The Everglades is in danger of being loved to death. Floridians and awestruck visitors, engineers and farmers—all scrabbled for their causes. A federal restoration plan has survived tough battles, and Bob Payne finds reason to hope the park will, too

On a dry, mosquito-free afternoon in February, near Nine Mile Pond, where fresh and salt water mix, a ranger was talking to a group of us about the threats facing Everglades National Park. As he was explaining that all the trouble had to do with competing needs for freshwater, a roseate spoonbill flew overhead. The ranger interrupted himself to let us exclaim in wonder over the lovely pink-winged creature before he said, "I see tremendous amounts of wildlife here, unbelievable amounts. But I have talked with folks who were here as young people, and although memories fade a little bit and we alter things, they say you can't imagine how much there was compared with today."

I, however, could do more than imagine.

In 1969, when I was not quite twenty years old, I lived here, aboard a houseboat I'd built myself. I worked, on occasion, at the Flamingo Visitors Center marina, where I sold live shrimp to Wshermen, who would very often try to engage me in conversation in the hope that my count would go awry in their favor. The image I still have of the Everglades was formed when I took the houseboat into the backcountry of the saw grass marshes for days at a time. It is an image of a wilderness unlike any other—a wilderness that is unique because it is defined not so much by the beauty of its landscape as by the drama of its biology.

"You can't be here long without seeing something eat something else," I remember a ranger saying back then. And he was right, although I am happy to say that I never saw an alligator eat a dog, as the old-timers swore had happened on more than one occasion—usually, the story went, a small, yippy visitor's dog.

Even in those days, the Everglades—which, beyond its importance as the only place of its kind in the world, serves as a crucial water source for urban South Florida—was considered to be in peril. It was drying up, I remember people saying, because much of the water that would have flowed into it naturally had been diverted. And now, as the ranger at Nine Mile Pond told us, the cumulative effect of that lack of water is "an ecosystem on the edge of existence."

But help has finally arrived—maybe. Just prior to the 2000 presidential election, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, a $7.8 billion, thirty-six-year undertaking that then secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt described as "the most ambitious environmental restoration project in the history of civilization."

Yet, as I revisited nature ponds, hardwood hammocks, and winding mangrove waterways that I hadn't seen in decades, I wondered what the plan would actually mean for this ecosystem, which agriculture and development have reduced to half its original size. What would it mean for the feathered population, now less than ten percent of what it was in 1832, when artist John James Audubon observed "great flocks of wading birds flying overhead in such numbers to actually block out the light from the sun"? What would it mean for the sixty-eight endangered species living in the Everglades—among them the Everglades kite, the wood stork, and the almost extinct Cape Sable seaside sparrow? What would it mean, over the next few decades, for visitors wishing to experience a subtropical wilderness that not only holds three designations (International Biosphere Reserve, Wetland of International Importance, World Heritage Site) but also is on the National Parks Conservation Association's list of top ten endangered U.S. parks?