Since the 1600s, human endeavor has drained or filled fully one half of the wetlands those early settlers encountered across the expanse that is now the United States (including Alaska). This is according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.
What this means is that in roughly 400 years, man has engineered himself out of acres of habitat that filters drinking water, controls flooding, balances nutrients and sodium values--and, new evidence suggests, perhaps even climate itself. He has undone in a short period of time what nature has taken tens of thousands of years to put in place, and he has spent billions of dollars creating waste water treatment centers to do what the wetland did with greater efficiency.
And this is just the wetlands, the swamps and meadows that line the coasts of our oceans, the shores of our lakes and the banks and flood plains of our rivers.
Rivers themselves have been dammed and redirected. All of this has been done in the name of progress, for purposes ranging from power production, to recreation, to sheer convenience. And now decades down the line, the folly of these endeavors is becoming evident. Our groundwater is polluted, shorelines and river banks are eroding, flooding has increased.
Many of the neighborhoods that flooded in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit used to be wetlands--wetlands that would have absorbed much of Katrina’s wrath, or at least water, wetlands that would have buffered the impact of the waves against higher ground, a sort of shock absorber, as it were. In short, flooding would not have been as wide spread. And the manmade levees put into place in their stead did not do the job. I am sorry for the people who lost their home, that is tragic--but the homes should not have been built there in the first place.
Because of all the dams and diversions along the Colorado River north of the Grand Canyon, the once-raging whitewater that carved the gorge is now murky and still. Plant and animal species are dying off at tremendous speed as the river drowns in its own silt. A river that once ended with a great delta before emptying into the sea is now but a stream.
As man hurries to undo what he has done, he finds he can’t--he can make it better but he cannot replace what has been lost.
The lesson here, as with the lessons of all history, is that we must think before we act, not after. We have, it seems to me, put our desires before our needs. We have put golf courses before drinking water. We have been blinded by easy living, existing on a “credit card” whose interest has been accruing, and whose bill is about to come due. We can’t afford environmental bankruptcy. That is the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil that grows our food.
Before we undo nature, maybe we should try to see why nature has put what she did where she did. There is a scene in the movie Out of Africa where the character played by Meryl Streep brings European technology to the “outback,” and has her servants dam the river running through her property. Her servant is taken aback. “This river lives in Mombassa,” he tells her. And when it rains, the river floods, the dam breaks. After several attempts to rebuild it, and several rains that destroy it, she finally concedes: the river lives in Mombassa.
My point is: wetlands are where they are for a reason, and will not be easily changed. I can give a local example. Just south of Higman Park, in Benton Harbor, the Paw Paw River was diverted so a road could be built (at least this is what I’ve been told). One can tell by the vegetation, and remaining ponds, that the land is low. And every time it rains, Jean Klock Road floods. It is best suited to being the wetland it was, and I suspect, given time, it will reclaim its territory.
As a child, in church school, I was taught a little ditty about the “wise man,” who built his house upon the rock, and the “foolish man,” who built his house upon the sand. I realize the song was about building on a spiritual foundation, but the analogy wouldn’t work it there weren’t physical truth in it.
In the song, the “rains came down and the floods came up,” and while the house upon the rock “stood firm,” the house on the sand went “splat.”
Wetlands not only provide valuable habitat, and ecological functions, they aren’t good places to build. It is the wise man who understands nature’s law, and obeys it.
--a version of this essay was published April 1. 2006 by The South County Gazette.
