It is in and around wetlands that the greatest blossoming of biodiversity has occurred—it is not too much to say that we owe our existence to this planet’s wetlands, including fens, bogs, and swamps. Our wholesale destruction of wetlands for the sake of a few decades of growing wheat, rice, soy, and palm oil has been breathtakingly short-sighted. Once again, we are shocked into recognition that most of us live only for the moment.
A valuable medicinal plant was the Bartrams’ second find. “It grows twelve or fifteen feet high,” William Bartram wrote, “with large panicles of pale blue tubular flowers, specked on the inside with crimson.” This was, the Georgia “fever tree,” a natural source of quinine used by Native Americans to treat tick fever, muscle cramps, parasites, and malaria.
During the Second World War, he served for four years, and was stationed in Georgia, rehabilitating returning soldiers with damaged bodies and psyches. His way was to take the jittery men on hikes and bird walks through nearby forests and swamps. One can only guess how many bird-watchers and amateur naturalists found mental balance and lifelong interests in the natural world through these expeditions. Certainly they learned from him that cutting old-growth forests removed vital bird habitat.
When I was in my twenties, my then husband and I sometimes vacationed in the Georgia islands—St. Simons or Sea Island—and we went once to the Okefenokee for a motorboat outing. For hours, we prowled the dark water at low speed, bathed in the damp, heady Southern air that always made me happy when I stepped off the plane into its distinctive perfume. I could not count all the wading birds that stalked in the shallows like tall, aloof models. We glided past cypress and their peculiar pointy knees.
By the eighteen-fifties, farmers noticed that raised stream banks in parts of the swamp were made of dry black soil. They picked up handfuls of it, rubbed it between their fingers, felt the friability and tensile strength, judged its tilth. Then they cut down the stream-bank trees, plowed and planted, and harvested tremendous crops. They said what every farmer in newly opened peatland has ever said as they gathered the first harvests: “This is some of the most productive soil on earth.
BookOfTheDay nypl : ecology ecosystems Biology conservation wetlands swamps bogs peatlands ClimateAction
Normal folk see wetlands as places to breathe in nature in peace and solitude… whereas developers see wetlands as real estate with marina opportunities
Environ Mentalist already lost
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Probably not true.
look at my boobs😘
Americans were led to believe they needed to drain a swamp but instead got bogged down in a quagmire.
This article fails to metion beavers ONCE, and lack of beavers is more of a reason for wetland loss than anything in the article. Pretty massive miss.
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