As I visited some of my old haunts—Anhinga Trail, still one of the best spots in the park to see concentrations of alligators and wading birds; Nine Mile Pond, where the water in which I had done much of my canoeing was so shallow that I could almost as easily have taken a "swamp tromp"; and Coot Bay Pond, where snakes could number in the hundreds on the nearby road but are now all gone, apparently the victims of a 1991 drought—I realized that it's much easier to get agreement on what's wrong with the Everglades than on how to fix it.

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan is an attempt to do that, while at the same time answering the concerns of everyone from environmentalists to sugar farmers to those of us who think it's worth getting up before dawn to watch herons rise into the sky at first light. In essence, the plan is designed to capture the up to 1.7 billon gallons of water a day that currently flow from lake Okeechobee to the ocean through a few waterways that are part of the Corps of Engineers" old plumbing job. Some water would be held in surface reservoirs, but much would be stored deep underground and pumped back up when needed for urban, agricultural, and park use. The cost is to be split evenly between the federal government and Florida, whose governor, Jeb Bush, strongly supports it (as did Al Gore).

Among specific benefits to the park would be the filling in of some canals, the tearing down of some levees, and the raising of a ten-mile section of the Tamiami Trail (which now acts as a giant dike)—all aimed at allowing the water to flow in broad, shallow sheets through the saw grass, as it once did naturally. The goal is for eighty percent of the captured water to be returned to the ecosystem, distributed when and where it is needed. "If that could happen," a park official told me, "there is every reason to think that the rest of the system would begin to respond. So, twenty-five years from now, you might again have a chance to do a backcountry canoe trip and come across rookeries with two thousand or more birds, which is very hard to do now."

The plan, which will be executed primarily by the Corps of Engineers, is of such enormous scale, and is based on so much untested and expensive technology (particularly relating to the underground storage), that it involves a number of pilot projects designed to show results within the next ten years. By law, it requires an independent scientific review and a report to Congress at least every five years, with the understanding that significant revisions can be made if the evidence warrants it.

The plan has been criticized as overly engineered and overly politicized, but most of the major environmental groups, including the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund, originally signaled their approval. Although now, with the actual moving of the dirt scheduled to begin this year, many of these organizations are voicing concern that regulations being formulated to govern the project are too vague to ensure that the water needs of the ecosystem will come before the water needs of developers. In an open letter to Governor Bush, a coalition of environmental groups recently wrote that the regulations "are like a road map that contains no mileposts, no destination, and only the faintest direction to those charged with driving the implementation of the restoration plan."