Was the restoration plan the last chance to save the Everglades, as I had been told by some of the people who know the park best? Or was it, as I heard from others who know it equally well, a $7.8 billion sham—a scheme, cloaked in the sacred word restoration. Some contend that it was meant not so much to rescue an imperiled ecosystem as to protect the powerful agricultural interests that lie to the north of the park and to provide drinking water and flood control for urban development that is expected to at least double the now six-million-plus population of South Florida. Was it a plan, as one critic said, "that fixes problems for people who aren't even born yet, while the Everglades is dying?"

For the visitor, the best way to begin to put these questions into perspective is to approach the park as I did, by way of lake Okeechobee, whose levee hints of the destruction caused when a flood in 1928 killed some 2,400 people. Although you can seldom see the water from the highway without climbing the tall levee (34 feet high on average), the lake is a key element in the Everglades drainage system—and is awash in destructive levels of phosphorous from agricultural runoff.

From lake Okeechobee, I traveled south on secondary roads through an area comprising more than 420,000 acres of rich black soil that was once swampland but has been drained and is now planted in sugarcane. The fields belong to a highly subsidized and environmentally controversial sugar industry that took off here in the late 1960s, when we stopped buying Cuban sugar. How powerful the industry is, environmentalists like to point out, can be judged by the fact that a South Florida sugar executive was able to interrupt President Bill Clinton during one of his sessions with Monica lewinsky. Despite the industry's clout, though, the fields may be without a future. The soil, based on a soggy, decomposing muck that disappears as it is exposed to air, has thinned by at least several feet since the draining began. Within a few decades, it may be too shallow to farm. Then, many predict, developers will move in.

In the meantime the fields, part of a huge reclaimed tract called the Everglades Agricultural Area, are directly in the natural path of a sheet of water that once flowed south from lake Okeechobee into the 1.5 million acres that are now the national park.

South of the agricultural area, I hit the Tamiami Trail, a two-lane highway built in 1928 to connect Miami on the east coast with Naples, ninety miles away on the west. Along the trail, which forms much of the northern boundary of the park, I stopped for a lunch of "gator bits" at a restaurant owned by the Miccosukee Indians, who also own 300,000 acres of land adjacent to the boundary. With the Miccosukee, you can take an airboat ride, something not permitted in the park because it is considered environmentally destructive. I did go, and couldn't decide if I was more disappointed in myself for doing it or in the driver for riding us in a tight, noisy circle around an agitated eight-foot alligator.