Patterson Boulevard looks like a road to nowhere. In fact, it’s hardly a road at all, just two dirt tracks into the Florida swampland, hemmed in by willow thickets, pine flatwoods, and cypress forests, passable only in the dry season, and then just barely. Patterson is part of what’s left of an immense grid of roads built years ago for a failed development that was both massively ambitious and ecologically ruinous. Yet these tracks have now become an entryway into one of the more striking restoration projects in South Florida, a bright spot in nearly three decades of efforts to protect and revive what remains of the greater Everglades ecosystem by returning the flow of water to 55,000 acres.

Here, in Picayune Strand State Forest, the state and federal governments have been working for more than two decades to undo the damage wrought by that failed development. It’s been a huge undertaking across 55,000 acres. Recently, though, the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put the finishing touches on the most critical part of the work: restoring the natural flow of water across the land. How well this hydrological restoration leads to wider ecological recovery remains to be seen. But the transformation is already underway.

“Picayune is as good a place in South Florida that there is, in terms of getting it back to what it was before,” said Michael Duever, an ecologist who has been monitoring the Picayune project for the state aimed at returning the flow of water.

The aim of the plan was to restore and reconnect parts of the Everglades that have been starved of water or otherwise degraded.

The story of the Picayune Strand Restoration Project begins in the 1950s, when the Gulf American Corporation set out to turn 114,000 swampy acres of southwest Florida — an area eight times the size of Manhattan — into a giant rural subdivision called Golden Gate Estates. It was said to be the biggest such development in the country. The land in question was not pristine. As in much of South Florida, loggers had swept in during the middle of the 20th century and cut down most of the old-growth cypress. The only trees left were those too small to sell.

Gulf American made things worse. To drain the wet and flood-prone land, the company blasted canals in the limestone bedrock, then used the spoils to build hundreds of miles of elevated roads. It ensnared buyers, many of whom lived in other states and countries and never saw what they were buying. “The wilderness has been pushed aside,” the company boasted in a brochure, returning the flow of water. “With calipers and slide rules, draglines and dynamite rigs, we are literally changing the face of Florida.”

Read the full article about conserving Everglades by Richard Mertens at Yale Environment 360.