These were minor obstacles. By 1700, spurred by the growing popularity of coffee, chocolate, and tea, sugar had surpassed tobacco as the New World's most lucrative export. Sugar, molasses, and rum (from fermented molasses) gave the struggling colonies their first economic impetus, fostering new commercial and political elites--and new patterns of exploitation. Under the infamous "triangle of trade," sugar from English colonies in the Caribbean went to England for refining, ships then went on to Africa to exchange goods for fresh slaves, who were shipped to Caribbean plantations. Writes historian Sidney Mintz: "The first enslaved Africans brought to [the New World] in 1503-1505 worked on sugar plantations, and the last enslaved Africans smuggled into Cuba in the 1860s or 1870s worked on sugar plantations, a depressingly enduring continuity."

As nations grew accustomed to sugar revenues, the industry gained political power. Countries shielded their planter colonies with protective tariffs, sparking geopolitical strife. In 1733, British planters on Barbados and Jamaica, annoyed that New Englanders were using French Indies molasses to make rum, convinced Parliament to heavily tax any non-British sugar imported by America.1. The resulting Molasses Act contributed as much to, America's revolutionary fervor as any other British snub.

Yet for all sugar's importance to America's origins, the new country had no sugar industry of its own and had to rely on imports--a position that abetted America's growing aspirations to imperialism. In the Kingdom of Hawaii, American sugar planters, hungry for the import privileges enjoyed by U.S. planters, cynically fostered a revolt that drew American military intervention and, eventually, annexation. In Cuba, U.S. investors bought up almost half of all sugar production, which not only let them feed their American refineries with cheap raw-sugar imports but also fostered massive resentment in Cuba that, coupled with the economic instability inherent in one crop economies, contributed to a century of rebellions, dictatorships, coups, repression, and, finally, revolution.

Even by 1920, the U.S. sugar industry still was small, centered mainly in Louisiana and Hawaii with a slowly developing sugar-beet presence in the Midwest. Florida wasn't even a bit player. Despite a subtropical climate and an early sugar heritage--Canaveral means "cane field" in Spanish--cane was a garden species, grown piecemeal by settlers and Seminoles. The future capital of cane was still dismissed as a hot, buggy, under populated state whose swampy saw-grass interior, in one account, was "suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilent reptiles."

At a boat ramp just off the Sugarland Highway, on the eastern edge of the Everglades, Freddy Fisikelli slides a battered aluminum airboat into the tepid waters of an irrigation canal and beckons to me. Sixty-nine years old and rail thin, tanned to the color of shoe leather, Fisikelli grew up on the swamp, hunting and fishing until the game and fish disappeared, and is said to know the Everglades better than anyone alive. I've ditched my sugar publicists for the morning to take a ride in his boat, a sixteen-foot long flat-bottom barge with a huge rear, mounted propeller and a gargantuan 500-cubic-inch V-8 engine pulled from a Cadillac, sans muffler. Fisikelli hands me ear protectors, hits the ignition, and casts off. We motor slowly down the canal until he finds an opening into the swamp. Tugging on the rudder, he nudges the boat through a curtain of reeds and drops the throttle.

From the air, the Everglades look pretty much like what you'd expect from a huge swamp--miles and miles of soggy grasslands sprinkled here and there with trees. But down low, racing along a narrow canal at 45 mph, the effect is much more like being in a jeep on a savanna, with head-high, brownish-green grass stretching off to a flat horizon and a huge, pale blue sky. For half an hour we roar down the watery track, gathering a gossamer sheath of spider webs on our hands and faces and startling the native fauna. Blackbirds rocket skyward, while the larger, wading varieties--blue herons and cattle egrets--heave up and flap along ahead of us for a dozen yards before veering off. Reeds whip by; a dragonfly creases my hair. The canal widens momentarily, and to one side something large and shiny rolls beneath the water. Fisikelli taps my shoulder: "alligator."

The engine's roar drowns out any real conversation, encouraging a bizarre, vibrating introspection as the landscape flies by. At irregular intervals the boat jogs from side to side as Fisikelli, navigating by invisible landmarks, turns into secluded side canals--right, right, left, right, left--winding deeper and deeper into the marsh. The place is a maze, and I begin to understand why hunters and surveyors who go astray here might spend days looking for a way out--and why drug dealers and other thugs use the place to hide problematic objects. Fisikelli himself has walked out twice after his boat broke down. Once he was just five miles from a road, but it took him six hours to slog through the knee-deep water and muck, and when he reached terra firma, his trousers had been ripped to shreds by the razor-sharp native saw grass. That time, Fisikelli was lucky: he got out before nightfall, when mosquitoes come on so thick that marooned hunters paint themselves with engine oil to ward off bites. I'm about to ask, half-jokingly, whether Fisikelli knows where we are when the track widens, the engine goes silent, and we start to drift across a pond-size space of open water dotted with lily pads and purple gallinules. I pull off my earmuffs. The humid air is surprisingly fresh, filled with the sweetish smells of hay and peat and the sound of crickets and frogs. Waves slap rhythmically against the boat's metal sides. I peer down: the water is still and clear, revealing a few tiny minnows above a copper-colored algae bottom. Looking more closely, I realize that the water is actually moving, barely, from north to south--the slowest river in the world.

The Everglades were created more than 6,000 years ago, when a receding ocean exposed the vast limestone plain of southern Florida. Inundated by heavy rainfall, invaded by subtropical plants that favored the low-nutrient limestone soil, the landscape gradually gave rise to a forty-mile-wide "river of grass" that began at the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee and flowed in a gentle curve all the way to Florida Bay, 100 miles to the south. Actually, "river" is a misleading term. Between lake and bay, the land slopes less than a quarter of an inch a mile; before 1900, water moved so slowly that a droplet leaving Okeechobee would have evaporated and returned to the marsh as rain perhaps a dozen times before reaching the bay six months to a year later. Nor did the river always flow. In the dry winters the river would drop, its waters receding into millions of shallow pools that teemed with trapped fish and were a haven for wading birds, which nested on the temporarily dry ground. In the wet summers the Everglades would again be waterlogged, soaking up trillions of gallons of rainwater like a natural reservoir, filtering it, and slowly discharging to Florida Bay. Oscillating on this extreme hydrological cycle, the Everglades offered a particular environment, amenable to a narrow band of plants and animals and utterly contemptuous of nearly all other life forms.

Especially sugar, For all its association with the swampy Everglades, sugarcane is actually a dry land crop requiring constant irrigation yet intolerant of flooding, growing best when the water table lies two feet below the soil surface. In the Everglades the water table is two feet above the soil. Or was, before the mid-nineteenth century. That's when Congress handed twenty million wet inland acres to Florida lawmakers, who saw the Everglades as the main obstacle holding their new state back from a rightful, prosperous destiny. "Reclamation" became-the rallying cry, a righteous crusade complete with glorious visions of an evil swamp giving way to vast orderly rectangles of cotton, rice, oranges, and, of course, sugarcane. "The statesman whose exertions shall cause the millions of acres they contain, now worse than worthless, to teem with the products of agriculture industry," warbled one booster, "will merit a high place in public favor, not only with his own generation, but with posterity."

Slowly, expensively, crews dredged the muck, and by 1920 four massive canals had been carved from Okeechobee to the Atlantic Ocean, draining the swamp just south of the lake and raising in its place a fertile crescent of new farmland. The floodgates were now literally open. Between 1900 and 1930, southeastern Florida's coastal population jumped tenfold, and with postwar sugar prices sky-high, sugar wasn't far behind. Even as realtors were selling northerners swampland "by the gallon," backers of sugar ventures were promoting the Everglades as a canegrowers' paradise. By one consultant's reckoning, the black sawgrass peat, or "muck" soil, was so rich in nutrients that, properly drained, the region's "fertility will be established, practically forever" without costly fertilizers. Investors came running like children to sweets, among them Charles Stewart Mott, the former General Motors magnate and philanthropist.2. Civic hopes were stratospheric. In Clewiston, city fathers laid out plans for a sprawling lakeside metropolis of 20,000 souls, complete with a massive street grid and new moniker -"the Chicago of the Everglades."

They were a little ahead of themselves. Even after drainage the only thing to grow on the unfertilized sawgrass peat turned out to be ... more saw grass. Not only was the soil less fertile than advertised but the climate of south Florida lacked the warmth that cane is accustomed to. By the time sugar farmers solved that small problem--by breeding new strains of cane and, more to the point, by massive applications of phosphorus and nitrogen--the inevitable oversupply of sugar, followed by the global Depression, pushed prices to a few pennies a pound. Many ventures, including Mott's, were driven into the muck. Even after Congress came to the rescue, stabilizing prices by limiting imports and controlling domestic production--and even after Mott relaunched his venture as U.S. Sugar Corporation--the Florida sugar industry remained tiny.

Then came the 1959 Cuban revolution, and overnight the state's fortunes were made. Having embargoed all Cuban sugar, U.S. trade officials filled the gap by encouraging domestic production of sugar through massive incentives. The results were swift and predictable. U.S. Sugar Corporation and its smaller rivals expanded as fast as they could acquire land and get it planted, while engineers drained more swamp. By the mid-1960s, Florida's cane acreage had jumped tenfold; the state's sugar industry now was a real player, with big money and an absolute stranglehold on Florida politics, especially in matters of water and drainage.

The post-Castro opportunities also drew outsiders, among them Alfonso Fanjul, heir to the Fanjul-Gomez-Mena sugar empire in Cuba, a sprawling enterprise that, before Castro "stole" it, included 150,000 acres of sugarcane and ten mills. Forced to flee Cuba, Fanjul had no intention of quitting sugar. Moving to Palm Beach in 1960, he and some fellow exiles raised $640,000 to buy Osceola Farms, which boasted a 4,000-acre parcel of drained farmland in the EAA. By the time of Alfonso's death, in 1980, the eldest of his four sons, Alfy and Pepe, were doing $30 million in annual sales. Five years later, in a move that confirmed Alfy's strategic touch, the company leveraged $240 million for the sugar holdings of an ailing rival, netting the Fanjuls 90,000 new sugar acres in Florida plus 110,000 acres of sugar in the Dominican Republic. By 1990 the company, now known as Florida Crystals, had not only surpassed U.S. Sugar as America's biggest cane grower but had become the dominant force in sugar politics, pouring money into election campaigns, flying lawmakers around in company jets, even hosting a Bush Administration official at its posh Dominican resort, Casa de Campo. In nearly every way, the Gomez-Mena empire had been reborn.

But by then the thirty-year post Castro bubble was ready to burst. Health experts were again denouncing sugar. Alternative sweeteners, such as HFCS, were eroding the sugar market while Congress was threatening the sugar program. Labor lawyers, meanwhile, claimed that Florida cane growers routinely, and profitably, abused the thousands of cane cutters brought in each year from the Caribbean--claims that resulted in multimillion-dollar lawsuits and forced the U.S. industry to convert to mechanical harvesting. But the most serious threat came from environmentalists, who argued that phosphorus runoff from cane farms was slowly poisoning the Everglades and that the government's system of canals and dikes had destroyed the swamp's crucial flooding cycle--all as state officials looked the other way. In 1988, the U.S. Attorney in Miami filed suit against Florida for failing to enforce its own water-quality standards. For the sugar industry, it was a systemic shock that would, in the parlance of B movies, either kill it or make it much, much stronger.

We're talking phosphorus here, not mercury or heavy metals." In the small conference room at Florida Crystals' packing plant, Jorge Dominicis, the Fanjuls' spokesman, is tutoring me on the finer points of environmental science. Through a cooperative P.R. deal with U.S. Sugar, Dominicis has joined my media tour and for the last hour has used maps, charts, and a steady stream of gee-whiz comparisons to demonstrate just how overblown the pollution issue really is. "We're talking parts per billion," says Dominicis. "It'd be like taking ten drops and putting them into a backyard swimming pool." Across the room, Malcolm S. "Bubba" Wade, Dominicis's counterpart at U.S. Sugar, reminds me that phosphorus is necessary for all life; why, the bottled water you buy in the store has more phosphorus than is allowed under federal water standards in parks and refuges. Adds Dominicis: "You'd have to drink 1,400 gallons of the stuff to get your daily recommended allowance."

Like much else with sugar, the issue isn't so clear-cut, nor is it simply about the toxicity of a single chemical. When engineers turned the upper third of the Everglades into farms, they effectively severed Lake Okeechobee from the swamp and reversed its natural water cycle. Where the Everglades had been too dry for farming in the winter and so flood-prone in summer that hurricanes wiped out entire towns, engineers could now irrigate farms in winter and drain them in the wet season. City dwellers benefited, too. Engineers built a massive north-south levee to keep Everglades waters out of the narrow coastal strip that runs from West Palm' Beach down to Miami, home today to 5 million people. And to supply those thirsty urbanites, engineers sealed off huge tracts of Everglades just south of the farms--essentially, the middle third of the swamp--as million-acre reservoirs, or Water Conservation Areas. Almost as an afterthought, in 1947 the bottom third of the swamp was reserved as a national park.

From the window of U.S. Sugar's corporate aircraft, five thousand feet up, the signs of so much alteration are unmistakable. South from Okeechobee, the Everglades Agricultural Area unfolds like an enormous emerald checkerboard, its fields perfectly rectangular, neatly scribed by dikes, roads, and rails. Just below the farms lie the water-control structures--huge floodgates and some of the world's biggest diesel-powered pumping stations, each of which can move 2 million gallons a minute from the farms into the highway-size canals that run south and southeast, toward the coast.

From this height, it's also clear why the orderly layout doesn't work. In the dry season, the EAA essentially dams up Lake Okeechobee, diverting water that once flowed into the swamp and sending it instead to sugar farmers or urban users. But in the wet season, to keep farms and suburbs dry, canals in and around the EAA carry away the rainwater as fast as it falls. Some is pumped into the Water Conservation Areas, often faster than the swamp can absorb it, drowning out bird and wildlife populations there. The--rest several hundred billion gallons a year--is simply sent down the main canals "to tide" (where this unnatural flood of fresh water is destroying Florida's delicate saltwater estuaries). Not enough water remains to filter down to the last pristine sections of swamp in Everglades National Park. In other words, while the lower glades are starved of water, the upper glades are drowning--a bizarre and ugly situation that has nonetheless allowed sugar officials to insist that the real Everglades problem isn't water quality as much as water quantity.

In fact, the sugar industry knows good and well that water quality and water quantity are inseparable. By draining the saw-grass muck, engineers exposed underwater soils to the air, allowing fertilizers and natural nutrients to oxidize, thus freeing them up to blow away as dust or float off in rainstorms. Over time, up to six feet of phosphorus-laden topsoil has washed from the farms into the Everglades. Granted, phosphorus isn't particularly toxic, and farm runoff concentrations were relatively tiny--200 to 500 parts per billion. But keep in mind that the original Everglades vegetation developed in the nutrient-poor limestone soils, and that even a little phosphorus goes a long way. In the pristine parts of the park, water contains only a few parts per billion (ppb) of phosphorus. But research shows that as concentrations rise even slightly, native plants, such as saw grass, react--first by growing to monstrously unnatural sizes, then by dying off and giving way to phosphorus-loving species, such as cattails.

Exactly how much phosphorus the swamp can tolerate before changes occur is, naturally, a subject of ferocious debate. Ron Jones, a microbiologist at Florida International University and a veteran of the Everglades controversy, claims that 5 ppb to 7 ppb is the natural level, with a maximum of 10 ppb. Sugar scientists say it's higher--as much as 50 ppb. Regardless, changes are occurring. In the national park, for example, cattails are almost nonexistent. But move north and cattail density rises, until, in the upper parts of the Water Conservation Areas, where farm water discharges, cattails have completely replaced saw grass and caused a ripple effect through the Everglades' ecosystem. Cattails grow so thickly that wading birds--the wood storks, white ibises, great egrets, and others have no place to land. They also have nothing to eat, since all this new plant life sucks oxygen from the water as it dies and decomposes, killing algae and the fish that feed on it. The process is known as eutrophication, and the numerical impacts are staggering. As feeding and nesting sites have dwindled, the annual breeding population of wood storks, for example, dropped from 20,000 in 1960 to 1,800 today. The Cape Sable seaside sparrow, dubbed by ecologists an indicator species for the swamp, has dwindled from the tens of thousands to roughly 3,500. Similarly severe declines are reported for American crocodiles, snail kites, and other birds and animals--declines that usually presage outright extinction. "Cattails are the grave marker," says Jones. "But the first sign that things are amiss is saw grass that has had too many nutrients and is fifteen feet high. Wading birds don't care if it's fifteen-foot saw grass or fifteen-foot cattails; they can't land. It's a mess."