Every child I have ever known is drawn to water — to running creeks and meandering rivers, to buzzing ponds and gently lapping lakes and echoing swamps and cool, mossy fens. Even toddlers who find the ocean overwhelmingly huge and alien will merrily splash in a tidal pool, dabbling their dimpled fingers in the water. To children, a puddle is for stomping. A marshy place is for barefooting, testing the ooze and suck of mud, peering through waving grasses at wild eyes peering back at them.
Last week Nashville got its first truly drenching rains in months, and the rain fell on soil already saturated by melting snow and ice. Our rivers swelled. Our creeks roared. Our ditches filled with rain. Temperatures shot up from single digits to 65 degrees, and children who only days earlier were squealing on the snowy hills were squealing in the luscious mud. The whole wild world — parched first by severe drought and then by hard freeze — came up from burrows or descended from trees to drink.
I’ve been thinking of climate change and pooling water not just because of the snow and the rain but also because the United Nations has designated Feb. 2 as World Wetlands Day. And because wetlands in the United States are more imperiled now than they were just a year ago. Too few of us understand how fundamental these damp, spongy places are to the struggling organism we call Earth.
For taxonomical purposes, a wetland is any ecosystem sustained primarily by a body of water, however small or temporary, that regularly saturates the soil or covers it entirely.
In this country alone, wetland ecosystems can take almost uncountable forms — tidal wetlands like salt marshes, mangrove swamps and mud flats; desert wetlands like playas and basins; prairie wetlands like grassland streams and prairie potholes; forest wetlands like swamps and sinkholes and fens and beaver ponds.
Though wetlands account for only 6 percent of our planet’s land surface, they sequester immense amounts of carbon — peat bogs sequester more than forests do — and some 40 percent of plant and animal species live in wetlands or require them to reproduce.
Millions of migratory birds use wetlands for breeding, for way stations during migration or both. Fish and aquatic frogs and turtles are found in wetlands, of course, but so are salamanders and toads and tree frogs, terrestrial animals which complete the first stage of their lives in water. And then there’s the whole host of mammals and reptiles that survive by eating the others.
Wetlands offer outsize benefits to human beings, as well, providing drinking water, filtering storm water runoff and serving as a buffer against hurricanes and storm surges.
Nevertheless, too many wetlands have no or insufficient legal protections, and the creatures that live there are paying the price. Just since 1970, according to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, an intergovernmental treaty on the conservation of wetlands and their sustainable use, 81 percent of inland wetland species and 36 percent of coastal and marine species have declined. Some 25 percent of wetland species are facing extinction.
These fragile ecosystems are imperiled by the same human-wrought devastation that imperils other ecosystems. But the extreme weather of climate change, like the pollution from upstream agricultural and industrial sites, can affect watery places even more quickly and more profoundly than it affects other habitats.
We are losing plant and animal species at a faster rate now than at any other time in human history. That pace is accelerating — for wetland species even faster than for others. Already some of them can be found in only tiny pockets of the world. The Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, for example, lives in just one river gorge outside the rapidly growing city of Asheville, N.C.
A key driver of biodiversity loss everywhere is development. “Drain the swamp!” isn’t merely a hypocritical political slogan. It is also the default position of developers, nearly always with the tacit — or stated — support of states and municipalities eager for any resulting taxable windfall.
Last year I wrote about a plan to build a strip mine on a ridge that more or less holds the waters of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in place. There is no good reason for the State of Georgia to permit this mine. What the mining company wants, titanium dioxide, is neither rare nor crucial to national interests. It is used primarily as pigment in paint.
Even Georgians don’t want it. Conservation organizations like the Okefenokee Protection Alliance and the Georgia Water Coalition, representing dozens of other environmental stewardship organizations in the state, have worked tirelessly to defeat the mine. American Rivers named the Okefenokee to its list of the country’s 10 most endangered river ecosystems. When the Georgia Environmental Protection Division invited public comments on the proposal, more than 100,000 people wrote to oppose it. Last month, the nonprofit Georgia Interfaith Power and Light gathered religious leaders across the state to pray for the swamp’s safety.
Most recently, advocates of the swamp have begun to target the commercial viability of the mine. At public corporations like Home Depot and Sherwin-Williams, shareholder proposals are circulating that aim to extract corporate commitments to boycott products made with titanium produced in proximity to the Okefenokee.
But even as opposition to the mine continues to grow, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division has not yet ruled it out.
It became much harder last year to protect wetlands in the United States. In Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court held that wetlands without a “continuous surface connection” to “waters of the U.S.” — a term whose definition changes according to political whim — aren’t covered under the provisions of the Clean Water Act.
The decision was a gift to developers, significantly weakening the power of the Clean Water Act and putting at least half of all U.S. wetlands at risk. The Natural Resources Defense Council called it “the most important water-related Supreme Court decision in a generation.” In a concurring opinion, even Justice Brett Kavanaugh recognized its likely impact — to human beings, if not to wildlife. The decision, he wrote, would have “significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.”
In addition to gutting the Clean Water Act, the decision highlights one of the greatest flaws in how this country has traditionally treated wetlands. For too long, we have considered them one of two things: waterways with a clear commercial use that therefore deserve protection, or hindrances to development that can be dredged or filled and paved over to build another highway or another hotel or — thank you, Joni Mitchell — another parking lot. If ever we have needed a World Wetlands Day, it is now.
As the rain fell last week, I kept thinking of the children. Not just because they will inherit what’s left of the world we have protected so poorly but also because they seem to understand what we still do not: that we are animals like any other, enmeshed with the wild world.
Called to water.