Wetlands are also part of the great river systems that flow from mountain peaks to the oceans. In the modern world, we too often think of rivers as water conduits cut off from the surrounding land. But natural rivers meander and divide, stop off in lakes and marshes, form deltas and spread across verdant floodplains. Most rivers retain at least some of these features. Rivers are wetlands in their own right.
Canada’s mighty River Mackenzie connects no fewer than three large deltas that punctuate its path to the Arctic Ocean, and a huge floodplain known as the Mackenzie Lowlands. In Asia, the Ganges surges from glacial lakes in the Himalayas, through the swamps and flooded grasslands of the Terai and its wide floodplain – one of the most densely populated regions in the world – to the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove swamp. The upper reaches of the River Paraguay in South America pass through the Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, before flowing through others almost as large to the Paraná Delta. In Central Europe, the Danube passes through wetlands left undisturbed by the Cold War on its journey to its own delta, Europe’s largest, and the Black Sea.
Wetlands have few fixed boundaries. They change as the water comes and goes. So global estimates of their total extent vary widely. But at any one time, they certainly exceed the size of the United States or China. In the recent past, these watery commons have been Cinderella ecosystems, shunned or forgotten. In European folklore and literature, swamps, mires, bogs and moors have been places to be feared, where monsters roam and diseases lurk. ‘As you value your life or your reason, keep away from the moor,’ said Sir Charles Baskerville in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. In British criminal history, few episodes loom as large as the 1960s child slayings known as the ‘Moors murders’, because of the children’s bleak final burial ground.
No wonder that we have long sought to banish wetlands from our landscapes. ‘Drain the swamp’ is an old cry. Ever since the Dutch began installing windmills to pump out the boggy places where the Rhine met the North Sea, engineers have been on the case. During the twentieth century, around two-thirds of all the world’s wetlands – swamps, bogs, river banks, lakes, mires, billabongs, oases, deltas, mangroves, lagoons, ponds, mudflats, fens, floodplains and the rest – were drained, dammed and dyked to death. They are still disappearing three times faster than rainforests, but with far less protest.5
In their places are cities, infrastructure and farmland – all released from the menace of flooding. Or so it is claimed. For the protection is often illusory. We now increasingly realize that wetlands prevent more floods than they cause. And rather than being badlands, they are a good thing, nourishing landscapes and maintaining river systems. Just as the jungles of past nightmares are now rainforests to be cherished, so the watery wastes are being reimagined as places teeming with natural wealth, vital to biodiversity and human welfare, and helping to resist climate change. As the first President Bush declared as long ago as 1989, ‘It’s time to stand the history of wetlands destruction on its head; from this year forward, anyone who tries to drain the swamp is going to be up to his ears in alligators.’6
Our new-found appreciation of wetlands is tapping into old roots. In much of the world, wetlands have always been important cultural beacons. Many are sacred places. Lake Loktak in north-east India is the spiritual home of the Meitei people.7 The Wapichan in Guyana chart their ancestry in their flooded grasslands. For Christians, the founding story of humanity begins in the Garden of Eden, widely regarded as the Mesopotamian Marshes of modern-day Iraq. And even where that religious association is lost, we have always found beauty in their open spaces: whether the Lake District in England, southern Africa’s Okavango Delta, India’s Kerala Backwaters, Peru’s Lake Titicaca or the Florida Everglades.
But the wealth of wetlands remains, literally and metaphorically, hard to grasp. They could yet slip through our fingers. The fluid, unfenced and often unowned attributes of wetlands are difficult to reconcile with a modern world that values certainty in nature more than variability, where floods are seen primarily as destructive, and where private property is the universal currency. Despairing of exploiting the moving feast, our first instinct too often remains to enclose, privatize, and tame; to dam, drain, dyke, dredge, canalize, or concrete them over.
This is madness. As one assessment by a collaboration of international scientists concluded, ‘our relentless conversion and degradation of remaining natural habitats – including wetlands – is eroding overall human welfare for short-term private gain’.8 It is simply a myth to imagine that a degraded environment is the inevitable price of development. Quite the contrary. In the Anthropocene, we need wetlands and the wealth they provide at least as much as we need rainforests or healthy oceans.
So, besides charting the losses and exposing the continuing threats that wetlands face in the twenty-first century, the central purpose of this book is to explore and celebrate ways that the world’s wetlands can and must be secured and restored, for a healthy planet and for healthy and well-fed humans. The stories told here are at least as much about wetlanders as wetlands.
Many conservationists would like to keep wetlands for nature alone. Especially for their birdlife, which happily also commands high value among tourists. In places, that remains possible. But wetlands are often too important to the people that live in and beside them to be set aside for nature alone. They provide sustenance for millions, and refuges and security for many poor and marginalized communities. They maintain river systems on which billions, often far downstream, depend. Moreover, as shared and commonly owned resources, their protection and restoration can sometimes help nurture peace – between communities and even between nations, such as in the Balkans, as we shall see.
The challenge today is to recognize the vast natural capital tied up in wetlands, and to access that capital by reinventing wetlands for the modern world, with new systems of governance, new economic roles, new crop regimes, and, if necessary, new hydrology. It means managing rivers and lakes to restore natural flows and reconnect them with their floodplains. In many places, it also means taking advantage of entirely artificial and accidental wetlands that have sprung up across the landscape, and to recognize that urban wetlands are no longer an oxymoron.
Wisely used, wetlands help development and lift people out of poverty. Indeed, this can be the key to their conservation. For if we don’t value wetlands, if they don’t contribute to the local economy and the livelihoods of their inhabitants, then they will be forsaken and lost.
Of course, a commitment to ‘wise use’ raises as many questions as it answers. Does it mean allowing in a few fishers and reed cutters? Or how about cattle herders? And if them, then why not farmers and charcoal burners? Should the arbiters of what is meant by wise use be economists, weighing farm profits against a dollar value attached to ecosystem services? Or ecologists, who may have a very different way of measuring wetland wealth? Or how about the wetland residents themselves, and the millions who can benefit from silt supplies and flood protection all the way to the ocean? No answer will fit all circumstances, but many people will conclude from the examples in this book that sustainable wetland use will only be achieved when those who live in and around them, and depend on their resources, have the final say.
What is certainly true is that if we want water for all we must take care of the wetlands that are the sources of most of our water, and rediscover ways to capture and store water in our landscapes. If we want safe coastlines, we need to revive the deltas and lagoons, mangrove swamps, and salt marshes that are nature’s flood defences. If we want to reverse land degradation, restore natural capital and improve the lives of wetland inhabitants, then we need to block up drains, tear down dykes, and guarantee that free-flowing rivers can deliver their life-giving flood pulses. Wetlands matter.
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