Will We Choose Life or Death for the Everglades?

If Lake Okeechobee can still be considered the heart of the Everglades, then the ecosystem is having a massive coronary. In the summer of 2004, four hurricanes blasted through Florida, churning up giant globs of phosphorus that had accumulated on the lake's bottom, wiping out its native vegetation, slathering its surface with coffee-colored crud. Scientists began warning that the 730-square-mile lake was becoming a dead zone, and water managers started flushing even more of the turbid lake into the fragile estuaries, which were clobbered by red tides so toxic that beachgoers had to wear surgical masks. Environmentalists sued, and the Palm Beach Post asked: "R.I.P. Lake Okeechobee?" In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Wilma ripped across the Everglades and pummeled the lake once again, taking several sizable chunks out of the Hoover Dike. There was no breach, but a few more hours of pounding could have created a catastrophe. And the lake's coffee hue has darkened from latte to espresso.

The hurricanes were natural disasters, but the collapse of Lake Okeechobee is a man-made disaster. Ever since the lake was imprisoned by the Hoover Dike after the killer storm of 1928, it has been used as a reservoir and a sewer for farms, dairies and cities. The control of the lake has enabled people to live and prosper in South Florida, but the slimy gunk that is suffocating the lake is a legacy of those people. So are the red tides that have increased 1,500 percent in the Caloosahatchee estuary, the invasive Old World climbing fern that is spreading through the Everglades like kudzu, and the water shortages plaguing a region that leads the nation in per capita water use. Man's impact has pervaded the ecosystem, from Disney World to Key West, from the herbicide-resistant hydrilla clogging the Kissimmee chain of lakes to the 60-mile-wide cloud of "black water" that wiped out half the coral in western Florida Bay in 2002.

Nature is clearly out of whack in South Florida. The watershed has dozens of parks and wildlife refuges, not to mention highway underpasses to protect panthers from cars and no-wake zones to protect manatees from boats, but 68 of its species are still on the endangered list.

The most daunting threat to the Everglades is the runaway development that is still wiping out its wetlands and stressing its aquifers. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach conurbation has become America's sixth-largest metropolitan area, obliterating almost every patch of green space between the Atlantic and the perimeter levee. Postwar Everglades suburbs such as Coral Springs, Hialeah, Miami Gardens, Miramar, Pembroke Pines and Sunrise have all attracted 100,000 residents, and are approaching build-out. Southeast Florida's office sprawl is just as intense; one study declared the region "the most centerless large office market in the U.S.," the ultimate "Edgeless City."

Westward sprawl has become the area's hottest political issue. Miami-Dade County has already approved two developments outside its "urban service boundary" and is now embroiled in a battle over proposals to shift the entire boundary west and south. Broward County's western frontier is almost completely paved.

The other major battle-ground in the Everglades sprawl wars is Southwest Florida, which is rapidly expanding eastward into the peninsula's watery interior. Environmental agencies have been helpless in the face of the intense development pressure-and equally intense political pressure. "We are permitting in Southwest Florida as fast as we can the same types of development and associated environmental degradation we are spending billions of dollars trying to fix on the southeast coast," the EPA's South Florida director e-mailed the top Army Corps regulator in Florida. "Haven't we learned our lessons? Apparently not!"

History repeats itself daily in the Naples-Fort Myers-Cape Coral area, where regulators who raise red flags about impacts to water quality, water flows and endangered species are routinely overwhelmed by the political clout of developers. The Fish and Wildlife Service recently admitted that the science it has used to rubber-stamp thousands of homes in panther habitat was flawed. An environmental impact study of the region's growth has languished in the bowels of the Army Corps bureaucracy for almost a decade. And the EPA's top regulator in Southwest Florida quit after federal government appointees began pushing a developer-funded study claiming that natural wetlands caused pollution.

On the east coast, the perimeter levee has served as a final limit to westward development into the Everglades, but on the west coast, there is no levee to stop the eastward surge of driveways, highways and fairways. Misnamed subdivisions keep steamrolling wetlands and farmland: Winding Cypress, Naples Lakes, Collier Lakes. Southwest Florida is already getting a taste of Southeast Florida's traffic jams, lawn-watering restrictions, polluted beaches, overstuffed schools and a vanishing sense of place. Even Gov. Bush's developer-friendly Growth Management Commission, chaired by Mel Martinez, an Orlando Republican who is now a U.S. Senator, warned that sprawl was out of control throughout South Florida. "The developers are very, very powerful, but obviously something has got to change," says Martinez, who also served as President Bush's housing secretary. "We're going to lose the Everglades. We're already losing quality of life." In coming decades, as sprawl marches east into the Everglades and west into the Everglades Agricultural Area, South Florida could become an uninterrupted asphalt megalopolis stretching from Naples to Palm Beach. Perhaps it could be called Napalm Beach.

This is a constant refrain in South Florida, especially from newcomers who believe their paradise is being spoiled by additional newcomers. When the Miami Herald ran a series of articles on Broward County's sprawl, the reader reaction was furious. "To the builders and developers and to our county, state and federal legislators: No, a thousand times no, on moving westward," said a Sunrise man.

Of course, those antisprawl letter-writers all lived in sprawling suburbs in the former Everglades. Now that they were settled in their gated communities, they wanted to slam the gate behind them. It is easy to fulminate about the costs of South Florida's growth-its gridlock, environmental degradation, inadequate municipal services and cookie-cutter landscape-but there is no denying the allure of its 75-degree January afternoons.

Some observers warn that Florida real estate is as overvalued now as it was before the 1926 hurricane, but the bubble didn't burst after the four Florida hurricanes of 2004. People are still flocking to the sunshine, and the land rush is expected to accelerate as heat-seeking baby boomers reach retirement age.

President Bush may be right: Ecosystem restoration may be the new environmentalism of the 21st century. In the 20th century, conservationists tried to stop the destruction of nature-first by protecting beloved species, such as wading birds, and beloved places, such as Paradise Key; later by cracking down on air and water pollution, while offering new protections to wetlands and endangered species.

Today America's air and water are much cleaner. Its rivers no longer catch fire; its bald eagles are no longer endangered. The National Wildlife Refuge system that began with five acres at Pelican Island now protects 96 million acres. Suburban sprawl and invasive species still pose serious threats to nature in America, and global warming is a 20th-century-style pollution problem that the country cannot ignore much longer.

But reviving entire ecosystems is the challenge of the future. It will require Americans to think on a landscape scale, to clean up their own messes, to gore someone's ox now and then. It will require the Army Corps of Engineers to embrace its environmental mission as more than a new way to move dirt, to change its culture as well as its rhetoric, to surrender some of its historical battlefield to Mother Nature.

On a landscape scale, restoring the Everglades would help people as well as panthers and periphyton. But the Everglades is more than a test of our ability to help ourselves. You don't have to worship Gaia or God to sense that we have done something wrong to the earth in South Florida; you just need to drive through the region's strip-mall hellscapes. There is only one Everglades, and we have just about destroyed it. It is our ability to recognize this, and to make amends, that sets us apart from other species.

Before the war in Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked the "Pottery Barn rule" for invading sovereign nations: You break it, you own it. The same rule should apply to ecosystems. We broke the Everglades, so we ought to fix it.

"The Everglades is a test," the environmentalists say. "If we pass, we may get to keep the planet." It is a test of our scientific knowledge, our engineering prowess, and our political will. It is a test of the concept of sustainable development. But most of all, the Everglades is a moral test. It will be a test of our willingness to restrain ourselves, to share the earth's resources with the other living things that moveth upon it, to live in harmony with nature. If we pass, we may deserve to keep the planet.