Ode to a swamp
Recommended reading is an interview by Darksyde (at Daily Kos) with Michael Grunwald, regarding the Florida Everglades (hat tip Chris Mooney of course, who has additional comments on Grunwald’s book here). But what I most enjoyed was Darksydes introduction, where he describes the Everglades as “the only place on earth where salt-water crocodiles live side by side with fresh-water alligators.” I’m fascinated by swamps because they bring attention to those things we miss when we compartmentalize ecosystems or anything else into their individual components like land and water, or freshwater and marine systems, or even humans and nature, or ecology and economics…. What we miss are the relationships between them, and the diversity that arises just because of this – which is suppose to be the whole point of ecology, and why, for example, when writing material for a chapter of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, on responses to freshwater degradation, I had a hard time staying within the confines of my chapter and was told to “think inside the box,” which nearly drove me to despair.
I also once wrote a series of descriptions of mangrove ecoregions for the World Wildlife Fund. The task probably came to me, as a consultant, because their staff was compartmentalized into those working on terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecoregions. Although marine, mangroves depend on the regular flows of freshwater and sediment, and although they don’t rank very high for biodiversity, they have many visitors from diverse nearby areas who come there to feed, including turtles who dwell in nearby seagrass beds, migratory birds, and fish from nearby coral reefs. Without mangroves, some coral reefs would not even exist because they would be smothered by the sediment trapped by the mangroves. Closer to home, in the Chesapeake Bay, is the Terrapin turtle (better known as the mascot of my alma mater), which uses all of the different habitats of the Bay in different stages of its lifecycle – so to save the Terrapin, we have to save the whole Bay, beaches as well as underwater grasses, and the balance of fresh and saline waters. My next project may be to learn to construct rain gardens to catch stormwater runoff in places like “Muddy Spring.” Consider also, that 70-80% of watershed areas are in these upstream hillslope areas that are dominated by extreme and randomly timed storm events. The last major modificaton to the shape of the stream behind my house was made a few years ago by hurricane Isabel, and I expect that the next hurricane that comes this way will mobilize a big pile of dirt up the street. Then consider that a case heard by the Supreme Court on February 21st will decide whether any of this will continue to come under the purview of the Clean Water Act. Ironic, since filtration through the landscape is how we get clean water without building expensive filtration plants – as New York City has recognized. For now, the city has been able to avoid the expense of a filtration plant by investing a much lower amount in financing upstream conservation activities.
It is no coincidence that living things are disrpoportionately concentrated along riverbanks and nearshore areas where they have access to the best of both worlds. I also once studied “ecological economics” and was always asked, “but are you an economist or an ecologist” to which I could only reply “yes.” I’m much happier calling myself a geographer, but, when I switched programs, I also had to leave behind plans I had for doing research in the world’s biggest swamp, i.e., the Pantanal – a seasonally flooded place that straddles the borders of 3 countries (Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay) and 4 major South American ecosystems that contribute to its vegetational composition – the Amazon tropical rainforest, the cerrado or scrub forests of central Brazil, the chaco – or semi-arid scrub forests, and the sub-tropical Atlantic humid forest. Within this, are 10 ecological subregions, depending on elevation and water levels. The difference between the first and the second picture below, taken at the beginning of the rainy season in 1995, is probably less than a foot in elevation, and less than a few kilometers of distance. At the bottom are pictures of the Tuiuiu – a bird that has come to symbolize the Pantanal and that is only the most well known of the 650 species of birds that can be found there, along with 90 species of mammals (including humans) and 50 species of reptiles, who feed on the 250 species of fish and other things that can also be found there – the fish make for easy pickings when the yearly floodwaters recede. The second picture is also what the area in the first might look like, if water levels dropped as a result of climate change, and/or of expanding the waterway for navigation – which would bring industralization along with it. Scientists in the region often point to the restoration of the Florida Everglades , and its cost, as a lesson to be learned from, and to make a case why they really shouldn’t be chaneling and straightening the upper Paraguay river for a waterway.
Asked “Why is the Everglades so important?” Grunwald says:
The Everglades is the ultimate test of sustainable development, of man’s ability to live in harmony with nature. It’s always been at the cutting edge of conservation–first when a hunting ban prevented the extinction of Everglades wading birds, then when Everglades National Park was the first park established for biology rather than scenery, then when an Everglades pollution lawsuit led to the largest nutrient cleanup in history, and now with the largest restoration project in history. Everglades restoration is already a national blueprint for multi-billion-dollar efforts to revive ailing ecosystems like the Chesapeake Bay, the Great Lakes, and Louisiana’s vanishing coastal marshes. It’s becoming a model for the world; the Corps is helping Iraqis try to restore the “Garden of Eden” marshes destroyed by Saddam Hussein. But it’s not clear whether the Corps knows what it’s doing. After all, it’s not a Corps of Biologists. And if man can’t figure out a way to revive the Everglades–the world’s most beloved and most studied wetland, in a region with plenty of rain and plenty of money–it’s hard to imagine which ecosystem he’s going to be able to revive.
I might add that it also challenges the way we think, which needs to change before we can act effectively to restore the Everglades or anyplace else. This is a topic I will probably be coming back to over the next few months, as I prepare for a panel I was invited to participate in in May, which will revisit the work of Gregory Bateson. One of Bateson’s great frustrations was that there was “no conventional way of explaining or even describing the phenomena of biological organization and human interaction,” and that he was unable to convey concepts of evolution in light of cybernetics and information theory for lack of a base of common understanding. This is what led him to develop a set of principles for a new as yet unnamed science, which to him were obvious and self-evident, and “that every schoolboy should know”. These seemingly elementary ideas became epistemological principles regarding how we can know or learn anything, which merged with his ideas about evolution and “the wider knowing that holds together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human communities.”
References after the jump
Bateson, G., Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bantam Books, New York, 1979.
Kawakami de Resende E., and Tognetti, S.S. (2002) Ecological and Economic Context of the Proposed Paraguay-Paraná Hidrovia and Implications for Decision-Making. Abaza, H. and Baranzini, A. eds. Implementing Sustainable Development: Integrated Assessment and Participatory Decision-Making Processes. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham UK. [prepublication version here]
For more information about current threats to the Pantanal, see Rios Vivos
