WASHINGTON — The Everglades of southern Florida, which have been under siege from development and farming for more than a century, have been offered a new lease on life with a plan to restore large areas to a natural, swampy state. Some 187,000 acres of sugar plantation will be gradually returned to nature under the plan. The hope of environmentalists is that the slow-moving ‘river of grass’ will flow north to south once again, restoring a delicate ecosystem that supplies fresh water to the aquifers of southern Florida. Yesterday’s deal was described as ‘an unprecedented opportunity to completely rewrite the course of Everglades,’ by Jeff Danter of the Nature Conservancy. The long-planned restoration effort is the largest of its kind in the world, an attempt to undo and reroute decades of flood-control projects that have diverted water to make way for growth. Until yesterday, the prohibitive cost meant the plan was moribund. According to the author Michael Grunwald, half of the original Everglades has been lost, and the rest is polluted and no longer flowing naturally. Just 100 years ago southern Florida was America’s last frontier, a watery wilderness of slow-moving, shallow rivers. It had the […]