When the Senate last week overwhelmingly approved a $7.8 billion plan to restore the Florida Everglades, it affirmed the greening of Bob Smith, the conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire and onetime bane of the environmental movement. For it was Smith who shepherded the historic legislation to passage.
Smith - who last year succeeded the late Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island as Environment and Public Works Committee chairman - had pledged in January to save the Everglades. Southern Florida's ecologically rich marshes are half what they used to be, a casualty of the federal flood control projects built 50 years ago that have robbed the area of 1.7 billion gallons of water a day.
Environmentalists say they never really expected Smith to champion the greatest ecological restoration project in American history. After all, during his two terms as senator and three as congressman - as well as his tempestuous, ill-fated, Independent presidential run last year - he had lost little sleep, for instance, over his perennially low scores from the League of Conservation Voters.
And the odds were stacked against him. It seemed unlikely that a rookie chairman, whose presidential run distanced him from the very party he returned to in November, could muster the needed bipartisan support. The task was made harder by the fact that this is an election year, when the legislative session is short, and candidates in both big parties shy away from groundbreaking legislation on the environment and other hot issues.
As if that were not enough to overcome, the Everglades plan is so scientifically shaky that the bill says it can be changed as technology improves in the next 30 years, the time it will take to make the ''river of grass'' once again pulse with water. Finally, in the world of politics and the environment, restoration is almost always more difficult to achieve, because it is considered a harder sell than preservation.
Yet Smith held hearings on the legislation, pushed it when few others would, bolstered support from both sides of the political aisle as well as environmental, industry, and Native American groups, and shrugged off uncomplimentary comparisons to Chafee, revered as a skillful and ardent defender of nature.
''This legislation would not have passed the Senate had it not been for Bob Smith's leadership,'' said Dan Beard, National Audubon Society's senior vice president. ''I don't think any of us realized what he was capable of.''
Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters, said that when Smith became committee chairman, ''he said there would be no difference between Senator Chafee's approach and his own. With this vote, he's made good on that promise.''
So why has Smith gone green? To many environmentalists, it is a mystery. Some point to Republicans' desire to reclaim what the party perceives to be its conservation legacy, forged a century ago by President Theodore Roosevelt. Some note the environment is a top concern among voters, if not candidates, and that Smith may simply be reading the writing on the wall. Some say chairing so key an environmental committee left Smith with little choice but to become a leader in its cause.
Smith suggested all of the above, noting he had met with and discussed the Everglades legislation with Roosevelt's great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, a leader in the charge to green the GOP. Smith said, ''The American people want this legislation,'' and added, ''I'm chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee now. I didn't have an opportunity to take leadership on this before.''
Now that the measure has passed the Senate (the vote was 85 to 1), it must win a quick endorsement in the House, which is set to recess Friday, if it is to go to President Clinton this year. Smith said he will do ''everything I can'' this week to make that happen.
Once signed, the legislation will pay to remove 240 miles of levees and canals and build reservoirs and pumping stations, which will capture and distribute water the way nature had. The $7.8 billion, Smith says, amounts to ''a can of Coke per citizen per year, which is a pretty good investment to save the Everglades.''
Robert Braile is a Globe correspondent who covers the environment.
