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of the Everglades by allowing more water to enter
the wetlands. CERP was signed into law by
President Bill Clinton in 2000, with an estimated
$7.8 billion due to be spent during the lifetime of
the project (
Economist
, 2005b). The implemen-
tation of CERP has, however, encountered a series
of setbacks and difficulties. In many ways, these
difficulties serve to illustrate the challenges that are
associated with governmental interventions in
environmental systems. The main problem is that
simply allowing the natural hydrological system to
return to the Everglades would have flooded large
areas of productive agricultural land and generated
heightened flood risks in large cities such as Miami
and Fort Lauderdale. In the wake of the events of
Hurricane Katrina, such flooding risks are clearly
unacceptable. What CERP must thus attempt to
achieve is a complex system of managed flooding,
in and through which flooding in some areas of the
Everglades is counterbalanced by flood control and
careful water channelling in others. In this context,
CERP is less a restoration project and more a
watershed management plan.
It is in the context of such hydrological com-
plexities that CERP has encountered resistance
and threatened to overshoot its allocated budget.
Every new engineering project has to meet the
demands of environmentalists who are concerned
that current re-flooding plans will not restore the
Everglades, as well as those of urban residents
and agriculturalists who want less flooding and
greater protection. And so it is that in the swampy
landscapes of the Everglades we find national and
local governments metaphorically and literally
up to their knees in water. In many ways, the case
of the Everglades serves to illustrate that neither
Marxist theories of the state (where the state
serves narrowly defined class interests) nor visions
of the state as a neutral referee (policing com-
peting economic and environmental interests)
effectively capture the nature of the relationships
between government systems and the environ-
ment. In the world of real-time environmental
management it appears that the state finds itself
trying to balance different socio-economic needs
on a case-by-case basis, with some interests
winning out on certain occasions, and other
interests prevailing elsewhere. The latest develop-
ments in the Everglades have seen the State of
Florida agreeing to buy US Sugar's operations in
the region. By gradually winding-up US Sugar's
operations in the Everglades, the State of Florida
hopes to free up some 760km
2
of the wetland for
restoration. At an estimated cost of $1.75 billion,
this is an expensive way to pursue environmental
restoration (Cave, 2008). It also appears to
represent an intriguing case of the public sector
purchasing premium corporate real estate that was
only reclaimed through significant public funding
in the first place.
News on the latest developments in the
work of the Comprehensive Everglades
Restoration Plan can be found at:
7.6 CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter we have explored the nature of state
systems and the practices of government with
which they are associated. Although the power
of nation states is being partially eroded by the
processes of globalization (see
Chapter 5)
, it is clear
that they represent key actors in the evolving
systems of environmental management that are
a part of the Anthropocene. This chapter has
illustrated how the territorial reach, institutional
capacities and expertise of governments makes
them powerful actors in the regulation of human-
environment relations. We have also seen that
while various theories of the role of the state within
environmental affairs exist (including anarchism,
Marxism and eco-authoritarianism), they are often
unable to deal with the complex nature of state-
environment interactions. Through the examples
of the London fog disaster and ecological restora-
tion in the Florida Everglades, we have seen that
