Abstract
In 2000, Congress approved a $9 billion dollar program to restore the greater Everglades ecosystem in south Florida. The program faces enormous challenges, including scientific and technological uncertainty, the need to reconcile competing objectives (water for nature and for people), and a cumbersome joint federal-state planning process. Implementation has been excruciatingly slow; ten years in, only two projects have broken ground. This paper draws on ethnographic research to present a case study of one of those projects: the Picayune Strand Restoration, which is rehydrating a failed subdivision in Collier County. I find that even for one of the Everglades restoration's lowest-hanging fruits, significant costs and delays have been imposed by local opposition grounded in property-rights discourse. I suggest that the salience of this opposition, in an area lacking development pressures and with almost no human inhabitants, is derived from Florida's dominant land-use paradigm, which is being radically destabilized by the state's restoration mission but which continues to inform political culture on the ground.
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