Action should happen immediately, I agree. But the Everglades has proven to be a more complex system than anyone ever imagined.

While we all stubbornly believe that every blunder we make can be fixed, maybe the Everglades problem is proving that our mistakes are sometimes irreversible. Maybe it is time we man-up and admit that this is one mistake that can never be fixed completely.

As of right now, there are thousands of papers detailing the results of painstaking studies that have been done on the Florida Everglades. Yet with the completion of every study, the picture of the Everglades becomes more and more complex. It's not just a big wash tub that we can just fill back up with water. In fact, simply throwing water on the sucker might cause even more problems. And because human habitation has taken root, we have to consider flood control.

Its a jumbled mess that might never be put back together. But not all is bleak. The restoration project, while not entirely successfull at its intended job, has already proven successfull at providing more information about the complexity of wetland ecosystems than ever before. Lessons learned from this project can be (and indeed are being) used in other areas around the world. The uniqueness of the Everglades has painted a more complete picture of the biogeochemical processes and the hydrology for any watershed.

Well, not quite all, dear Pynnacle.  Not all of us adhere to 19th-century faith in progress, especially of the scientific/technological kind, nor to American can-do-ism.

But your general philosophical point is well-made and important.  "It's a jumbled mess that might never be put back together" unfortunately does not describe the Everglades alone.  It is just one instance of a Humpty-Dumpty-ism which it behooves all of us to take to heart.