" The staff had done a good deal of geographic work. The best stands of forest - and there are some magnificent individual trees as well as forests - had been plotted, and the areas providing views to the community had been exploited or preserved for common use and had been mapped (about 40% of Columbia is green space). The streams had been studied as to their usual and unusual flow patterns so that areas safe from flooding were known. The function of the streams in providing barriers within the area had been looked into and their possible function in supplying artificial lakes for recreation (Lake Kittaquandi, Wilde Lake and Elkhorn). Their steep banks in some areas precluded building economically on them and made them obvious candidates for relatively uncultivated, natural areas not to "be lightly interfered with."
Many of our wetlands are traversed by elevated bridges to less the environmental impact on the areas.
And of course the birds and ducks
So how does the loss of wetlands affect humans directly? According to a recent article I read,
"wetlands offer one of the best natural protections against flooding
since they act as giant pads that soak up the excess rain and surface
water. Because of the natural topography of wetlands, this absorbed
water is evenly distributed over a large expanse and is almost
immediately sucked into the ground where it feeds wetland plants that
are specially suited to being either completely or partially submerged.
In addition to this, the height of the ground is leveled and erosion is
either halted or slowed. This action is even more important to have near
large cities because they absorb the high degree of runoff. It is
equally useful in agricultural areas where drainage is nearly always a
problem which is sometimes even further compounded by the dredging
operations that were meant to assist with the problem. Wetlands are also
vital near large bodies of water as they help minimize the amount of
erosion and take in the energy of waves as well as change the currents
near rivers or fast-moving streams. Aside from these more geographical
benefits to wetlands, they also influence the quality of drinking water
supplies since they absorb many contaminants that find their way into
groundwater."
Additionally the loss of wetlands can impact the strength of storms hitting our coastal regions. This was pointed out in Environmental Health Perspectives,
"Hurricane
Katrina’s disastrous flooding of the Gulf Coast confirmed three decades
of warnings by scientists. Most of New Orleans is below sea level, and
South Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, which once helped buffer the city
from giant storms, have been disappearing at a spectacularly swift pace.
Now some researchers are calling for restoration of wetlands and
barrier islands to help protect New Orleans the next time a hurricane
strikes. An average of 34 square miles of South
Louisiana land, mostly marsh, has disappeared each year for the past
five decades, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). As much as
80% of the nation’s coastal wetland loss in this time occurred in
Louisiana. From 1932 to 2000, the state lost 1,900 square miles of land
to the Gulf of Mexico.
By 2050, if nothing is done to
stop this process, the state could lose another 700 square miles, and
one-third of 1930s coastal Louisiana will have vanished. Importantly,
New Orleans and surrounding areas will become ever more vulnerable to
future storms. “New Orleans can’t be restored unless we also address
coastal and wetland restoration too,” says Craig E. Colten, a geographer
at Louisiana State University (LSU)."
P.S.
At 6 p.m. tonight on Maryland Public Television 2 is the show that I had worked on with others about foster care stories. Verizon channel 480
P.S.1
The west coast got to see this solar eclipse which is shown in the photo above taken from the International Space Station.
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