This week a cavalcade of Obama Administration officials will smile for photos as the first major federal project in the long-awaited Everglades restoration begins, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports.

State agencies have already ripped out hundreds of miles of roads and canals in the area once known as Southern Golden Gate Estates to prepare the failed subdivision for this particular $53-million component of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project. Next the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will "install pumping stations to spread water in sheets across the southwest corner of the ‘Glades to nurture plants and wildlife, reversing the past practice of channeling water out to sea," the Sun-Sentinel reports.

Remember now, this is only one part of a massive, complex restoration project to fix Florida's most famous marsh, a project that by some estimates is likely to cost the taxpayers $20-billion over the next couple of decades.

To get an idea of what's involved, take a look at what the Corps has been doing with the Kissimmee River, where the state and federal taxpayers are spending $1-billion to put the bends back in a river that the Corps once straightened into a ditch. As the Sun-Sentinel notes, in recent weeks "bulldozer operators finished refurbishing another six miles of river channel — and backfilling four miles of canal channel that was as much as 900 feet wide and 30 feet deep in places."

So far, though, it's working. Biologist Lawrence Glenn told the paper, "We've counted 320 fish and wildlife species that have come back since we reconnected the floodplain to the flow of water."

Reading these stories is like looking at all the king's soldiers and all the king's men putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. It's not easy.

As we note in "Paving Paradise," it's far more expensive to restore wetlands than it is to just leave them alone in the first place: "When wetlands are destroyed to make room for subdivisions and stores and limestone mines, we taxpayers wind up footing the bill. We pay for government-subsidized flood insurance for homes built in what used to be swamps. We pay for the government to spend millions buying homes that are repeatedly inundated just to tear them down. We pay to clean up the water pollution that the wetlands once filtered naturally. We pay to find new sources of water to replace the ones we’ve paved over."

In 2001, a panel of wetland experts assembled by the National Research Council reviewed the Corps' performance in protecting wetlands and found it seriously wanting. A month ago, members of that same panel published a review of the Corps' latest wetland rules. Among other things, they urged the agency to push much harder the existing policy of avoidance first and foremost.

As they explained: "we should not overlook the simplest and most straightforward contribution to the goal of no net loss of wetland functions—avoidance of impacts to high-quality and difficult-to-replace wetlands."