What Is a Wetland Worth?

Annie Proulx was not able to travel for her book on wetlands. She had imagined journeys into the disappearing Siberian mires and the English fens, which are already mostly lost. She would visit biologists examining the fires crackling under the Arctic peatlands and explore the southeastern swamps, where her feet would bounce on rafts of sphagnum moss, a sensation she compares to walking on a water bed.

But amidst a global pandemic, Proulx, who is 87 years old, was stuck at home. So instead, as she explains in the forward to Fen, Bog, and Swamp, which was released today, she drew from an extensive personal treasury of books, conversations, and memories of lessons in swamp appreciation. The earliest came from her mother.

Growing up in eastern Connecticut in the 1930s, Proulx learned how to navigate the grassy tussocks around channels of sodden or submerged ground. An inaccessible, even frightening territory of bugs, muck, and stench opened up to her as a place of wonder, even delight. It is unlikely that many of the places Proulx recalls are still there, at least not in the form she remembers them.

That is because, as she writes, “the history of wetlands is the history of their destruction. ” The swamps of southern New England, like so much of America’s wetlands, have since been encroached on by nearly a century of suburban development, and by centuries of draining and dredging before that. People have always been hanging nature’s sponges out to dry, until the land is firm enough to support a farm or a strip mall.

It has been going on so long that attaining any perspective on the losses requires stepping back thousands of years. Or as Proulx puts it: Most of the world’s wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries were the Earth’s most desirable and dependable resource places, attracting and supporting myriad species.

The diversity and numbers of living creatures in springtime wetlands and overhead must have made a stupefying roar audible from afar. We wouldn’t know. Proulx, who has previously traced humanity’s instinct to ravage nature in fictional works like Barkskins , is the latest in a long line of wetland enthusiasts, many of whose accounts populate the book.

Before her, there were painters and writers who became hip to swamps, finding inspiration in what she calls the “rare novelties and eerie beauty” of landscapes others considered ugly. There were lepidopterists and ornithologists, who found pleasure in exploring the unique miasma of nutrients and flora that could allow a species of insect or bird to evolve and thrive just there and only there. But this did not forestall the unrelenting waves of “ecological violence,” as Proulx calls it.

People fought the wetlands, seeking to tame them for uses they considered productive. Little did they know how productive those places already were, through services like filtering water , flood protection , and storing carbon . Buy This Book At: If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.

This helps support our journalism. Learn more . The result has long been a confused impulse toward wetlands, deeply embedded in America’s colonialist culture.

Even our kindest urge is often not so much to preserve them as to “fix” them. Proulx expresses this well, but I think the television show Arrested Development puts it best when the entitled scion of a family of tract home developers decides to put herself on the auction block for a “Save the Wetlands” charity dating event. Asked what she hopes the money will achieve, she replies: “To dry them?” It is a tricky task to get people to value a place that gives us so much “discomfort, irritation, bewilderment and frustration,” as Proulx writes.

It can be a chore to appreciate all the things these ecosystems do for us, and harder still to see that value in a way that extends beyond the wants and needs of our species. Her argument is that we must. In a few weeks, lawyers will gather at the Supreme Court for oral arguments in Sackett v.

Environmental Protection Agency, a case that concerns how the US perceives the value of many of its remaining wetlands. In 2004, the Sacketts, a couple then in their late thirties, purchased a vacant lot in a subdivision near Priest Lake in Idaho’s northern panhandle. The lake is known as an ideal environment for fish, thanks in part to it being fed by the neighboring Kalispell Bay Fen, a type of mineral-rich wetland that is chock full of nutrients.

Previously, the US Army Corps of Engineers had examined the Sacketts’ future property and included it as part of the area’s broader network of wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act. The federal law, passed in the 1970s, was intended “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters. ” A few years later, the Sacketts started building their home.

A neighbor complained, and soon the couple received a visit from federal inspectors who ordered them to stop filling in their property with gravel and sand and—under threat of heavy fines—apply for a federal permit. Thus began a 15-year legal saga. In court filings, the Sacketts’ lawyers have argued that the permitting process is an undue financial burden and a violation of their property rights.

This is a view shared by groups like the National Association of Home Builders and US Chamber of Commerce. The reason, they argue, is that the wetlands on the family’s property—and countless similar areas—are not the sort of hydrology that is covered by the Clean Water Act. Their rationale lies in the ill-defined idea of “the Nation’s waters.

” (Often you’ll hear these referred to as WOTUS, for “waters of the United States,” like POTUS or SCOTUS. ) The reason there are federal rules to protect water in all its varied forms is because in some way it is all connected to “navigable” waters. A commercially important river like the mighty Mississippi runs through numerous states, so its health is thus protected by the feds in the interest of “interstate commerce.

” But so is the health of the many rivers that send their water into the Mississippi, as well as the smaller streams and wetlands that feed into those. If a mine wants to dump waste ore into the wetlands of northern Minnesota, the thinking goes, the potential harm to people and ecosystems downstream in New Orleans must be considered. Why? Because water flows.

But not all water flows in the same way. The Sacketts’ argue that the wetlands on their property are a step removed from this national network of waters. This is because they lack a “continuous surface connection” to the navigable waters downstream.

That’s one definition of “waters,” and it comes courtesy of a 2006 opinion by former justice Antonin Scalia. It’s also how one arrives at the apparently strange sentence at the core of the Sacketts’ complaint: “Wetlands and other non-waters that are merely nearby true ‘waters’ cannot themselves be deemed to be ‘waters. ’” The Environmental Protection Agency disagrees.

They go by a different Supreme Court opinion, this one written by former justice Anthony Kennedy, that expands Scalia’s two-dimensional definition of a connection. Known as the “significant nexus” definition, it considers other forms of aquatic connections, like subsurface groundwater and streams that may only gush from time to time, perhaps during the spring melt or after a large storm. Water is water, by whichever route and at whatever time it arrives.

For decades, the EPA has written rules that flip-flop between these two definitions, depending on which party controls the White House. In recent years, the Obama administration expanded protections, which the Trump administration then tightened, arguing that the added protections came at too high a cost to development. Now, under Biden, things are mostly back to the way they were before.

There is no good estimate of how many wetlands and streams are affected by picking one definition over the other, says Joseph Shapiro, an economist at UC Berkeley who studies the Clean Water Act, though within some watersheds up to 90 percent could lose protection if the Sacketts win their court battle. Historically, researchers have struggled to articulate the importance of more peripheral wetlands and streams to the rest of the nation’s waters, Shapiro says. But wetland science has come a long way since 2006.

In 2013, a large team of scientists and policymakers working with the EPA published what’s known in wetland circles as “ The Connectivity Report . ” It outlined all the mysterious ways that waterways form networks, even when constant surface connections are not apparent. This makes it much easier to explain why the fate of an apparently isolated wetland can still be integral to the health of the big, commercially important rivers downstream, says Mažeika Sulliván, a wetland scientist at Clemson University and one of the report’s authors.

Scalia’s continuous surface definition “ignores hydrological reality,” he says. Sulliván holds “cautious optimism” that the court will heed evolving wetland science. But there is good reason to think the court may side with Scalia.

That would be in keeping with a pattern of opinions intended to reduce the latitude of federal regulators trying to protect nature. The latest was West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency , which limited the agency’s ability to rein in power plant emissions under the Clean Air Act.

If Congress wants the government to take broader forms of protection, then the court has reasoned that legislators should be clearer about their intentions, relying less on half-century-old laws. Of course, no one—Supreme Court justices included—is expecting that sort of consensus anytime soon. The Clean Water Act is a strange law, almost utopian in its mandate to protect the “integrity” of the nation’s waters.

Among the goals of the act were to reduce pollution so as to make all of America’s waters “swimmable” and “fishable” (a goal that has not yet been achieved), but this belies a more fundamental sort of protection: chemical, physical, and biological. The trouble is that earning those broad protections depends on how a waterway connects to the rest. This makes for a strange way of talking about wetlands, at least in the courtroom, since they are always considered in relation to some more commercially important river somewhere far downhill.

To a wetland ecologist, it’s tempting to say all of the nation’s water is connected, Sulliván says, though not always through direct hydrology. Instead, he considers biological connections, like the movement of animals, soils, and seeds, as well as chemical links, like the capture and burying of carbon by plants. While it’s true that “you have to draw some lines between use and protection,” he says—and in the arena of the Supreme Court, that line is hydrological—it leaves so much of a wetland’s value out.

Those connections are, of course, important. To Sulliván, the immense value of the wetlands at question in Sackett is easy to demonstrate. He could point to their role in controlling sediment and pollution, or to protection from floods due to their role as natural sponges.

Whether or not the connection comes under or overground, or intermittently or all the time, a mosaic of wetlands works in aggregate. He compares it to the human body. “Your adrenaline levels change depending on the situation,” he says.

“Just because they only go up when you see a bear doesn’t mean it’s wise to remove your adrenal glands. ” Proulx is keen to highlight those other, more mysterious interconnections, regardless of where a wetland’s water flows, and whether or not they matter to our species and to others. But most of the time, of course, they do, because humans are connected to other species.

She chose fens, bogs, and swamps from a vast superset of wetland types, she says, because they all form peat —organic material caught in a perpetual state of partial decay—and therefore sequester carbon dioxide for long enough to make a difference to the warming climate. Proulx has centuries of destruction to draw from to make her point. But for a glimpse of what could be in store after Sackett, look to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, in Georgia, a place the writer and ornithologist Brooke Meanley calls the “prince of southern swamps.

” Proulx traveled there with her husband in the 1950s, admiring its cypresses, lakes, bogs, and more wading birds than she could count. The threat comes not from within the protected wilderness but from a mine proposed just outside it, in a neighboring swamp that is connected to Okefenokee under one legal definition and not the other. Environmental researchers fear that it will pollute or deplete the groundwater beneath the region through the process of extracting zirconium and titanium dioxide.

But the proposal went to federal regulators during the Trump administration, who decided the project does not require permits under the Clean Water Act. That decision appears to be final. It’s now up to state officials to decide what should be done.

In a surprise move earlier this year, a group of Republicans in the Georgia Senate put forward a bill that would make the area off-limits to mining. The borderland was an ecosystem too precious, they believed, to put at risk. The bill died before coming up for a vote, and the mine’s fate remains uncertain.

But Proulx is keen to point out this pattern of realization. In Europe, she points out, regulators have recognized that important role with rules that ban the cutting of peat, and efforts to rewater wetland regions have accelerated around the world, though at far greater expense than it would have cost to protect them in the first place. And so much has already been lost.

In the Okefenokee, the disputed borderlands were once deep within a much more vast ecosystem, only a sliver of which the federal wilderness area now protects. Endangered species like the ivory-billed woodpeckers that once lived there are now feared extinct. In a way, Proulx points out, the fight to preserve wetlands is a metaphor for the global task of slowing climate change—a failure to see how small acts of destruction add up to something much larger, and a scramble to save ecosystems only when the harms to ourselves become undeniable.

We must keep trying, she writes. But in the end, Proulx’s book is an elegy, an ode to what future generations will not know. .