Agricultural marsh draining caused 90 percent loss of U.S. wetlands

Evidence

Not surprisingly, hunger for this productive land precipitated a 90 percent loss of the wetlands—as well as the Native people who depended upon them. Cattails are also soil builders. All those leaves and rhizomes return to the sediments when the cattails die back. What hasn’t been eaten lies beneath the water, only partially decomposing in the anaerobic waters, building up peat. It is rich in nutrients and has the water-holding capacity of a sponge, making it ideal for truck crops. Decried as “wastelands,” marsh draining for agriculture was carried out on a huge scale. So-called “muck farms” plow under the black soil of drained marshes, and a landscape that once supported some of the world’s highest biodiversity now supports a single crop. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 833

Categorization

• XREF: Hinge to Legal Systems land-rights course: draining ‘wastelands’ mirrors settler logic of land-as-property imposing narrow ideas of good, which ch20 framed for restoration. — connects to: Drained marshland carries its whole lost community to extinction unnoted — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 573; Agricultural drainage destroyed half of America’s original wetlands — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 166; Fen drainage depleted the wildlife that once fed local inhabitants — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 294
• ADDENDUM: Supports ‘On Sacrifice’ article thread of settler extraction logic, and the wetlands-loss mechanism resonates with the pond eutrophication in ch19-21 ecological care teaching.
• DEFINE: Introduces the settler label ‘wasteland’ as loaded term, tied to ch52’s immigrant-extraction mindset.