Ten years ago, Gov. Lawton Chiles famously surrendered in federal court and agreed that Florida should clean the water going to the Everglades. Since then, a massive public and private effort has been successfully implemented. Now significantly cleaner water is going into and improving the health of the Everglades.

About 95 percent of the Everglades today, including all of the pristine areas and Everglades National Park, are at or near the water-quality goals set by scientists and believed to be impossible to reach just 10 years ago, when the Everglades ecosystem was pronounced in critical condition.

After the governor's court appearance in July 1991, negotiators from the state and federal governments, environmental groups and landowners, mainly farmers, hammered out an agreement to clean the water -- the Everglades' lifeblood.

That agreement was codified in 1994 in the Florida Everglades Forever Act, the state-private effort that is the first major step in Everglades restoration. The next step is the $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan that Congress approved in 2000. Because Congress did not finish its federal action until 2000, some believe that no work has yet begun. In fact, the state of Florida and the Florida sugar industry, which is upstream of the Everglades, have been working on and achieving substantial on-the-ground improvements based on the 1994 legislation.

Deep in the Everglades, four massive new marshes have been built and now are working to provide wildlife habitat and deliver clean water to the surrounding Everglades. At a cost of $297 million, these 19,588 acres of new, critically placed marshland are making a difference. In 2003, two more new marsh projects will come on line with another 21,830 acres and a price tag of $410 million.

This is the largest human effort of wetlands creation in history. It sets the stage for the federal program of reconfiguration of canals and levees, deep wells, storage wells and water conservation yet to come.

The Everglades Forever Act was based on farmers paying ``100 percent of the cost'' of cleaning the water that leaves their farms, and they are. Florida sugar farmers are paying more than $230 million toward the cost of these new marshes through a special assessment that they agreed to in 1994. The marshes receive water from farms, dirtier water from Lake Okeechobee and much dirtier water from urban areas.

Additionally, those farmers have invested tens of millions of dollars in improvements on their land to reduce the impact on the Everglades. U.S. Sugar's processing mills no longer discharge into the surface canals; its pumping, irrigation and fertilizing practices have changed completely, and the use of pesticides is down to a tiny fraction of historic practices.

The law required farmers to eliminate 25 percent of phosphorus from their water, but they actually removed 73 percent this past year. As the farmers send cleaner water to the new marshes, the marshes in turn are able to discharge water even cleaner than had been anticipated. For example, the level of phosphorus in the inflow to Water Conservation Area 2A in Broward County has been cut by 41 percent.

Meanwhile, in spring of 2001, nests of the white ibis, a threatened species of wading bird, reached an all-time record high of 12,500 in the Loxahatchee preserve in Palm Beach County. Florida panther births now are counted as three times as numerous as panther deaths. Florida crocodile nests in the region more than doubled during the last 20 years. Overall, by spring of 2000, nesting pairs of Everglades wading birds had surpassed 30,000 for the first time since 1946, up from the low of 5,000 in the 1980s. (See www.sfwmd.gov for details.)

These signs all point to the prospect for increasing good health. No one should minimize the challenges ahead in reaching final water-quality standards and in continuing the larger, federal-restoration effort, but neither should anyone deny the success of the state's initiative in putting our once-dying Everglades on the road to full recovery.

Malcolm S. Wade is the senior vice president for sugar-cane operations for U.S. Sugar Corp. in Clewiston.