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The Everglades Restoration Case
The canonical case of conservation-phase optimization that succeeded by engineering metrics while slowly destroying the system — and the subsequent shift to adaptive management as a response.
The Everglades ecosystem in South Florida was managed for decades under a conservation-phase paradigm. The Army Corps of Engineers straightened rivers, built canals, drained wetlands, and imposed a controlled hydrological regime designed to maximize agricultural productivity and flood protection. The engineering was excellent. The coordination between water management districts was tight. And the Everglades, one of the most biologically productive ecosystems in North America, was dying. The optimization was destroying the system because the optimization assumed that conditions would remain stable. They were not. The case became the canonical demonstration of the resilience-efficiency tradeoff — and, eventually, the canonical case of adaptive management applied at scale.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Everglades depends on variability — seasonal fluctuations in water level, periodic fires, the unpredictable meandering of sheet flow across the landscape. The engineering regime eliminated the variability. Without variability, the system could not maintain the biological complexity that made it productive. Species that depended on seasonal drying lost their habitat.