But by the time a U.S. Navy lieutenant named Franklin Swift surveyed the oysters in Apalachicola Bay in 1896, he found many of the reefs decimated, some by a great hurricane and others by industrious oystermen. Swift believed the oysters would rebound if left alone for a time, and they did. Ever since, the fishery has made spectacular comebacks from one crash after another.

Until 2012, when the famed oysters collapsed during an unprecedented drought. That crash was the heart of Florida v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court case that clinched the 30-year “water war” over the freshwater that flows through the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin to the historic bay. For decades, Florida politicians blamed sprawling Atlanta’s thirst for withholding freshwater vital to the estuary and its life. The lawyers who filed the Supreme Court case shifted the blame to voracious irrigation by Georgia farmers.

The court’s dismissal last week was a thorough rebuke — the justices voted 9-0 against Florida. It surprised no one who closely followed the case. Florida failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Georgia’s overconsumption led to the collapse, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the opinion, which cited the many additional “confounding factors.”

The truth is that no one thing is broken in the Apalachicola, or in every great estuary in the world. The problem is not only south Georgia’s farmers. It is not only Atlanta’s thirst, quenched by Lake Lanier, created when the U.S. Army Corps dammed the Chattahoochee River in the northern part of the basin. It is not only overharvesting, a crucial fact that is not an indictment of today’s fishers, but predates even Lt. Swift’s 1896 observations. Archaeologists know from measuring archaic half-shells in the last of the indigenous mounds that once lined the Gulf that overharvesting dates to aboriginal people.

The only ones who came out ahead in the case are the lawyers who convinced former Florida Gov. Rick Scott to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. What the region needs, instead, are statesmen and women who can lead Florida, Georgia and Alabama to share water and plan for the future amid competing demands and climate risks. Five private law firms have billed Florida taxpayers well over $100 million since 2001, when the earliest court battles began. In response to a public-records request, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection reports having spent $65 million on the litigation since filing the Georgia case in 2013. Georgia taxpayers have spent more than $50 million to defend the case.

In other words, over the eight years that Florida v. Georgia wound its way to the court, more water than Florida was asking Georgia to save for the oysters flowed into Apalachicola Bay. And the oysters didn’t come back — just as they won’t come back in Florida or elsewhere until we stop fighting over water and embrace working together to save it.

Cynthia Barnett is the author of four books on water, including “The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans,” forthcoming in July from W.W. Norton.