Ideas - The Marrow of Nature: A Case for Wetlands

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Our relationship with wetlands is nothing if not troubled; swamps, bogs, and marshes have long been cast as wastelands, paved over to make way for agriculture and human development. But with wetlands proving crucial for life, artists, ecologists and activists say we need to rewrite this squelchy story. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 17, 2022.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Today, a celebration and a defense of the much maligned swamp. A town is saved not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

The words of writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, written in 1862. If it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide it for the swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of nature. Our planet's very survival depends on the existence of swamps, more specifically, wetlands. They store twice as much carbon as forests, for starters, even though they occupy only about 6% of Earth's surface.

But since 1970, it's estimated more than a third of the world's remaining wetlands have been lost. And that figure keeps rising. A major blow to a world threatened by climate change. And yet, for many, wetlands are still considered a wasteland. An evil dwelling where we imagine terrifying monsters and death. Something to drain and conquer. A concept that has oozed into political rhetoric. Bring us love! Bring us love! Bring us love! Bring us love! that has oozed into political rhetoric.

A very important lesson is that history is normally written by the winners and by the states, especially when we're talking about agrarian states that encouraged a settled way of life, the big lesson for us is whatever those states, whatever they say about wetlands, how diseased they are, how wild they are, how inhospitable they are, how scary, maybe haunted by ghosts, we should not take them at face value. We have so much evidence about their value and yet they're treated in this way like they don't matter and like people don't care. And it's hard to be sort of very slowly losing the battle, inexorably losing wetlands year to year and knowing that we can't effectively put them all back. Here is The Marrow of Nature, a case for wetlands. It's by Ideas contributor Moira Donovan. I'm standing on a highway in Nova Scotia, in the Annapolis Valley, not far from the Bay of Fundy.

What you're hearing in the background is a construction crew busily expanding the road, expanding into the salt marsh bordering this highway. And most speeding by aren't aware of what's being lost, the paving over of a hidden, rich world, vital to our existence. To stand on the edge of a marsh and look at it, it really does, depending on the time of year, it either looks like a green hayfield, or it looks like a brown deadfield, or it looks like a brown dead field, or it's underwater. Tony Bowron is a coastal wetland ecologist. And that, in a sense,

that simplicity does very much belay the importance of these habitats and what is actually happening, both at the micro and macro scale in these systems so to think about a marsh that you visited in the morning and it's a nice looks like a nice green hayfield with some birds flying around and you know some mosquitoes bothering you but not really much else seeming to happen but then come back four or five hours later when the tides come in and all of that grass all of that landscape is now underwater and what you can't see at that point is all the fish that are then in amongst those grasses, furiously feeding away, hunting each other, hunting invertebrates, eating those mosquitoes that have bred in the pans and pools on the marsh.

And yeah, so it's... It's the word I'm trying to think of the term. Appearances can be deceiving. Coastal wetlands store up to five times more carbon than similar-sized mature tropical forests. The carbon locks into the salt marsh's thick tidal mud. The marsh plants that we have here, they're our rainforests. And the marsh grasses, which in the summer can tower so high researchers need to wear flags in order not to lose one another, support a wealth

of biodiversity. Though it doesn't look like it, this salt marsh is bursting with life. A place between water and land whose only constant is change. They're what connects the land to the sea. So the plants that we find in the salt marshes, we don't find them anywhere else in the system. There's birds that nest only in salt marshes. There's fish that only breed in salt marshes. And in the Bay of Fundy, over the last 400 years, we've unfortunately lost almost 80% of these coastal wetlands.

It's hard to comprehend. We stand on these sites today and go, this is like a 400 hectare marsh. This is a huge marsh. It's a fraction of what we used to have. And now, this fraction is getting smaller. smaller. What we're doing here today on, unfortunately, a portion of this marsh that is slated to be lost as a result of the causeway expansion, we're harvesting, or to put it another way, we're rescuing some of the marsh plants. And what we're doing is we're removing them from this marsh before it's lost. This rescue mission is one of the attempts to hold

back a tide of destruction that is threatening wetlands across the globe. Destruction in the name of economic and societal advancement. For most of the historical record, we viewed wetlands negatively is because we viewed wetlands as stumbling blocks to agrarian development, right? Because their soil exerts such a major stress on the growth of crops because of the lack of oxygen and the soil pores, which makes it very difficult to meet the demands of most rooted plants for respiration. So what do you do about that? Faisal Hussain is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. Throughout history, our answer has been to destroy wetlands,

drain them and make them drier so you can grow those high-value crops, especially wheat and barley. So throughout history, our view has been a good wetland is a destroyed wetland. Hussain is an environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire. And so far, my research has focused on the history of the Tigris and Euphrates under the early centuries of Ottoman rule. The massive Tigris and Euphrates river system begins in the mountains of eastern Turkey, descending down into Syria and Iraq before draining into the Persian Gulf. It once featured

large swaths of wetlands, including a part of Iraq that used to have the largest wetland ecosystem in Western Asia, which also served as a refuge for those defying authorities. Hussein picks up a book written more than a thousand years ago. So the chronicler here, his name is Ibn al-Athir, and the book is Al-Kamil Fi Al-Tariq, all right? So, and here in this section, he is narrating in this account the events of the year 338, and that in the Gregorian calendar,

that would be 949, 950. And this is what he writes. And this year, the affair of Imran ibn Shaheen exacerbated, and he became more powerful. His story is as follows. He was from the people of the town of Jamida, who committed a crime, so he fled to the marshes in fear from the Sultan, and he settled between the reeds and bushes and confined himself to the fish and water birds of the marshes for his sustenance. Later, a group of fishermen and brigands gathered around him, and they empowered him and defended him against the Sultan. These wetlands, known as the Mesopotamian Marshes,

were not just a refuge, but also a weapon against a powerful enemy. Because some of those wetlands, a particular tribe or village could have its own intricate damming system that it could break whenever an army is approaching. So it was a good way to use water as a weapon to flood your enemies. And we see this happens during the Ottoman period as well. And people, even European visitors who came to the region would take note of that, that the populations of this particular wetland and this district are really independent and they make it very difficult for the Ottoman Turks to establish any modicum of

political order in that region. These weren't the only communities who used wetlands to challenge authority. Across the Atlantic Ocean and beginning in the 17th century, the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast wetland stretching from southeastern Virginia to northeastern North Carolina, was also significant in the power dynamics of colonialism. The Dismal's right in the heart of that colonial enterprise in the Atlantic. Just to bear in mind, Jamestown famously in Virginia was settled about 40 miles away from the nearest Dismal Swamp. So all the wealth of Europe is flowing here eventually and here's this big 2,000 square

mile swamp in the middle of their backyard. This is Dan Sayers. I'm an associate professor of anthropology with a focus on historical archaeology, professor at American University in Washington, D.C. Sayers says as soon as Europeans arrived, they

began looking for ways to exploit the swamp. You've got a handful of largely elite, very aristocratic colonists that are always trying to find ways. You can kind of get this sense in those period documents. How do we make money out of this, this swamp? It's sitting here. It is this thing we fear. It's this thing we loathe. It does nobody any good. While Europeans were perplexed how to benefit from the great dismal swamp, others found a good use. The time we're talking about, which is 1660, 1680, 1700 for sure, it's certainly become a place and a haven for people who resisted that colonization and then

the early generations of the race-based slavery there. Through archaeological work, Sayers and others have started to piece together the story of this haven. Deep in the wetlands, he's uncovered remnants of raised wooden cabins and other traces of human life. For over two and a half centuries, Maroons, people of African descent who'd escaped slavery, and indigenous people who had been forced off their land, joined together and established multi-generational settlements, hidden deep within the Great Dismal Swamp. As much as you are about people coming into the swamp,

you're also talking about people being born there and staying there and living most, if not all, their lives within the interior of the swamp. And then what we know from about what they're using is, in fact, one of the most intriguing parts of this whole story or history. Because these Maroons and Native Americans, they were joining together in these communities, most likely, because they were out in the middle of the swamp, because they had decided, I'm done with that world, the outside world. I'm staying here as long as I possibly can, which as far as I'm concerned, they probably assumed was the remainder of their lives or their whole lives, because these were confident people. Well, one of the things that went along with that, I think this should make sense to anybody, right, is that, well, if you're going to say goodbye to that world, you're not going to go back out to it every three days.

You get a couple of tobacco pipes and tobacco and a bottle of whiskey. So all that standard kind of mass-produced outside world stuff that really defines a lot of our most archaeological sites after 1607 in this region, mid-Atlantic region. Not seen a lot of that, right? And it's a direct, I think it's a direct demonstration, right, of this act, this putting up this wall, right, between them and the outside world. These communities were so successful at concealing themselves that this history is only now being understood. Nonetheless, for centuries, the Great Dismal Swamp sheltered the largest community of maroons

in the United States. So one of the beautiful things or ironies of this history is that these people who go to this swamp, and these are people that I've been looking at archaeologically, trying to look at their lives, they are taking advantage of that European loathing and fear of these kinds of places. It becomes a very synergistic, to use a common word for it in a way, kind of a synergy develops between the beliefs and the attitudes of colonials, their wider beliefs about exploiting people that they think are less than human in some sense or another. Those people going into a place that is by colonial standards, not really human. So there's something going on that is quite fascinating.

The same derision was placed in southern Iraq on the traditional inhabitants of the Mesopotamian marshes, the Marsh Arabs, seen also by their Ottoman rulers as less than human. So it was a very violent and zoological language that Ottoman authorities would use to describe the inhabitants of wetlands. So all kinds of wild animals and wild creatures were used to describe the inhabitants of the wetlands. There were dogs, there were insects, there were locusts, rats, and so on and so forth.

And that was the predominant attitude, not only by the Ottoman state, but also by the local inhabitants who lived in nearby cities. They really viewed settlers of the wetlands as just as dirty and as uncivilized and as beastly as the livestock that they waste over there. And of course, this is rhetoric, but it had an impact on how the state and those urban populations would treat them. In many cases, those prejudices accumulate one generation after another. At certain points, when you have times of friction and conflict of interest, they descend into a bloody warfare and we inherited those biases.

That's why for a very long time, we failed to appreciate the significance, political and ecological significance of wetlands. And also this is reflected in policy. This is why we failed as states to protect those valuable and important ecosystems.

And there was also a fear, not just a disdain, for wetlands. European colonists to North America saw them as reservoirs of illness and death. This view was fueled by a fear of miasma, or bad air, that was thought to come from the wetlands and cause fevers, though ironically it was likely European colonizers who had brought diseases like malaria to the continent. And in the 1930s, the drive to control malaria led to the draining of Italy's Ponteen Marshes by the dictator Benito Mussolini to create what he saw as a productive fascist landscape. And he said this was the kind of war he'd like to fight because it was so easy to win.

And in a sense, wetlands are easy. They're easy targets. They're easy to take down. They're easy targets. They're easy to take down. They're easy to destroy. This is Rod Giblett, Australian writer and professor of environmental humanities. I have an honorary position at Deakin University in Melbourne, where I now live. Giblett is the author of several books on wetlands that examines them through a historical and cultural lens. He first became interested in these ecosystems when he was living in Perth, Australia, and a nearby wetland became a concern

to locals. In particular, because of the biting flies, or midges, as they call them in Australia, that flourish in such dampness. In summer there were midges, and you get them in Canada, In summer there were midges and you get them in Canada and this was an affront to a lot of local people who wanted to have a barbecue and couldn't. There was a local move to do something about it and there was a public meeting in the local hall. One guy wanted to pour a 44-gallon drum of dieseline into the wetland. Another guy wanted to fill it in and make a football oval,

but there was a football oval right next door to it anyway, and it's a 200 hectare lake, so it would have made many, many, many football ovals. So I started thinking about why people had a dislike of wetlands. There was kind of this long tradition of a horror of wetlands. As a university student majoring in English, Giblett approached this horror from a literary perspective. I'd just finished my PhD on literature, and I started thinking about some of the negative representations of wetlands in English literature.

And the first thing I thought of was C.S. Forrester's novel African Queen that was made into a famous film with Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn. It was the highest grossing film of the 1950s. It's alive, look at that. Get me out of here, Charlie, I can't stand it. And the film and the story take place in basically three different landscapes. One is a flowing river, one is a swamp and one is an open lake. So when they get into the swamp, it's described as a nightmare time of filth and horror. Poor

old Humphrey Bogart has to get out of the boat and pull the boat through the swamp and he gets attacked by leeches. He has a a kind of visceral horror of swamps. So, yeah, swamps aren't necessarily pleasant places. If there's anything in the world I hate, it's leeches. Filthy little devils. You need to be careful, you need to watch where you're going, you need to be wary of other creatures. They're also in places where monsters can live and this goes back to the

old English poem Beowulf where there is a marsh, Grendel and his mother are marsh monsters and they attack Beowulf and his hall and kill his men and Beowulf eventually kills Grendel and his mother. So there's a long history in English literature and in popular culture about the swamp as a place where monsters live. In Beowulf, the swamp is associated with death and seen as the dwelling of the deceased. This poem helped inspire The Dead Marshes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. There are dead things were also based on Tolkien's experience in World War I, especially the Battle of the Sum, where he saw fellow soldiers fall dead into the wasteland of All dead. All rotten elves and men and orcs. A great battle long ago.

The dead marshes. Yes, yes, that is the name. In many accounts, marshes were seen as not only bad for the body, but also for the mind. At times emanating an alluring light, seducing people to their demise. This way. Don't follow the lights. They can sink you into melancholy and despond. A theme that is also found in the 17th century Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan,

where there existed a cruel swamp known as the Slough of Despond. This is the place where sin gathers and Christians get sucked into the Slough of Despond. There is this kind of whole philosophy and taxonomy of places in Western thought, which kind of ramps up in modern times that regards them as bad for the body, bad for the mind, bad for the city. You want to avoid them, you got to drain them, you got to build a solid city that keeps all this bad stuff and these monsters at bay. Even Henry David Thoreau, who called swamps the marrow of nature, loved wetlands in part because of their maligned reputation. He said it wasn't a melancholy place,

it was a place of joy for him. So again, it was that kind of contrarian strand to Thoreau's thought, but he could see the place of the swamp and he would love to, he said, go and bury himself in a swamp up to his neck, something that I've never done, but, you know, and it was a place of joy for him and he could hear the gnats and mosquitoes buzzing around and that was wonderful to him. So, I mean, he said, it's in vain we seek a wilderness outside ourself or a wildness outside ourself it's the bog in our brains and our bowels so he understood the kind of we have a wetland part of our bodies I mean we're predominantly water anyway but we have a kind of a swampy lower section or swampy mid section and when he went into some of the wetlands around Concord,

like Gowing Swamp and Bexto Swamp, he said it's like, you know, it's walking on the moss and it's like going into this quaking zone and it's kind of somewhere where the earth trembles and he felt that his body was trembling. So there was kind of this, rather than the horror of the wetlands, it's like the wetland is part of his body was trembling. So there was kind of this, rather than the horror of the wetlands, it's like the wetland is part of his body. Swamps, marshes and bogs stabilize our climate,

filter our water and nourish humans and animals alike. Yet as our understanding of wetland ecology has grown, the last century has seen more destruction than ever. As an example, Faisal Hussein says we can look to the early 1990s, when Saddam Hussein was more successful in attacking the Mesopotamian marshes than the Ottomans had ever been. In retaliation for a failed revolt in southern Iraq, Saddam Hussein bombed and drained the marshes, displacing more than 100,000 people. The only difference I can see is probably those modern regimes, totalitarian regimes,

they had at their disposal machineries that pre-modern societies lacked. And they were empowered by fossil fuel subsidies to be more ambitious and more reckless and callous in the way that they could enact their crimes against what some scholars call it as ecocide, right? So maybe the Ottomans, had they had the power and fossil fuel subsidies and the machineries, had they have them properly, they

would do the same. And this is why probably that the damage that Saddam Hussein did was more long term and still lives with us. It's been a challenge. And to this day, people in the region, policymakers, environmental NGOs are trying to figure out what to do. Since 1900, half the world's wetlands have been lost, the majority since 1970. I wrote a paper with some colleagues in Alberta on the management of wetlands in a kind of neoliberal context. Rebecca Rooney is a wetland ecologist and associate professor of biology at the University of Waterloo.

And when I finally read the full manuscript with all of our pieces together, I was sort of blown away to realize the message was really radical. And at the end, what we were saying is that in a system where wetlands are providing benefits to this broad group of people, Wetlands are providing benefits to this broad group of people, the public we might think of. But the people who control the fate of that wetland are upstream, are remote, and are few. The decision-making is concentrated in a way where the cost and the benefits equation for the individuals making the decision is really dissociated from the costs and the benefits en masse. And in this system, wetland conservation is just never going to happen. And so the need to examine the system was the conclusion of this paper. You know, I can't dispute it. Like, we're right. You're listening to The Marrow of Nature,

A Case for Wetlands, on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. This program is by Moira Donovan. You can also hear Ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic.

I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Here is the second part of Moira Donovan's documentary. One of the key issues people often fail to realize is the importance of preserving wetlands within their own neighborhood. The geographic scope of influence of each wetland is really narrow in a lot of contexts. If you don't keep them in your neighborhood, then you're not going to benefit from them.

Wetland ecologist Rebecca Rooney. Sure, maintaining boreal extensive peatlands is vital if we're going to mitigate and use natural solutions to redress climate change. But for a lot of those ecosystem services, people talk about the recreational values, the cultural values, but also the flood mitigation, the water purification,

those are inherently local. And if you don't keep them in your neighborhood, then you're not going to benefit from them. The fact that we can't trade them like playing cards between watersheds really is a message that I think people need to hear. In other words, each slimy, stinky wetland needs to be understood as a unique ecosystem in its own right. We now know, for instance, that roughly 40% of the world's species use wetlands at some point in their life cycle.

You would never think, okay, we'll clear cut this old growth forest, but don't worry, because we're going to plant all these poplar over here. And in 20 years, there'll be trees again. That would be a 20-year lag. And people would be like, that's too long. But with wetlands, for some reason, and some of these wetlands, you know, take a thousand years to develop. Peatlands are incredibly slow to grow and expand. And yet we think we can replace them just with a snap of fingers. A lot of this will, it does come back to biases or that's too loaded a term, predispositions, right? To be thinking of wetlands and swamps and whatever else, you know, these kinds of still remote places as being not so much cultural landscapes as they are natural.

Archaeologist Dan Sayers. Wetlands are places we need to pay attention to in all aspects, human, natural, cultural. They have a lot of potential profundity in terms of the info, the insight they can provide. And I think we can do a better job of, yeah, across the globe, no doubt. But certainly in the backyards I'm used to, yeah, we could pay a lot more attention and really respect them a bit more than we have. In some cases, that act of paying attention means taking a closer look at the wetlands that surround us. Take the Tantrumar Marshes, 50,000 acres that lay across parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, which have inspired many artists, including the

painter Alex Colville and the poet Elizabeth Bishop. A pale flickering, gone, the Tantrumar Marshes and the smell of salt hay. Another artist whose work is hugely influenced by the Tantrumar Marshes is the British-born photographer Thaddeus Halonia. I'm a visual artist who lives on the Tantrumar Marshes in Jolikere, New Brunswick, and have made this my home for the past 41 years. I can't imagine being anywhere else.

Noted for his breathtaking photographs of the marshes, which often possess an otherworldly feel to them, portraying the sanctum sanctorum that Thoreau wrote about. Can I ask just about... Thaddeus and I are standing in his studio, looking over some of his work. What is happening here in terms of the interplay between the landscape itself and the sky? It's just such a vast expanse. Sure, well in this landscape and it is akin to the prairies by viewing it. If you've driven the prairies and you look out on this flat expanse it echoes what the tantrum or marshes are which are, flat landscape. And two-thirds of the photograph is a dramatic sky that's ever-changing with cloud formations going off into the distance. Other photographs capture the small delights of the marshes.

I'm struck by an image of a small pitcher plant that he plucked from the bog and photographed in his studio on a backing of black velvet. They look like aliens. Yeah. They are aliens. Wow. Can you describe this one for me? This one is probably the most intact pitcher plant, one that has the color existing within it from its natural state still kind of crimson. For Halonia

the tantrum marshes are a constant muse. It's just part of a daily practice of ingestion of life and in terms of making photographs of the tantrum are I think you initially talked about how it is a mundane place, how it is something that it's not romantic, it's not glorious, it's not in your face. But if you slow down and look at it, there's an energy and there's a beauty in its mundane richness, right? And it's not, it's glorification. It's a metaphor for looking at everything. It's a metaphor for slowing down and embracing the natural world in a way that is different maybe than the way you live your life, the way that you are in a hurry and you're going by things and you're not considering all those aspects

that are right there in your face and historically have been there a long time and serve many, many purposes. We don't always need sort of Ansel Adams mountain landscape to make us love the earth. We also have... And I, you know, I took a lot of... Ansel Adams had a profound effect on my early career.

I went to New York and saw an exhibition of 8x10-inch contact prints at the Museum of Modern Art in, like, 1975. And, I mean, there probably wasn't a more staunch environmentalist, but his photographs are very heroic and are very heroic and very heroic landscapes and we live in a in a landscape on the tantrum are that is heroic in its own way and if you live here you see it in its daily changes blowing your mind because just little nuances of seasonal change of light and color create a whole different environment and if you become sensitive to looking at it every day and really breathing it in of seasonal change of light and color create a whole different environment. And if you become sensitive to looking at it every day and really breathing it in,

you're going to see the same beauty and richness there if you're open to taking it in. The plurality of landscape is a wonder. But there was a time when even mountains were looked down upon. It might be worth our reviewing the way mountains were regarded, which was actually in some ways very similar to the way wetlands are regarded as being places that are inhospitable, that represent potential terrors, both real and imagined, and places to be avoided at all costs. This is Jay Baird Calicott, retired professor at the University of North Texas and a pioneering figure in the field of

environmental ethics. Calicott links the emergence of a more positive view of mountains with the 19th century romantic period of landscape painting. The landscape painting movement got people outside sort of appreciating in a new and even fashionable way the out-of-doors, which then began to include mountains as well. And so I think we're seeing something very similar, the same kind of process of rehabilitation in the case of wetlands. Calicott says this transition could be attributed to the growing field of wetland ecology. We always view the world or apprehend the world through a cognitive lens. The idea that there's just a given reality is not very reflective. And so I think that the popularization of ecology began to provide a new

lens through which we could apprehend wetlands and see them in terms of their functionality in the ecological sense of the word. And then to sort of adapt a phrase from architecture, form follows function. That is to say, the way we perceive their functionality begins to inform our aesthetic sensibilities. And so then we begin to see them as beautiful and not as these forbidding and rather drab and ugly places. I'm trying to say there are a variety that our cognition informs our aesthetic sensibilities. And the more we understand about places, then it stimulates our capacity to see their beauty. In other words, rather than simply restoring wetlands, we need to restore our perception

of these landscapes. Well, this is what I call worldview remediation, is what it's called for here. And so I think that this is gradually happening, but the pace is not fast enough. That's what we need to try to cultivate through education, through just spreading the word. In the Hyderpur wetlands in northeastern India, a shift in public perception is proving transformative.

Through education, we can bring the local community on board. So with education, they realize how important role the wetlands play, how it has to be sustainable. I'm Ashish Loya, and I'm a regular birder at Hyderpur Wetlands. Ashish Loya became a birder at an early age. That hobby did not make him the most popular kid in school. There was a lot of teasing and bullying and I was made fun of. Nobody knew what birding was and the bird names used to, they used to find bird names to be very funny. And they would make so much fun of it.

So I endured all of that and, you know, and I got hooked. That passion was put on pause when as a young man, he moved to the United States. But in 2008, Loya gave up a successful Wall Street career and moved back home to India to work with an organization dedicated to yoga and meditation. It was there, in northeastern India, when out for a drive, Loya came across an extraordinary site, the Hyderpur wetlands. So we crossed a bridge on the Ganga River while going on this highway and on the riverbed I would notice huge flocks of barred goose, painted storks, spoonbills and pie divers, these birds. And I would always fancy these birds as a child actually, like I'd always had a desire to see them and I was actually quite stunned that they were like in hundreds

and thousands they were roosting on the riverbed and I could see them from the bridge. And it was then that Loya's passion for birding was reignited. India's wetlands are crucial for birds traveling on the Central Asian Flyway, one of the planet's major avian migratory routes. But researchers say over the past 40 years, the country has lost a third of its natural wetlands. And for a time, it looked like the Hyderpur wetland and its 30,000 migratory birds was at risk of going the same way. Until birders like Ashish Loya encourage people to see wetlands differently. There is so much more awareness about it and recognizing it as a

wetland area kind of brings it in the consciousness of people who live here that there is an important ecological area which needs to be conserved. In 2021, thanks in part to Loya's observations of birds at the Hyderpur wetland, it was added to a list of wetlands of international importance, known as the Ramsar Site Network. The Ramsar Convention was signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971, making one of the first international conservation agreements. For the past 50 years, it set standards for conserving wetlands and encouraging harmonious coexistence between human communities and these ecosystems. In the Haiderpur wetland, that process started

with getting people to be attentive to the world around them. Local media now refers to it as Haiderpur wetland and regularly now report the findings of birds and wildlife in that place. It serves as an educational purpose for children. Even local nearby villages and all, now they tell me, oh, now this has become a wetland so it's something it has an identity or it's no longer a wasteland. A few months back I met a few youngsters who would play around in the wetland area they live in nearby area so I gathered them and I started

getting them interested into birding and I started teaching them. Earlier they would not know anything about birding but then when they were told, instructed, or educated about it, children, they just picked it up so rapidly and so well. I was surprised how quickly they learned all the names and how interested they got and how sharp they were into birding. I found them to be naturally curious about things around them and they just needed a direction. And now they tell me that earlier they would not value this place like that. In fact, they would even cause harm to birds in some way while playing. But now this attitude has changed so much that they cannot even imagine it. Besides, they won't let other people do it. much that they cannot even imagine it besides they won't let other people do it you know so it's a completely complete turnaround in their attitude just because of education

and actually this benefit is so big i mean many a times when we think of benefits of wetlands i mean even i was initially thinking about the same thing like it recharges water levels and prevents floods and supports biodiversity and all that. Of course, it is true and it's very critical right now. But for our mental well-being, for emotional well-being, I mean, we need nature, we need biodiversity, we need that environment around us to be more natural. And that is really huge, yes. That is really huge, yes. While the Ramsar Convention has helped shift the global conversation around wetland conservation,

it obviously hasn't been enough to stop wetland destruction. But in some places, that trajectory has started to reverse. The valley here was essentially all floodplain. A huge natural resource for the Native people that lived here, the Akanuki, which are part of the Tanaka Nation. I'm Norman Allard, community planner for Lower Kootenay Band. The Lower Kootenay Band is located in southeastern British Columbia in what's now called the Creston Valley. They relied heavily on the wetlands for food sources, for materials.

But with the arrival of settlers, much of this area, which was once a vast stretch of floodplain wetland, has been turned into agricultural fields. Before that, the wetlands were interwoven in the lives of the Akanuki people. A long time ago, there was different chiefs for different things like there's a duck chief a hunting chief etc they're basically the specialists of the day and they all knew the life cycles of everything that existed out there and then knew the relationships between so they all conferred at the beginning of the year and came up with recommendations to the main chief and that's how they decided where they were going to go harvest things for the year and where they would set up camp they'd rotate through and it became a intricate asset management system because uh there's still the same populations of people

that existed in the valley as they do today but they didn't have grocery stores. They had to make sure, you know, they knew where their food would be for the year, how to manage it so that it doesn't become over-harvested and destroy that source, because that could take, you know, decades to return for some things. Allard says the alteration of this wetland has had broad consequences. Having those systems disconnected from each other altered the natural sources that were there, degrading some and creating an overabundance of others. A lot of these areas that were open water ended up becoming choked with cattail.

Some of those changes affected important species. Like this burbot, the sturgeon, kokanee, everything that was utilized, especially for a food source, had language and had some type of Indigenous practice of harvesting and sometimes ceremony attached to it. The Lower Kootenai Band is now restoring more than 1,000 acres of floodplain wetlands, one of the largest restoration projects in Canada, which is itself home to a quarter of the world's wetlands. We've had community members get choked up with emotion because they hadn't seen that amount of waterfowl since they were kids, like 30, 40 years ago. And those things are starting to return. We'll hopefully be working with other nations as well on how to undertake large-scale restoration

work or, well, any type of restoration work. It's like a huge untapped source of knowledge from all of the elders, the culture, and the stories that pass on, and including it into modern science. Even as some wetlands are restored and perspectives evolve, there are still threats on the horizon. It seems as long as there are swamps and marshes in our backyards, there will be friction between these ecosystems and human development, including in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where protesters gathered in the

summer of 2022 to fight the construction of a housing development on the Eisner Cove wetland. We're here to protest what they're doing at Eisner Cove wetlands. They're going to put a bridge across the wetlands too, which will completely finish it. Well, actually a road, right? A road, yes. So they're going to infill, you know, and it's going to go through the middle of the wetland. It's going to destroy it completely.

It's just so completely insensitive. I'm not an activist. I'm just an ordinary person. I work. I take care of my elderly mom. I grow vegetables. I have never been involved in anything like this before. But this is my moment. This is my moment to stand up for what I believe in.

Yeah, we still get a lot of people who are saying that it's just a swamp. It needs to be developed. It's a stinky swamp. But wetlands store so much carbon. but wetlands store so much carbon. It's so much that we're going to waste in stored carbon. I know that our wetland is about five, well, more than five feet deep because I stuck a pole in it yesterday. And because it's so deep, it's going to store more than your regular wetland.

But it's not just the fact that it's the greenhouse gas. It's the, I already mentioned the species at risk. I don't consider myself an environmentalist or a conservationist, but I'm learning so much about it, and the more and more I walk in it, the more and more I'm loving it. Sometimes it's a little hectic because it's not the best place to walk, but it's so beautiful. Ultimately, this effort did not succeed, and construction work proceeded.

But a reflooded wetland in Ukraine has proven its worth during the Russian invasion. Not every wetland has got a national strategic thing, but it probably surprisingly more than one thing. This is Jasper Humphreys. Humphreys runs a research group on the overlap between conflict and the environment at King's College, London. In the first few weeks of the war, in early 2022, he saw that overlap in action, as Russian forces were quickly advancing on Kiev. In fact, the Russians were only about 40 kilometers from Kiev.

I mean, and if they got in, that would be probably the end of the war. Until the 1960s, an area outside Kiev on the Irpin River was a stretch of floodplain wetlands. Some ecologists called it the Ukrainian Amazon. Soviet-era policies drained those wetlands through the use of dams and pumping stations, draining the swamp, so to speak, to create land for housing and agriculture, as well as hydropower. But as the Russians were closing in on Kyiv,

Ukrainian forces opened a dam, flooding the Irpin Basin. It was a desperate measure by the Ukrainians. Over several days after the dam was opened, the river flowed into the floodplain, restoring water to wetlands that had been drained for 70 years. And so the water filled up and the Russian troops were all on this floodplain and they attacked them gradually. They just found themselves sinking deeper and deeper into the water and to the point where they had to leave. And they were also getting shelled because they were stuck.

They were sitting targets. They were getting heavily attacked, bombed, whatever. So the whole thing became into a disaster. But even more importantly, it saved Kiev. That one action saved Kiev, and you could argue, saved Ukraine., my friends, Ukrainian friends, call it the hero river. You know, the European hero. Save the nation river. Further damage to the dam was caused by Russian shelling, which prevented Ukrainians from draining the area again

after the Russians left. Conservationists are arguing the area should remain flooded. So various ecological groups in Ukraine have been deciding what to do and talking about keeping it as a rewilding project. But there are a lot of vested interests. There's people who have bought land to build houses. There was lots of housing projects in the pipeline. There was agricultural projects in the pipeline because it's got this wonderful soil that they've got in Ukraine.

And agriculture is such a big revenue earner for Ukraine. So as things stand now, well, the water is still there and people are sort of discussing. I think discussions will go on for a long, long, long time. So wetlands has always been the victim of other people's ideas and economic interests and that sort of thing. So it's only recently that people are really starting to appreciate the importance of wetlands. People are going to have to start taking them much more seriously. And in a sense, the Irpin situation in Ukraine is symbolic of that. For Canadian wetland ecologist Rebecca Rooney, the fact young people took wetland seriously when an ecosystem in Ontario was threatened

is a source of hope. At the University of Waterloo, she teaches an introductory ecology and evolution course. Which has somewhere between 300 and 500 students in it every year. an evolution course. Which has somewhere between 300 and 500 students in it every year. And these are 17, 18 year olds. And in my classes, they express anxiety, fear, grief. They are really struggling with the reality of inheriting this damaged environment and the apparent disregard for that legacy that, you know, that they see among adults. And one of the things that I think can help is engaging in, in wetland conservation, because when we are successful in stewarding the land, when we are successful in protecting habitat against threats of development, it really has an effect that's quite renewing. The fight over the Duffins Creek wetland, a provincially significant wetland between Pickering and Ajax on the north shore of Lake Ontario, that was threatened under a minister's zoning order to be developed as part of this Durham Live project. I think CBC reported that it was to become an Amazon warehouse.

And a couple of young people really initiated a community movement. A couple of young people really initiated a community movement. They started a phone zap that grew into a shoe protest. And for me, it was so inspiring to see these young people engage on. It's emotional. But to see them engage, you know, with their politicians, with their local politicians, and demand action. And the wetland, at least for now, is saved. And I think that is, we need to take a lesson from young people that if we want to leave for our children and our grandchildren

the same kind of opportunity, the same quality environment that we benefited from, then we need to become active stewards to ensure that those habitats, those wetlands in particular, are protected. We end this documentary with some final words from the wise Thoreau. Another reminder that wetlands are not wastelands, but places where we are restored. My temple is the swamp.

When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable, and to the citizen most dismal, swamp. I seem to have reached a new world, so wild a place, far away from human society. What's the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs if a half-hour's walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty? You were listening to The Marrow of Nature, A Case for Wetlands, by Ideas contributor Moira Donovan. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, to see additional material for this documentary. This program was produced

by Mary Link. Special thanks to Jeff Douglas. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Pat Martin. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas and I'm Nala Ayyad.