the same — only this time, the water is as important as the land. Critics say CERP has more to do with development than restoration, that it is the right amount of water drained from the right developer-owned swampland. They say the overall purpose remains to protect from flood the people who will live on that land once houses are built and to provide water for a burgeoning and thirsty coastal population. Reiner and other critics say the reasons for the public relations makeover are obvious. When the state and federal governments reach $8.4 billion deep into taxpayers' pockets, "restoration" is more palatable than "flood control" that will ultimately benefit developers." And while plans move forward to restore the Everglades, simultaneously development in South Florida chews away at wetlands, and indications abound that Southeast Florida will be concrete from Miami to Homestead.

Two harbingers of more sprawl are the widening to four lanes of Krome Avenue along the eastern edge of the Everglades and pushing the Miami-Dade County urban boundary west earlier this year. The latter was a precedent-setting event in which developer Armando Codina — former business partner with Gov. Jeb Bush in Codina Bush Real Estate — persuaded the Miami-Dade Commission to allow building of his 6.2-million-square-foot, 400-plus-acre Beacon Lakes office complex. In part, Codina got his permit because the wetland on which it is built is impaired. It's a point that Reiner and others fear will kick off another kind of Everglades cycle.

Flood controllers must keep developments such as Beacon Lakes dry. To do that requires draining the land around it as well as what it sits on. Such situations lead to impaired wetlands adjacent to development and a readymade argument for developers who have a use for impaired wetlands. Codina's land can't practically be reclaimed as wetland, but Miami-Dade Commissioner Katy Sorenson voted against the project anyway because of the line it crossed. "Anytime you make an exception, that makes it easier to do again later," she said.

As well, Sorenson worries developers are eyeing another part of her district along Krome Avenue from Kendall Drive south. The plan is to widen two-lane, rural Krome Avenue to four lanes. The argument by proponents is that the road will be safer. Originally opposed by the Florida Department of Community Affairs because it violated state regulations designed to prevent sprawling development at urban edges, the project won approval after former Commissioner Miriam Alonso led a successful effort to approve the widening on the grounds of safety. But what doesn't fit the widening-for-safety argument is that most deaths on this road happen at the northern end, a 20-plus mile stretch from Kendall Drive north to Okeechobee Road. That segment, not on the table for widening, is mostly water containment areas and Everglades prairies.

The stretch to the south, however, leads to land that calls to developers like a siren's song. It is thousands of acres of farms and ranchettes now, but it isn't difficult to imagine condos, subdivisions, townhouses and malls rising there. "To me, all (the widening) is a way to promote urban development," Sorenson said. "I think it's very foolhardy for the environment and the community."

The right water

And while land use and the right amount of water may remain in question, water quality is a pressing issue to scientists and South Florida residents who have seen what nutrient-polluted water does to the Everglades, Florida Bay and the Keys. One of the tenets of Everglades restoration wasn't only the right amount of water at the right time but the right quality of water. That means as near pristine as the water management district, farmers and the Army Corps of Engineers can make it.

Some scientists say the Everglades Restoration plan is as shortsighted as one from a half-century ago and will deal a death blow to Florida Bay and the coral reefs in the Florida Keys because it fails to adequately address water quality. They say the current plan is too concentrated in engineering and not in science to benefit the ecosystems south of the Everglades swamp. In a way, they say restoration efforts to date have already helped destroy Keys reefs and turned once-clear Florida Bay into algae soup with increased freshwater flows first recommended in the late 1980s by Joseph Zieman, a marine ecologist at the University of Virginia.

Zieman said Florida Bay was dying because it had become too salty, a condition that killed sea grasses in the bay and fueled algae blooms that only sped the decline. Critics of Zieman's theory say it missed the mark because more fresh water was already reaching the bay as early as the 1970s. Called the Interim Action Plan, water that had been back-pumped into Lake Okeechobee to keep sugar cane fields dry was instead directed south to Florida Bay.

The interim plan's goal was to keep the lake from crashing under massive algae blooms that resulted from the infusion of nutrients that came with the backpumped water. Plants need a basic cocktail of nitrogen and phosphorus to thrive. Usually there is more of one than the other in any particular ecosystem. That helps limit the growth of plants that could grow out of control and strangle the ecosystem. In the Florida Everglades, the lacking nutrient is phosphorus, and any increase tips the scales in favor of cattails that choke off the flow southward of the River of Grass.

South of the Everglades in Florida Bay and the Keys, the lacking nutrient is nitrogen, and the situation is similar. Any increase beyond normal levels of nitrogen in the water favors algae that clouds the water and chokes the life out of sea grass beds and coral reefs. Acting upon Zieman's recommendations, water managers pumped even more water south in the 1980s. Instead of saving the bay, the move spurred the algae blooms. By the early 1990s, the bay — reacting to the fresh water — saw the demise of more than 100,000 acres of seagrasses strangled by large kinds of algae called macroalgae while smaller algae blocked sunlight from reaching it.

Scientists Larry Brand, professor of marine biology at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and Brian Lapointe, senior scientist at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, have argued that the bay's decline comes not from the water being too salty but from what the fresh water flowing through the Everglades carries to the bay. Lapointe began swimming upstream on the issue in the early 1980s, and Brand joined him in recent years. Brand tracked the size and locations of algae blooms in Florida Bay and saw a direct correlation to water flows from the Shark River and Taylor sloughs. Lapointe saw more than 100,000 acres of sea grasses in the bay die with the increased flows. As well, he spent the past 20 years watching algae turn a spectacular Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary into an almost monochromatic rock pile. Lapointe says he thinks nitrogen-rich water from agriculture north of the Everglades harmed not only Florida Bay but Keys reefs as well.

The two scientists were pretty much alone in their opinions until August 2002, when the National Academy of Sciences weighed in on the issue. The academy's review of the restoration plan ended with a recommendation that scientists pay closer attention to water quality, specifically nitrogen.

Along with the nitrogen discharged from agricultural fields came phosphorus, and that nutrient spurred cattail growth that choked out sawgrass and stifled the flow of water through the marsh. Until farmers began pumping phosphorus-rich water through the Everglades, low levels of the nutrient kept the cattails in check. The swamp between the sugar cane fields and Florida Bay is naturally poor in phosphorus, a situation that has kept sawgrass the dominant plant. But with phosphorus-rich runoff moving through the 'Glades, cattails replaced sawgrass.

The federal government sued Florida in 1988, and in 1992 the state agreed to reduce phosphorus levels in water pumped into the swamp down to 10 parts per billion by 2006. The order was followed by the 1994 Everglades Forever Act that authorizes the South Florida Water Management District to convert more than 40,000 acres of land bordering the northern Everglades into six phosphorus-absorbing wetlands.

Sugar farmers are proud of the improvements.

Before 1991, water leaving the agricultural area had an average 173 parts of phosphorus per 1 billion parts of water. By 2002, that average had fallen to 77 parts per billion. The improvement came with some help from farmers themselves who have collectively cut their phosphorus use and thus their contribution to the swamp by almost 60 percent.

But even with those improvements the cattails are winning. So far cattails have taken more than 60,000 acres of swamp and advance by another 2 acres each day, destroying habitat for every other occupant of the swamp. Pretty as they are, cattails keep light from reaching the water and algae, which is the base of the Everglades food chain, from growing.

Buying time

Florida lawmakers and Gov. Bush, in a bill backed by the sugar industry, this spring granted the state another 20 years to finish the Everglades Restoration cleanup job. Bush signed legislation in May to delay by 10 years the start of an upper limit for phosphorus in water streaming from agricultural areas just south of Lake Okeechobee.

In a June decision, though, a judge who had overseen the Everglades case since it began 15 years ago promised to stick by the 1992 consent decree, offering only that he might give the state some wiggle room, just not two decades' worth. Lawyers from the sugar industry then sought to have the judge removed from the case, arguing he'd spoken about the case to the press and had made decisions based on press reports. Last month, they won the removal of U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler. A new judge was appointed.

That elected leaders and bureaucrats are influenced by the sugar industry is no surprise to those watching Florida and federal politics. The tie is money. Sugar growers pump money into political campaigns. Politicians provide an annual subsidy to sugar farmers of roughly $14 billion. If it weren't for politics and big money, there'd be a simple solution — or so says Reiner from Friends of the Everglades. He wants to protect the remaining half of the Everglades by buying out farmers in the Everglades Agricultural Area and allowing the system to return to a more natural state as well as doing away with the fertilizer that restorers are now struggling with. Florida already owns a third of the Agricultural Area, leasing it to sugar cane farmers.

Reiner said the sugar industry's political machine is formidable and has a budget many times the $60,000 that Friends of the Everglades spends each year. About half goes to education; half to litigation. Friends and every group like it face the daunting political and public relations machine of the state, development interests along with sugar farmers.

So Reiner and his group see themselves dug in until the public becomes aware of what he sees as the makings of an environmental and economic disaster. "Until we reach some kind of boiling point with the public, I guess we're trying to hold ground," he said.

The Corps giveth, taketh away

While urban boundary and nutrient debates continue, the National Wildlife Federation is maniacally pointing to the western Everglades, warning of a 1960s repeat of destruction. The Wildlife Federation says that the same Army Corps of Engineers and South Florida Water Management District that are orchestrating Everglades Restoration are also permitting the destruction of wetlands along its western fringe.

The two agencies are charged with protecting wetlands by overseeing wetland filling and mitigation. The latter basically means that when you smother 1 acre of wetland, you must replace it somewhere else. Since 1998, the Corps has permitted more than 3,800 acres of wetland drainage in an area of the western Everglades, the Wildlife Federation concluded in a November 2002 report. By the Corps' own records, it didn't withhold a single permit in the 1 million acre study area of the western Everglades between 1998 and 2002, and the federation contends that the two agencies are sanctioning wetland destruction in a similar manner to the way it was destroyed in the eastern Everglades.

The federation estimates that, even with mitigation, there has been a net loss of 2,700 acres of wetlands in the western Everglades, where the $8.4 billion repair is under way. Debate about the Corps' dual role also is unfolding in Louisiana. There, folks are taking notes and beginning the road to restoring their own wetlands. Those have suffered under restricted water flows as well. Early estimates say that effort will cost roughly $14 billion.

Called Coast 2050, the plan is meant to restore — or at least perform — the function of natural processes that built the Louisiana coast. The plan is in its early stages with two studies under way to decide which projects will be needed to carry out the plan's strategies and to develop projects for marsh creation and barrier shoreline restoration. Malia Hale, senior policy specialist for the National Wildlife Federation, said Louisiana is a sort of next-generation restoration, though the effort is richer in unknowns. But it will also benefit from what restorers in Florida learn, despite the different situations each state faces.

She said restoration efforts on the scale of those in Florida and Louisiana are giant experiments that must happen despite the political maneuvering and the unknowns. "It's a chance we're willing to take," Hale said.

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