Picayune Restoration begins.  David Anderson attended and spoke at a groundbreaking event for continued restoration of the Picayune Strand.   An article about that is attached below.

Everglades gets back to nature
$11 billion restoration 30-year project

By JOEL MORONEY
jmoroney@news-press.com
Originally posted on November 30, 2006

The scars of development are healing in the Everglades south of Alligator Alley, where thousands of motorists pass the unseen effort in the vast wetlands that stretch to the Gulf of Mexico.

Backhoes churn amid flocks of birds while miles of blacktop and canals slowly disappear.

The land is returning to its roots, salvaged from damage caused by developers of what in the 1960s was to become South Golden Gate Estates.
State officials met at Picayune Strand State Forest on Wednesday to mark the second anniversary of the first Acceler8 project, a 30-year, $11 billion effort to restore the Everglades.

"It's already bringing back the sheetflow and bringing back the plants," said David Anderson, of Audubon of Florida. "It not only works, but it's working faster than the people involved could have hoped."
 
Several hundred people are working to remove 290 miles of roads; plug 48 miles of canals; burn invasive vegetation; clear trailers, junk cars and makeshift structures; and remove other evidence of what once were 19,000 building lots.

Some of the men sleep in campers and work yards from ponds created by plugged canals, where alligators make their homes and the endangered wood stork flies.
"Most of the land to the south (of I-75) was uninhabitable," said Chip Ditel, Acceler8 program manager.

"This was the ditch-and- drain philosophy that built Southwest Florida," Ditel said. "Even if nothing else is done, this is a really good thing for restoration." So the men continue work on more than 55,000 acres that stretch to the Marco Island skyline on the horizon and the Gulf of Mexico a dozen miles away.

Land acquisition took 20 years, cost an estimated $125 million and involved 20,000 landowners, said Alice Carlson, of the water district.

Jesse Hardy was probably the best known landowner. The disabled former Navy SEAL finally lost his battle in January to stay on his land and surrendered his ramshackle homestead and 160 acres to the state for $4.95 million. He bought the land in 1976 for $60,000 and lived in a clapboard home without electricity about 40 miles east of Naples. Only an earth plot remains, his homestead just a patch of scraped earth in the wilderness.
"We will all reap the benefits of this project for generations to come," Carlson said.

And so the motorists on Alligator Alley continue to speed by.

But here the land is being returned to the Florida panther, the alligators and the birds.
Here, there will be no development.

"These species and this habitat need this restoration — they need it fast," Anderson said. "And maybe one day, we're going to get back to a colony of a million birds."
By JOEL MORONEY