Save the Wetlands, Save The World

Excuse the melodrama in the title (no doubt evoked by my recent obsession with a certain show), but the importance of wetlands -- especially coastal wetlands along the Gulf -- has been ignored and undervalued for too long.

"Mr. ['Blackie'] Campo gives his wetlands habitat only 50 more years before it is gone," a New York Times reporter wrote from Shell Beach, Louisiana, about an old fisherman's prediction in 1988. In 2004, National Geographic posted an article that eerily forecasted the devastation that would be credited to Hurricane Katrina a year later.

The crux of the matter... Coastal wetlands are a natural levee system. They protect the coast from storms by absorbing the energy of strong waves. Since the 1930s, a huge chunk of wetlands about the size of Delaware (2,000 square miles) has been destroyed to build hundreds of canals for oil exploration and ship traffic; and drained for development and farming. The wetlands have been torn apart and weakened, certainly by massive storms, but also by us humans, which cause the deadly effects of storms like Katrina to be so much greater. Considering that >30% of America's fisheries and 25% of oil and gas come from or through Louisiana's coastal wetlands, this problem affects the entire nation. Louisiana has the highest rate of wetland loss - about a football field every 20 minutes -- and 80 percent of the country's total loss of wetlands has occurred there.

Enter the age-old question: Can a balance be reached between environmental conservation and progress? The idealist in me cries, "Heck yeah!" I'm glad folks smarter than me are working on this one.

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P.S. When we visited the Shell Beach Memorial in August, we met the grandson of Mr. Campo, the old fisherman who was featured in the NYT and NG articles (above). I can still picture the streetwise-looking teenager perched on his bike, describing to us in his strong Cajun accent about how "Grand-daddy was rescued from the rooftop by a helicopter during The Storm." He then told us that Grand-daddy passed away at age 90 just a month ago.