In "Paving Paradise, we point to the story of the Miami-Dade Port Authority's notorious Everglades jetport as the point in American history where people first stood up for a swamp.

"In 1968, the port authority bought a 39-square-mile site just north of Everglades National Park and quickly built a training runway, laying down the first of what were supposed to be many big, long slabs of asphalt," we wrote. "The 'Everglades jetport'...would have runways six miles long, with jets taking off every minute. Then, for easy access to the site from both coasts, the authority wanted a 1,000-foot-wide transportation corridor built from coast to coast. The corridor would include a new interstate highway, a high-speed mass transit system, even a “recreational waterway” for airboats and waterfoils."

However, a coalition of hunters, conservationists and citizen activists -- including, for the first time but far from the last in her long life, Marjory Stoneman Douglas -- defeated the jetport plan. They were aided in no small part by the first-ever environmental impact study, written by a group led by Aldo Leopold's son, Luna.

The grassroots group that Douglas launched then, Friends of the Everglades, is still around four decades later. But as the Miami Herald reported recently, it's suffered some financial reversals and has had to close its Miami office to regroup.

Meanwhile, though, the jetport project that it was formed to oppose has shown surprising signs of life -- just not as a jetport. As the Herald reported last week, Miami-Dade County is facing a serious budget deficit and in searching for new revenue, turned its attention toward the old site.

As a result, "commissioners are considering prospecting for oil and gas under the swampy, sprawling 37-square-mile site that is now mostly within the borders of the Big Cypress National Wildlife Preserve," the Herald's Curtis Morgan wrote. "Besides drilling, ranked as option No. 1, there are other possibilities: rock mining, a park for off-road vehicles, selling the land or charging by the chunk for its use as a 'mitigation bank' to offset wetlands damage elsewhere."

Environmental activists were, as Morgan puts it, "flabbergasted." Noted Alan Farago in his blog, "Does anyone really believe that there is a point to fighting the same battles over and over again, over unsustainable and damaging uses to the Everglades?"

The Herald's editorial page didn't think so: " As desperation moves go, these options are the mother of all dunderhead schemes." Fortunately, the editorial noted, "Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez pulled the jet port option proposal from the county commission's Tuesday calendar, according to his spokeswoman, Victoria Mallette, because the `mayor is not comfortable with it.' Wise call, Mr. Mayor."

But that's the nature of the unnatural world of Florida. No development project is ever completely dead, not even the ones thought buried 40 years ago. They're all ready to rise like zombies in a Michael Jackson video and dance like the devil all over again.