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Guest Essay

By Margaret Renkl

Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South from Nashville.

Every child I have ever known is drawn to water — to running creeks and meandering rivers, to buzzing ponds and gently lapping lakes and echoing swamps and cool, mossy fens. Even toddlers who find the ocean overwhelmingly huge and alien will merrily splash in a tidal pool, dabbling their dimpled fingers in the water. To children, a puddle is for stomping. A marshy place is for barefooting, testing the ooze and suck of mud, peering through waving grasses at wild eyes peering back at them.

Last week Nashville got its first truly drenching rains in months, and the rain fell on soil already saturated by melting snow and ice. Our rivers swelled. Our creeks roared. Our ditches filled with rain. Temperatures shot up from single digits to 65 degrees, and children who only days earlier were squealing on the snowy hills were squealing in the luscious mud. The whole wild world — parched first by severe drought and then by hard freeze — came up from burrows or descended from trees to drink.

I’ve been thinking of climate change and pooling water not just because of the snow and the rain but also because the United Nations has designated Feb. 2 as World Wetlands Day. And because wetlands in the United States are more imperiled now than they were just a year ago. Too few of us understand how fundamental these damp, spongy places are to the struggling organism we call Earth.

For taxonomical purposes, a wetland is any ecosystem sustained primarily by a body of water, however small or temporary, that regularly saturates the soil or covers it entirely.

In this country alone, wetland ecosystems can take almost uncountable forms — tidal wetlands like salt marshes, mangrove swamps and mud flats; desert wetlands like playas and basins; prairie wetlands like grassland streams and prairie potholes; forest wetlands like swamps and sinkholes and fens and beaver........

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