FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. -- At dusk, Jim Raines likes to drive to this quiet spot on the city edge, sit on his pickup's tailgate and listen to Florida primeval: sea breezes rustling the saw grass, the endless buzz of mosquitoes and the thick bubbles bursting out of the muck of an alligator-infested swamp.

"Spooky, ain't it," he muses, as a big splash is heard deeper inside the 11,655-square-kilometre swamp known as the Florida Everglades.

"Probably a 'gator going after a critter. Sitting here, it gets you back to nature."

Getting back to nature is an increasingly difficult thing to do in Florida.

In the 1950s, with the demands of sugar barons and real-estate developers in mind, the Army Corps of Engineers was ordered to drain the Everglades. The Corps' multibillion-dollar mission was to eliminate an ecosystem as quickly as possible.

And the Corps came close to finishing the job. Sugar plantations, farms, malls, condos and golf courses -- all built on dried swampland -- have swallowed about half of the original Everglades. Its water has been polluted with fertilizer and sewage; populations of wading birds dropped by 90 per cent in Everglades National Park and nesting grounds in the mangrove swamps are growing silent.

But now what was one of the planet's biggest swamp-draining schemes has been turned into a massive scheme to re-plumb nature.

The federal and state governments have embarked on an $8-billion (U.S.) plan to save the approximately 96-kilometre-wide channel of water that once flowed freely -- though very, very slowly -- from 180-square-kilometre Lake Okeechobee to the tip of Florida. Simply put, the plan is to reverse almost everything the Corps of Engineers built and bring back what is known as the shallow River of Grass.

"There's one thing about the Army Corp of Engineers," said Mary Barley, a spokesman for The Everglades Foundation. "If you give them a mission, they do it. Now they've been given the right mission. It won't be easy . . . but I think it can work."

The plan is to capture and store the 1.7 billion gallons of fresh water that now flow daily out of the swamps. The water will be stored in underground aquifers and reservoirs and used to irrigate farmland and provide drinking water for south Florida. The Corps will remove at least 380 kilometres of levees and dikes that have directed much of the water to the east and west, drying up the southern part of the Everglades. Ultimately, the plan envisions storing more than 500 billion gallons of water in underground wells, for use in dry periods.

The 30-year plan will also be attempting to bring back the legendary purity of the water in the Everglades. Before development, the water was purer than a bottle of Evian water. But phosphorous and other pollutants have poisoned it, a decay that could also be reversed with the creation of 32,000 hectares of artificial wetlands.

"When it is finished, the Everglades will look and function as it did more than a century ago," U.S. Senator Bob Graham promised the Atlanta Journal Constitution recently. When completed, the plan's advocates predict, the 'Glades will be full of orchids and wading birds, Florida's endangered panthers and its manatees will all be ensured of survival and the state's sprawling real estate will be given clear boundaries.

"If we don't do something to change what's been happening, the Everglades will die," agreed Juanita Greene, a spokesman for the Friends Of The Everglades, a key pressure group in southern Florida.

But Ms. Greene and her group aren't nearly as optimistic as others that the Everglades will be saved. She fears that real-estate developers and the sugar barons, special-interest groups that wield enormous power in Florida and in Washington, will slowly bend the plan's mission to their own interests.