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EVERGLADES, home to staggering numbers of plants and animals, is to wetlands what Kilimanjaro is to mountains, the Amazon to rivers, or the Grand Canyon to cracks in the Earth. Like these iconic places, the Everglades is singular and sublime. Nothing remotely matches it. Once a continuous sheet of water covering the southern half of the Florida peninsula, less than half the original Everglades survived development. Now diminished and relatively desiccated, the Everglades persists, in the vivid words of author William deBuys, as a kind of inundated Kansas of water, grass, and muck, ending in the dense mangrove forests that edge the sea. Mary Peck grew up in Florida, barely an hour away from the Everglades but separated from the wetlands by air conditioning and pavement.