Biden's chance to save the Everglades

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Biden's Chance to Save the Everglades
With passage of the Covid-19 relief bill behind it, the Biden administration will soon offer its encore, one or more big proposals reflecting President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better, which will enlarge government’s role in the American economy. Together, these budget requests will be bigger in dollar terms than the relief bill, will address daunting problems like infrastructure and climate change — and, inevitably, will revive the partisan divide that plagues Washington.

There is, however, one environmentally important project that boasts remarkable bipartisan agreement and has important climate implications. It may be the most ambitious ecosystem recovery project ever, not just in the United States but anywhere, and it has the added virtue of being an act of atonement for past government failures.

scheme aimed at replicating as nearly as possible the historical flows of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee — flows that a pioneer advocate named Marjory Stoneman Douglas called the River of Grass — that once made South Florida a biological wonderland. These flows slowed to trickle starting in the late 1940s when Congress ordered up a massive flood control project to protect Florida’s booming cities, which looked like a smart idea at the time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/opinion/biden-environment-everglades-florida.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage