Sustaining the Wetlands

Cassandra Wilson
September 20, 2018


Sustaining the Wetlands

For many years,  wetlands have protected America from severe floods.  The wetlands in Louisiana are important to America because they help protect the land, people and businesses from storms and flooding. The moist land and plants of the wetlands work as a sponge to absorb storm water, this is beneficial because the more water that gets absorbed in the wetlands, the less water will cause flooding in urban areas and in homes and businesses. Wetlands also work as a natural barrier that decreases the intensity of a storm, so that if it moves further inland, it will not be as strong, and it will not cause as much damage as it would if there were no wetlands.


Canals created by humans were made so that boats could travel easy to and from the Gulf of Mexico. Since the Gulf of Mexico is salt water and the wetlands are fresh water, and the canals cause the two types of waters to mix, many plants and animals in the wetlands are harmed or killed. Also, climate change is causing the temperatures and sea levels to rise, meaning that even more salt water from the sea will find its’ way into the wetlands, drowning them out. Humans are also draining out wetlands to turn them into places to grow crops, causing even more loss of wetlands.


Some solutions to sustain the wetlands would be to stop building additional canals in the swamps to reduce the flow of salt water into the fresh water, and to fill in some of the existing canals by planting non-invasive wetland plants to restore the wildlife there.  As for climate change, using natural energy sources such as windmills and solar panels will help reduce emissions in the air that will cause the sea levels to rise. And as for the swamp land being used for agriculture, a solution would be to move these farmlands to an ecosystem less at risk, and abandon the land to let it once again absorb water and function as nature intended it to be.




Works Cited:

http://www.americaswetlandresources.com/background_facts/detailedstory/causes.html

Comments

Mr. Roddy said…
This is a very important topic! What would be the challenges to moving people off of their property if they live in wetlands areas?
September 26, 2018 at 2:28 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Emily Routbort Mr. Roddy GPHC R 20 September 2018 Social Sustainability Addressing social sustainability is a challenge for many places in the world. Social sustainability works to reduce factors that negatively affect human social well being (p. 61 in the reading). Some examples of social sustainability issues are corruption, unfit healthcare and education, disempowerment of women, and social inequality. These problems should be dealt with after fulfilling basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and rest. From another standpoint, you might find to achieve economic and environmental sustainability, you must achieve social sustainability before other proceeding to solve economic and environmental issues. My reasoning for this is because you should have a strong established base that you can work off of (where everyone is working in harmony) so we can then proceed to work on other issues. In most of the world though, this is not the case (considering that you place s...
Read more

Zoey Weinstein Sustainability Blog

Zoey Weinstein Mr. Roddy Global Politics 9/19/2018 Sustainability Blog One of the major issues concerning women in America and all over the world today and for the past 88 years is the wage gap or gender pay gap. On average, nationally, women earn approximately 78 cents to the man’s dollar. The wage gap impacts women different ethnic backgrounds even more. According to the huffington post, Latina women earn 56% of what a white man makes and black women earn 64%. The first and most impactful thing the United States needs to do is pass equal pay legislation in all 50 states. Many states have enforced the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), an amendment that ensures that nobody faces discrimination based in their sex, especially in the workplace. This past May, Illinois became the 37th state to ratify this amendment. The first clause of the ERA is “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” This amendm...
Read more

Tackling Environmental Sustainability in my Imagined Country

Image
As the president of any given nation focusing on environmental sustainability, my main concerns would be the conservation of biodiversity, the effects of Climate Change, and the reduction of fossil fuels. One way of increasing the biodiversity in many countries, with the exception of areas whose climate could not support heavy vegetation, is through the commission and propagation of food forests. A food forest as defined by the Beacon Food Forest Permaculture Project is “a gardening technique or land management system, which mimics a woodland ecosystem by substituting edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals. Fruit and nut trees make up the upper level, while berry shrubs, edible perennials and annuals make up the lower levels ( “Beacon Food Forest Permaculture Project” ).” This can also be seen in the diagrams below: Through this model of creating functional green spaces, and or partially replacing the nations current agricultural systems with this method of cultiv...
Read more