Contrary to popular belief, wetlands provide important functions and are often called “nature’s kidneys” or “ecological supermarkets.”
These important functions include storing flood water, filtering dirty water, and protecting shorelines. Wetlands also support an extensive food chain. If you like crawfish, you’ll find them in wetlands. Many cultures, including the Cajuns of Louisiana and various Native American tribes, have learned to live in harmony with wetlands, using them as a source of food, peat for fuel, and building materials. Wetlands may even help stabilize the climate by serving as reservoirs for excess carbon in the air.
So, do you still believe that wetlands are wastelands? Then read on.
The Situation: Swamp Thing
Are you swamped with work? Do you get bogged down with details? The English language is full of negative images of wetlands. Sadly, wetlands have gotten a bad rap both in literature and especially in film.
Take, for example, classic B-rated flicks like Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and that cult-fave, Swamp Thing (1982). These movies depicted wetlands as insect and disease-ridden, unattractive, and even dangerous. Foggy, eerie, mucky, and foreboding. But are these Hollywood-type depictions true?
The Problem: Wetlands Are Undervalued
Wetlands have historically been considered to be wastelands. Early settlers and later developers, farmers, and industrialists felt that wetlands were worth more to them dry than wet.
As a result, wetlands were systematically drained, dammed, leveed and filled to make room for farms, cities, and industry—with catastrophic results. Even more amazing is the fact that the U.S. government at one time encouraged the destruction of wetlands to make the land “more productive.”
In Illinois almost 7 million acres of our wetland habitats have been lost—that’s almost 90 percent of our pre-settlement wetlands! What is perhaps most sad is that while Illinois is often thought of as the “Prairie State,” it was once actually a “Wetland State.” In fact, 100 years ago, Illinois was labeled “the duck capital of the world.”
But now most of these habitats are gone, along with their vital ecosystem, functions. So why is wetland loss so important to us today?
The Solution: Our Land Can Be More Valuable Wet Than Dry
The loss of wetlands is vital to all of us because of the many ecosystem services wetlands provide. Wetlands services include: flood storage, water filtration, trapping of sediment, transformation of toxins, shoreline protection, improved air quality by the trapping of carbon, and noise abatement.
Without wetlands, our quality of life and wellbeing are greatly compromised. Land and water are interconnected by of wetlands. Degradation of any of these ecosystems may have powerful negative effects on the services provided by the others. We must understand these connections if we are to ably manage these ecosystems.
Wetland scientists are studying ways to reconnect degraded wetlands to their terrestrial and aquatic neighbors. For example, ecological engineers have proposed restoring up to 52,000 kilometers2 of wetlands along the Mississippi River to reduce the excess nitrogen pouring to the Gulf of Mexico and the resulting hypoxia2.
It is ironic that after years of ignoring and destroying our wetlands, we have found that these “scary” swamps may ultimately improve our lives, economies, and the planet!
What You Can Do to Help Wetlands
You can be a good neighbor to a wetland by practicing the following environmentally-sensitive activities to decrease the amount of nutrients, pollutants, and sediment that enter a wetland:
- If you live near a wetland, establish adjacent strips of native vegetation
- Use chemicals sparingly
- Don’t dump on (or in) your wetland
- Share your land with wildlife
- Keep your pets out of wild areas
- Maintain your septic system
- Control non-native plant species
Written by John Sentell of The Wetlands Initiative and James Montgomery of the Environmental Science Program, DePaul University