Chapter 1
Wetland History and Science

Wetlands are found in almost all regions of the world. Although many human cultures have lived among and even depended on wetlands for centuries, the modern history of wetlands until the 1970s is fraught with misunderstanding and fear, as described in much of our early Western literature and even in current human media such as science fiction movies. Wetlands have been destroyed at alarming rates throughout the developed and developing worlds. Now, as their many benefits are being recognized, wetland conservation has become the norm. In many parts of the world, wetlands are now revered, protected, and restored; in other parts, they are still being drained for human development.

Because wetlands have properties that are not adequately covered by current terrestrial and aquatic ecology paradigms, wetland science has become a unique discipline encompassing many fields, including terrestrial and aquatic ecology, chemistry, hydrology, and engineering. Wetland management, as the applied side of wetland science, requires an understanding of the scientific aspects of wetlands balanced with legal, institutional, and economic realities.

Wetlands are among the most important ecosystems on Earth. In the great scheme of things, the swampy environment of the Carboniferous period produced and preserved many of the fossil fuels on which our society now depends. In more recent biological and human time periods, wetlands have been valuable as sources, sinks, and transformers of a multitude of chemical, biological, and genetic materials. Although the value of wetlands for fish and wildlife protection has been known for centuries, some of the other benefits have been identified more recently.

Wetlands are sometimes described as kidneys of the landscape because they function as the downstream receivers of water and waste from both natural and human sources. They stabilize water supplies, thus mitigating both floods and drought. They have been found to cleanse polluted waters, protect shorelines, and recharge groundwater aquifers.

Wetlands also have been called nature's supermarkets because of the extensive food chain and rich biodiversity that they support. They are where a great variety of organisms go to eat or be eaten. They play major roles in the landscape by providing unique habitats for a wide variety of flora and fauna. Now that we have become concerned about the health of our entire planet, wetlands are being described by some as important carbon sinks and climate stabilizers on a global scale.

These values of wetlands are now recognized worldwide and have led to wetland conservation, protection laws, regulations, and management plans. But our history before current times had been to drain, ditch, and fill them, never as quickly or as effectively as was undertaken in countries such as the United States beginning in the early 1800s. In some regions of the world that scale of wetland destruction continues.

Wetlands have become the cause célèbre for conservation‐minded people and organizations throughout the world, in part because they support some of the most biodiverse assemblages of plants, animals, and microbes. Scientists, engineers, lawyers, and regulators are now finding it both useful and necessary to become specialists in wetland ecology and wetland management to understand, preserve, and even reconstruct these fragile ecosystems. This book is for these aspiring wetland specialists as well as for those who would like to know more about the structure and function of these unique ecosystems. It is a book about wetlands—how they work and how we manage them.

Human History and Wetlands

There is no way to estimate the impact humans have had on the global extent of wetlands except to observe that, in developed and heavily populated regions of the world, the impact has ranged from significant to total. The importance of wetland environments to the development and sustenance of cultures throughout human history, however, is unmistakable. Since early civilization, many cultures have learned to live in harmony with wetlands and have benefited economically from surrounding wetlands, whereas other cultures quickly drained the landscape. The ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and the Aztec in what is now Mexico developed specialized systems of water delivery involving wetlands. Major modern cities of the world, such as Chicago and Washington, DC, in the United States; Christchurch, New Zealand; and Paris, France, stand on sites that were once part wetland. Many large airports, such as in Boston, New Orleans, and New York, are situated on former wetlands.

While global generalizations about human cultures and their respect (or not) are sometimes misleading, there was and is a propensity in Eastern cultures not to drain valuable wetlands entirely, as has been done in the West, but to work within the aquatic landscape, albeit in a heavily managed way. Dugan (1993) makes the interesting comparison between hydraulic civilizations (European in origin) that controlled water flow through the use of dikes, dams, pumps, and drainage tile, in part because water was only seasonally plentiful, and aquatic civilizations (Asian in origin) that better adapted to their surroundings of water‐abundant floodplains and deltas and took advantage of nature's pulses, such as flooding. It is because the former approach of controlling nature rather than working with it is so dominant today that we find such high losses of wetlands worldwide.

Wetlands have been and continue to be part of many human cultures in the world. Coles and Coles (1989) referred to the people who live in proximity to wetlands and whose culture is linked to them as wetlanders.

Sustainable Cultures in Wetlands

Some of the original wetlander cultures are described here. The Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq (Fig. 1.1) and the Camarguais of southern France's Rhone River Delta (Fig. 1.2) are two examples of ancient cultures that have lived in harmony and sustainably with their wetland environments for centuries. In North America, the Cajuns of Louisiana and several Native Americans tribes have lived in harmony with wetlands for hundreds of years. The Louisiana Cajuns, descendants of the French colonists of Acadia (present‐day Nova Scotia, Canada), were forced out of Nova Scotia by the English and moved to the Louisiana delta in the last half of the eighteenth century. Their society and culture flourished within the bayou wetlands (Fig. 1.3). The Chippewa in Wisconsin and Minnesota have harvested and reseeded wild rice (Zizania aquatica) along the littoral zone of lakes and streams for centuries (Fig. 1.4). They have a saying: “Wild rice is like money in the bank.”

Likewise, several Native American tribes lived and even thrived in large‐scale wetlands, such as the Florida Everglades. These include the ancient Calusa, a culture that based its economy on estuarine fisheries rather than agriculture. The Calusa disappeared primarily as a result of imported European disease. In the nineteenth century, the Seminoles and especially one of its tribes, the Miccosukee, moved south to the Everglades while being pursued by the U.S. Army during the Seminole Indian wars. They never surrendered. The Miccosukee adapted to living in hammock‐style camps spread throughout the Everglades and relied on fishing, hunting, and harvesting of native fruits from the hammocks (Fig. 1.5). A quote in a Florida newspaper by Miccosukee tribal member Michael Frank is poignant yet hopeful about living sustainably in the Florida Everglades:

Figure 1.1 The Marsh Arabs of present‐day southern Iraq lived for centuries on artificial islands in marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia. The marshes were mostly drained in the 1990s and are now being restored. 

(Hassan Janali/Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 1.2 The Camargue region of southern France in the Rhone River Delta is a historically important wetland region in Europe where Camarguais have lived since the Middle Ages. 

(Uryadnikov Sergey/Adobe Stock)

Figure 1.3 A Cajun lumberjack camp in the Atchafalaya Swamp of coastal Louisiana. 

(Courtesy of Louisiana Collection, Tulane University Library)

Figure 1.4 “Ricer” poling and “knocking” wild rice (Zizania aquatica) into canoes as Anishinaabe (Chippewa, Ojibwe) tribes and others have done for hundreds of years on Rice Lake in Crow Wing County, Minnesota. 

(With permission of John Overland)

Figure 1.5 The Miccosukee Native Americans adapted to life in the Florida Everglades in hammock‐style camps. They relied on fishing, hunting, and harvesting of native fruits from the hammocks. 

(Photo by W. J. Mitsch)

We were taught to never, ever leave the Everglades. If you leave the Everglades you will lose your culture, you lose your language, you lose your way of life.

—Michael Frank, as quoted by William E. Gibson, “Pollution Is Killing Everglades, Miccosukee Warn,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, August 10, 2013

Literary References to Wetlands

With all of these important...