The Everglades restoration project, authorized by Congress in 2000 as the largest environmental undertaking in human history, remains barely a third complete after more than 25 years at a cost that has roughly doubled from its original estimate. Billions of dollars have been spent, yet the ecosystem continues to deteriorate: wading bird populations have crashed by 90 percent, Florida Bay chokes on toxic algae, and the soil beneath the region’s farmland is disappearing. The central obstacle is not a lack of public support or scientific understanding. The Everglades was systematically dismantled over more than a century to make way for agriculture and one of America’s fastest-growing metropolitan regions, and the infrastructure built to control the water is now deeply embedded in the region’s economy.
Restoring the ecosystem would require moving water through land occupied by farms worth billions and neighborhoods worth trillions. What most Americans misunderstood for 150 years was the nature of the place itself. The Everglades was never a stagnant swamp but a river—roughly 50 miles wide in places and barely six inches deep—moving so slowly it appeared motionless. It flowed south from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay through vast sawgrass prairies, feeding cypress swamps, hardwood hammocks, and coastal mangrove forests that served as nurseries for fisheries worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The watershed originally spanned roughly 11,000 square miles, an area larger than Maryland. Lake Okeechobee, the system’s heart, is half the size of Rhode Island but averages only nine feet in depth. Every wet season, the lake overflowed its southern rim, and a sheet of water fanned out across the flat limestone below, moving south at perhaps a hundred feet per day. That slow-moving water sustained the largest wading bird colonies in North America.
Beneath the water lay thousands of years of accumulated peat, sometimes eight to ten feet deep. That rich black soil was the region’s stored wealth—and it was that soil that attracted the men who decided to drain it all. The first attempt came in 1881. Hamilton Disston, a Philadelphia saw manufacturer, bought four million acres—an area larger than Connecticut—for $1 million.
The state of Florida, bankrupt and desperate to sell land it considered worthless, accepted without haggling. Disston’s dredges lowered the water table in places, but the Everglades was bigger than one man’s money; every canal drained one area and flooded another. He died in 1896 at age 51, his scheme unfinished. The idea he planted took root.
In 1904, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward ran for governor on the promise that he would drain the Everglades—not part of them, all of them. He won, and by 1906 state dredges were cutting canals from Lake Okeechobee east toward the Atlantic. The soil they exposed was extraordinarily fertile, producing winter vegetables and sugar cane that reached northern markets months ahead of any other region. Towns appeared along the lake’s southern edge: Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay, Clewiston.
Through the 1920s, the drainage expanded, and the Florida land boom swept money into the state. Around the lake, the farming towns swelled with workers, most of them Black migrant laborers from the South who lived in the cheapest housing closest to the lake on the lowest ground. The levee protecting the southern shore was made of mud and sand, dredge spoil never engineered for a serious storm. On September 16, 1928, a hurricane struck.
Winds near Palm Beach were estimated at 145 mph. The lake’s mud dike collapsed in multiple places, and a wall of water six to nine feet high surged across the farming towns in the dark. The official death toll was placed at roughly 2,500, but many historians believe it was higher—possibly 3,000 or more. Many of the dead were Black migrant workers whose names had never been recorded.
They were buried in a segregated mass grave in West Palm Beach that remained unmarked for decades. The disaster should have served as a warning. Instead, the conclusion drawn was that the drainage hadn’t gone far enough. The federal government authorized the Herbert Hoover Dike, a massive earthen levee eventually stretching 143 miles around the lake, rising 30 to 40 feet.
It protected human lives, but it severed the top of the Everglades from the bottom. The lake could no longer overflow its southern rim to feed the river of grass; the water was instead sent east and west through canals to the ocean. Then came the project that finished the job. After devastating floods in 1947, Congress authorized the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control Project in 1948.
The Army Corps of Engineers replumbed all of southern Florida: roughly 1,800 miles of canals, over 700 miles of levees, and nearly 200 water control structures. The Kissimmee River, which had meandered 103 miles through central Florida, was straightened into a 56-mile ditch. South of the lake, roughly 700,000 acres of the richest peat soil became the Everglades Agricultural Area, where the sugar industry exploded after the Cuban Revolution cut off America’s main sugar supply in 1959. The same year the flood control project was authorized, a different kind of history was being made at the southern tip of the peninsula.
On December 6, 1947, President Harry Truman dedicated Everglades National Park—the first major national park established not for its beauty but for its biology. A landscape architect named Ernest Coe had spent nearly 20 years lobbying for it, enduring mockery and political resistance. But the park sits at the bottom of the watershed. Every decision about how much water flows south, and when and how clean it is, is made a hundred miles away by engineers managing flood control for eight million people, irrigation for sugar fields, and water supply for the cities of the Gold Coast.
The water stopped coming. The canals diverted billions of gallons per year east and west to the ocean. During dry years, the agricultural area and coastal cities took what they needed first; whatever was left trickled south to the park. By the 1960s and 70s, the great wading bird colonies were collapsing.
Florida Bay grew saltier, seagrass beds died off by the thousands of acres, and algae blooms spread across bays that had once been crystal clear. Something quieter was also happening. The peat, exposed to air when drained, began to oxidize and decompose. Survey markers driven to bedrock in the 1920s now stand several feet above the surface.
The soil is vanishing at roughly an inch per year; in some places, five or six feet of muck have disappeared. The farmland that justified the drainage is consuming itself, and at current rates much of the agricultural area will hit bare limestone within this century. Meanwhile, the sugar industry built extraordinary political power. US Sugar Corporation and the Fanjul family’s Florida Crystals became among the most influential political donors in the state.
The Fanjul brothers, Alfonso and Jose, had rebuilt a sugar empire after Fidel Castro nationalized their family’s holdings in Cuba; in Florida, they donated generously and strategically to both parties. Federal sugar price supports—tariffs, import quotas, and loan programs—kept domestic prices roughly twice the world market price, effectively subsidizing sugar production on drained Everglades soil while the ecosystem next door starved for water. The collision became impossible to ignore by the late 1980s. Agricultural runoff carried phosphorus—a nutrient that acts like fertilizer—into the conservation areas and toward the park.
The natural Everglades evolved with almost no phosphorus; when levels rise even slightly, sawgrass is replaced by cattails. In 1988, Acting U. S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen sued the South Florida Water Management District and the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation for failing to protect the Everglades from agricultural pollution.
The case forced a political reckoning, leading to the Everglades Forever Act of 1994, which required construction of massive artificial wetlands to filter phosphorus from runoff before it reached the ecosystem. The treatment areas work to a degree, but the fundamental problem is the plumbing: the entire infrastructure of southern Florida is designed to prevent water from flowing south. This is what Congress tried to fix in 2000 with the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, a program of 68 projects including reservoirs, treatment areas, canal modifications, and the restoration of the Kissimmee River. The original cost estimate was $7.
8 billion, split between state and federal governments. By 2020, the project was far behind schedule, and cost estimates had ballooned to $16 billion or more. Funding was inconsistent, the state and federal governments argued over cost sharing, and every component required environmental impact statements, engineering studies, land acquisition, permitting, and legal review. Political will wavered with each new administration and each national emergency.
One moment crystallized the impossibility. In 2008, Governor Charlie Crist announced that the state would buy US Sugar Corporation—all of it: 187,000 acres for $1. 75 billion. The land would be retired from farming and used for water storage.
It seemed too good to be true. The financial crisis cratered Florida’s budget, the price was renegotiated downward repeatedly, and political opposition mounted. By the time the deal closed, the state had bought roughly 27,000 acres—about one-seventh of the original offer. The window that might have changed everything opened for a few months and quietly closed.
While restoration crawled forward, the Everglades found new ways to die. Burmese pythons, released or escaped pets, established a breeding population by the 1990s. A landmark 2012 study documented catastrophic declines in mammal populations: raccoon observations down 99 percent, opossum observations down nearly 100 percent, rabbit observations effectively zero. The population is estimated in the tens of thousands, possibly well over 100,000, and no one has a realistic plan to eliminate them.
Then came the algae. Lake Okeechobee had accumulated decades of nutrient pollution from cattle ranches, dairies, septic tanks, and fertilizer runoff. In a functioning Everglades, that water would have flowed south slowly, filtered by miles of sawgrass. Instead it sat in the lake, trapped behind the aging Hoover Dike, and when the lake got too full, the Corps opened the gates and sent the nutrient-laden water east through the St.
Lucie Canal and west through the Caloosahatchee River. When it hit warm coastal waters, it triggered massive blooms of toxic cyanobacteria that killed fish by the thousands, damaged tourism, and plummeted property values. The water the Everglades desperately needed was being pumped to the coasts, where it was poisoning the communities there. The infrastructure built to control the water gave every drop only two options: sit in the lake and threaten the dike, or rush to the coasts and feed the algae.
The dike itself became another crisis. Engineers warned for years that it was deteriorating, and a major rehabilitation project added billions more dollars and years more work. Any failure would be worse than 1928, because the population around the lake has grown enormously. Southern Florida now faces a threat that dwarfs all the others.
The region is among the most vulnerable places in the United States to sea level rise. The limestone bedrock beneath the Everglades is porous, so rising seas don’t just flood the surface—salt water seeps upward through the rock itself, infiltrating the Biscayne Aquifer that supplies drinking water to millions of people. The only thing pushing back against the encroaching salt is freshwater pressure from the Everglades. A healthy, fully hydrated Everglades would act as a natural barrier; a drained, diminished one offers less resistance.
Saltwater intrusion has already forced the relocation of some coastal wellfields inland. Parts of the southern Everglades could be inundated within the lifetime of people alive today. The story folds back on itself in the cruelest way. Fully restored, the Everglades would be the best defense southern Florida has against sea level rise.
Intact mangrove forests would buffer storm surges, and waterlogged peat soils would actually grow, building land upward as they had for thousands of years before the drainage. The ecosystem that America spent a century destroying is precisely the infrastructure the region now desperately needs. The Everglades isn’t just a nature preserve; it is a water treatment plant, a flood buffer, a storm shield, and a freshwater reserve, performing all these services for free if allowed to function. The restoration isn’t failing because nobody cares.
The science is clear and the public supports it. The restoration is failing because caring isn’t enough when the thing you’re trying to restore has been replaced by the thing you’re trying to keep. The Everglades and South Florida’s economy compete for the same water, same land, and same political attention, and the economy wins almost every time—not because politicians are villains, but because millions of people need to drink, farmers need to farm, and developers need to build. All those needs are immediate, while the Everglades dies on a timeline just slow enough to postpone.
Some progress has been made. The Kissimmee River restoration has brought back miles of the original channel, and wildlife has responded. Storm water treatment areas filter billions of gallons. A one-mile bridge section of the Tamiami Trail was completed in 2013, with a longer section following, allowing more water to flow south into the park.
The state of Florida has spent billions of its own money on Everglades projects. But the pace of restoration is slower than the pace of destruction. Every year the population grows, sea levels rise, the soil drops, and the python population expands. Marjory Stoneman Douglas understood this better than anyone.
She published The Everglades: River of Grass in 1947, the same year the national park was dedicated, with the opening line: “There are no other Everglades in the world. ” She reframed the place not as a swamp to be drained but as a river to be protected, and she fought for that idea until her death in 1998 at age 108. She founded Friends of the Everglades in 1969 when she was already 79 and spent the next three decades confronting governors, testifying at hearings, and refusing to stop. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993 at over 100 years old.
She reportedly said the Everglades was a test: if we can’t save it, we can’t save the planet. South of Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades Agricultural Area, there is a concrete post driven into the bedrock decades ago, placed when the surface of the muck reached its top. Today that post stands several feet above the ground. The soil around it has oxidized, shrunk, blown away, and burned.
It marks what used to be there—an honest monument recording the slow disappearance of the ground itself.