Photo: © U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Losing our Wetlands

A harried homeowner stands on her deck, her shoes damp and anger on her face. She's yelling at her companion. She has to shout to be heard above the rush of the river in spring flood. "The second cottonwood went down last night; now the river is eating away at the third. If that one goes, I think we may lose all of the backyard. The real estate agent swore our land would be safe, but a fourth of it's gone!"

If you understand how riverine wetlands protect us from flooding, and you know that we've lost so much of this vital habitat, you'd think that no one would buy a house next to a big river. But people do it every day in every state of the country. We can't seem to help ourselves. We love water, we love vegetation, we love the birds and the mammals and the fish. But our love of this riverside land could be our undoing, as the woman above is discovering.

Deadly Wetlands On June 13, 1997, the Environmental News Network reported the death of more than 300 waterfowl along the Coeur d'Alene River. What killed them? Lead poisoning contracted from the sediments in wetlands near old mining operations.

Such a revelation is ironic when you consider that wetland destruction historically has been caused by our hatred of these same habitats. After all, they bred mosquitoes, were impossible to build upon or plow, so why not get rid of them? We have destroyed millions upon millions of acres of wetlands from Maine to Florida and back again.

How Much Have We Lost?
In a few hundred years of settlement, the United States has lost more than half of its original wetlands-from an estimated 220 million acres in the contiguous states to less than 110 million acres. More than half of Idaho's wetlands had disappeared by 1980. Ninety percent of the state's low-elevation wetlands are gone, converted to agriculture or urban areas, destroyed by channelizing of streams, polluted by humans, and invaded by exotic plants. These changes have, among other things, decreased fish reproduction and reduced populations of the spotted frog and western toad.

Photo: © U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Currently, the United States loses more than 70,000 acres of wetlands every year, and this pace probably won't slow. Within the next few decades, more than half the population of this country will live within fifty miles of our coasts. Urban development in this region has already accounted for almost half of the coastal wetlands destruction in the last decade of the twentieth century. If we keep moving to and building in this region, how much longer will the remaining wetlands survive? It's the same conundrum that faces homeowners of the Intermountain West: Can we keep from loving our favorite places to death?

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