President Bush’s June visit to Florida again focused attention on the Everglades, and people concerned with protecting surface water watched with an uneasy eye. There, where best-laid plans went so wrong, lurks the reminder that the large-scale water-quality and flood-control projects so confidently launched in one era can have grim, unintended consequences in the next. But the means to prevent that from happening are more accessible than ever.

What happened in the Everglades? Sporadic drainage and dredging uncovered tracts of fertile farmland for a hundred years. Then in 1947–about the same time the Everglades National Park was established–the Army Corps of Engineers stepped in with fearsome efficiency to straighten channels and build a matchless system of canals and levees and dikes. Acknowledging that further development was inevitable, the Central and Southern Florida Project, as the corps’ effort was called, aimed to control flooding, provide fresh water for agriculture and urban development, and "restore the natural balance between soil and water in this area insofar as possible by establishing protective works, controls, and procedures for conservation and use of water and land." In its intent, the plan sounds eerily similar to the current "beneficial uses" language of the Clean Water Act.

Today, though, the Everglades are half their original size, their waters clogged with algal blooms fueled by agricultural runoff and 70 of their species endangered. Not only the ecosystem but also the region’s supply of fresh water for human use is threatened. Following a 1992 restudy of the project, the corps is beginning a nearly $8 billion effort to undo much of its previous work–ripping out water-retention structures, filling in canals, restoring marshes, and trying to restore natural flows. Early funding will go toward pilot projects and a RECOVER (Restoration Coordination and Verification) effort to ensure that what is being done this time is working and to refine what isn’t.

How to Hit a Moving Target

Will current policies and projects turn out, decades down the road, to have been as misguided as their predecessors? We have better tools than ever before for mapping, modeling, and measuring and a more thorough understanding of hydrology. In general, we place a different value today on natural wetlands and biodiversity (a word not yet coined when the battle with the Everglades began)–certainly a higher one than the New Jersey congressman who, in a 1930s debate over whether to make the Everglades a national park, declared it "a snake swamp park on perfectly worthless land."

Yet for all that, our ideas about how to manage water, and stormwater in particular, continue to change, as Andy Reese’s article on page 48 illustrates. Each new approach endeavors to correct an existing deficiency while oftentimes introducing new and unforseen problems. Two articles in this issue–"Stormwater Paradigms" and "Restorative Redevelopment"–examine the constant rethinking in the field.

The need to reexamine fundamentals is the best guarantee that we are–or will be–on the right track. Current debates, such as Dominic DiToro and Andrew Thuman’s discussion of eutrophication criteria in this issue and G. Fred Lee’s discussion in our May/June issue on the actual impacts of runoff on the beneficial uses of receiving waters (www.forester.net/sw_0106_guest_editorial.html), demonstrate reassuring open-mindedness rather than blind commitment. It’s never been easier to start or join in the debate of your choice on Stormwater’s online discussion group, StormwaterPro (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stormwaterpro or stormwaterpro-subscribe@yahoogroups.com). The pros and cons of the watershed approach, debates on which water-quality measurements we should be using–all go toward denying future presidents the opportunity to stand next to a body of water and pledge restoration funding.

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