Wetlands

 

Wetland

Wetlands seen as “kidneys of the landscape” (Hunt, 2019, p.1) play a crucial role in providing wildlife habitat, controlling erosion, protecting shoreline and conserving and purifying water. It is estimated that more than 30% of the species vulnerable to extinction is closely intertwined with wetlands. However, the amount of wetlands around the world is shrinking due to the excessive human activities. With this problem getting worse, some scientists have been proposing different solutions to protecting wetlands. Randall J. Hunt (2019), for example, suggests that wetland mitigation is not necessarily an effective approach to “minimizing the effect of wetland loss,” (p.1)  but Lee et al. (2019) argue augmentation might be a way to compensate for the gap caused by wetland mitigation. Though Hunt’s criticism against wetland mitigation is plausible, he seems to ignore that fact that augmentation could bridge the gap in his argument. Drawing on the suggestions by Lee et al., this essay aims to problematize a specific idea proposed by Hunt.

In his article, “Do Created Wetlands Replace the Wetlands that are Destroyed?” Hunt (2019) describes what wetland mitigation is and then lists at least four reasons as to why wetland mitigation might not be successful. First and foremost, created wetlands fail to substitute “the lost function resulting from a wetland’s destruction” (Hunt, 2019, p.1). Second, created wetlands are usually recreated in some places “away from where they are needed and/or in areas that are not wetland deficient” (ibid.). Third, “mitigation banking projects” (ibid.) are not as effective as natural wetlands. Last but not least, Hunt argues that “created wetlands do not provide in-kind compensation” (ibid.).

Despite the problems of mitigation mentioned above, Lee et al. (2019) propose a solution to preserving the wetlands in their article “Comparative Hydrology, Water Quality, and Ecology of Selected Natural and Augmented Freshwater Wetlands in West-Central Florida.” They maintain that augmentation could effectively contribute to minimizing the loss of “kidneys of the landscape” (Hunt, 2019, p.1). If the practice of augmentation is implemented/carried out, water might not drain out of the augmented wetlands while flooding is usually more effective in the presence of augmentation. Moreover, this protective measure is reported to protect wetland plants and lessen the invasion of upland vegetations.

Both of the two views have their pros and cons, but Hunt’s (2019) arguments are partially fallacious because he seems to overlook the fact that augmentation could help preserve wetland plants. Recreated wetlands, Hunt (2019) asserts, “do not provide in-kind compensation” (p.1); in other words, people adopting mitigation would tend to substitute “easy-to-create wetland types” (p.1) for “hard-to-create wetland types” (p.1), thereby leading to the worse quality of the created wetlands. Nevertheless, with the aid of augmentation, Lee et al. (2019) suggest “aquatic algae, wetland plants, and freshwater macroinvertebrates” (p.1) are very likely to survive because they are able to be inundated with “ the soil moisture conditions” (p.1). Also, the mortality of wetland vegetations like “cypress tree” (p.1) would be greatly reduced to a certain degree. Therefore, the problem raised by Hunt (2019) might be addressed in the practice of augmentation.

Wetlands are crucial to the balance of nature and ecology. The devastation of the wetlands would probably have a permanently detrimental impact on all species. Many efforts have been made to restore this ecological resource. Hunt (2019) is skeptical about the effectiveness of mitigation, yet his scruples/concern might be eased through the augmentation proposed by Lee et al. (2019).