... principal water supply, blocked since the 1920s. In 1989, Congress told the Corps to modify water-management structures to allow sheetflow when it passed the Everglades National Park Protection and Expansion Act, expanding the park to include the northeast part of Shark River Slough. In 2000, Congress again directed the Corps to do that work before other projects in CERP. Appelbaum calls it “the stopper in the bathtub.”

The Dept. of the Interior has $80 million already appropriated for the work, but design is still in dispute, says Scarlett. In early April, the Corps is scheduled to release a draft of the tentatively selected plan for the project with an estimated cost of $189.2 million. But the construction start date already has slipped to October or possibly later.

South Florida Water Management District

South Florida Water Management District

South Florida Water Management District Equipment sank in the soft soil of Picayune Strand, but Prairie Canal was plugged in 2004 and backfilled in 2006. Natural hydrology is returning to the area.

In 2004, with CERP progress lagging, the state launched Acceler8, a program to expedite funding, design and construction of eight critical CERP projects to restore 70,000 acres of wetlands, expand water treatment areas and provide 425,000 acre-ft of additional water storage 11 years ahead of CERP’s schedule. Today, construction of five of the projects is under way, and they are to be completed by 2011. SFWMD bypassed the cumbersome congressional funding process by issuing $546.1 million in certificates of participation, a type of tax-exempt revenue bond, for the work. The current cost estimate for Acceler8 projects is between $1 billion and $2 billion.

The Everglades is much more than a national park at Florida’s southern tip. The 18,000-sq-mile Everglades basin begins draining around Orlando, widens to within a few miles of the Atlantic coast, then empties through the national park via Shark River Slough and Florida Bay, its waters flowing to the Florida Keys and the coral reefs beyond. At its center is Lake Okeechobee, fed by the Kissimmee River’s inflow and historically drained by sheetflow to the south in the rainy season.

The area south of the lake has few defined rivers. Sheetflow can be 40 to 60 miles wide and 6 in. deep in most places. Efforts to drain the Everglades for agriculture began in the mid-19th century and grew into a drive for mastery of the hydrology. But success brought unintended consequences for water supply, water quality and the ecosystem.

In the 1970s and 1980s, consensus slowly shifted from seeking mastery to developing understanding and stewardship of the region’s natural resources. Everglades National Park remains as the ecosystem’s zoo, an artificially delineated habitat where there is a sense of what south Florida used to be. Now, even that is threatened.

The shift to conservation was not motivated entirely by compassion for wading birds. The lowering of the region’s water table dried the peat soil, which subsided and caught fire. It also allowed seawater to intrude in the aquifer from which Atlantic coast communities draw water. Degradation also threatened commercial fisheries and the ecosystem that itself is a key tourist attraction.

Planners in 1948 estimated that south Florida’s population in 50 years would be...