A lot of things were learned about how the great swamps of Florida actually worked to keep things stable, long after the engineers drained a lot of it.

To be fair, the environmentalists--such as they were way back when much of this was being done--didn't know how the Florida ecosystem really worked either.

The Corps of Engineers is a classic example of a government doing something the private sector won't do, and while they have done some amazing things, they've screwed up some things, too. Florida's beaches are inhabited because the government subsidized both the creation of stable land, and the present-day flood insurance.

One wonders how the South American rain forests would be doing if the governments down there weren't building roads for the tree cutters.