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"Green ol' boys: Wetlands' decline breeds environmentalists"
Savannah Morning News,
Thursday, October 24, 2002
By Russ Bynum
The Associated Press
NAHUNTA -- James Holland stops walking at the "No
Trespassing" sign beside Highway 303, overlooking neat rows of
pines planted in a dry floodplain that once was as swampy as his
Southern drawl.
Holland is careful not to cross the property line onto the manmade
pine forest -- he was jailed for trespassing a few months ago. He
stares at his dusty loafers and curses through toothless gums.
"This is what cost me my way of living," Holland mutters.
"It got my pocketbook. It put me out of business."
For most of the last 20 years, Holland didn't much care that thousands
of acres of forested wetlands in this section of coastal Georgia,
north of the Okefenokee Swamp, were being cleared of cypresses, tupelo
gums and other hardwoods and replanted with more profitable pines.
His attention was focused on the Satilla River, where the salty
estuaries brimmed with the blue crab that allowed Holland to make a
comfortable living.
But in the late 1990s, Holland's crab catch started to dry up -- it
took three days to bring in what once was a day's catch. Holland
started paying attention to how those drainage ditches and uprooted
hardwoods might harm the river he relied on for a paycheck.
"I can no longer say it's not all connected, because it is,"
he says, turning toward the river. "I can't say what goes on here
doesn't affect what happened to me down yonder."
From the Mississippi Delta to the Okefenokee Swamp to the coastal
plains of the Carolinas, the forested wetlands of the South have been
steadily dying out since the nation's colonial beginnings.
Researchers estimate that, by 1980, the United States had lost half of
its wetlands in two centuries. Most were drained, cleared and filled
in so farmers could plant crops. In recent decades, urban development
and timber harvesting also took a large toll.
Of the nation's remaining 50.7 million acres of forested wetlands, 32
million acres are located in the South. Their importance is more than
just providing habitat for animals and plants.
They function as natural kidneys for the region's water supply. They
regulate flooding by trapping and slowly releasing water that flows to
connected rivers and streams. In the process, they filter out
pollutants, sediments and other impurities.
"Much of the drinking water we get here in the Southeast comes
from rivers," says William Ainsely of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency in Atlanta. "These wetlands are buffers to our
rivers. If you destroy the buffer, you make our water supplies much
more vulnerable."
Though federal and state laws passed since the 1970s have dramatically
slowed the destruction of wetlands, and promoted their restoration,
the decline continues.
About 3.5 million acres of Southern wetlands were clearcut or
otherwise altered from 1986 to 1997, according to the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service. Of those, 350,000 acres were lost altogether.
The agency's National Wetlands Inventory pins the wetland loss almost
equally on urban development, agriculture and commercial logging.
But loggers and timber companies say they've gotten a bad rap, saying
they know how to convert wetlands to pineland without disrupting their
ability to hold and filter water.
"We're an easy target. What we do doesn't look pretty," says
Joe Allen, executive director of the Southeastern Wood Producers
Association and a former logging contractor in southeast Georgia.
"We make our living off this land. Why would I want to kill the
goose that laid the golden egg?"
Among those who disagree are the South's "Bubba
environmentalists" -- the fishermen, hunters and rural folks who
say they feel the impact firsthand.
They're people like James Holland -- a high-school dropout, ex-Marine
and now ex-crabber who left his business to become the Altamaha
Riverkeeper in 1999.
Then there's Gean Seay, a court reporter from Winnabow, N.C., whose
home lies on the edge of the 140-square-mile Green Swamp, much of
which was drained in the 1920s for farming. Now it's largely a pine
plantation, with International Paper owning 180,000 acres.
Seay has battled the company since 1999, when Hurricane Floyd sent a
23-foot wall of water crashing through Seay's neighborhood, wiping out
eight homes.
If the swamp was functioning properly as a wetland, it would have
trapped much of the water and controlled the flood, Seay says.
"It was an absolutely horrible storm, and we keep telling
everybody it'll happen again," Seay says. "Water hits that
land and its like pouring it through a colander. We've lost the flood
protection."
Sharon Haines, forest policy manager for International Paper, the
nation's largest private landowner, says Seay's accusation "falls
into the category of myths that have nothing to do with science."
"There is absolutely no scientific data to say anything would
have flooded any less if a section of swamp had not been in pine
plantation," Haines says.
In the Mississippi Delta, real estate broker Jack Branning had begun
restoring 3,500 acres of wetlands himself, building 3-foot earthen
dams with a rice plow on land that had been cleared for soybean crops.
Branning figured restoring the land to its murky origins would bring
back game fowl. Then he found out the government would do most of the
work -- and pay him $500 an acre.
Branning, 70, enrolled his land in the Wetland Reserve Program,
approved by Congress
in 1990. In exchange for a government check, landowners agree not to
farm or develop their property once it's restored. In Mississippi
alone, 103,000 acres have been enrolled since the program began.
"I'm not a tree-hugger," Branning says. "The program
just fit the land like a hand in a glove."
James Holland may blame the timber industry's harvesting of wetlands
for the loss of his crabbing business, but he's had a hard time
convincing others.
"I like a good fight. I ain't never been whipped," Holland
says. "This one may whip me. Forestry may whip me."
Timber companies say there's no scientific proof -- which Holland
concedes. Federal and state regulators say many of the logging sites
he reports have been harvested for decades, and therefore fall under
special exemptions for forestry written into federal law.
Holland has had a few successes, though.
In 2000, a group of hunters alerted Holland and fellow Bubba and
seafood merchant Robert DeWitt to a logging site on International
Paper swampland where someone had stuffed a hollow tupelo gum with oil
filters, soda cans and other trash. Logging equipment had also been
left at the site.
The hunters, who pay the company $8,600 a year to hunt on its
property, showed Holland and Dewitt -- who snapped photographs and
reported the pollution to the Army Corps of Engineers.
International Paper ended up firing the contractors for violating the
law and company policy.
"His instinct's good," says Mitch King, an assistant
Southeast director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who has
known Holland for years. "He has the ability to ask questions and
sort of poke around."
Still, many of the complaints Holland files come to nothing.
The laws regulating wetland can be as hazy as a misty swamp. The
Federal Clean Water Act of 1972 prohibits drying out a wetland. But
changes made in 1976 give timber companies and farmers special
exemptions.
Private landowners, who control the vast majority of the nation's
wetlands, can legally conduct harvesting, plowing and minor ditching
on wetlands. Large drainage ditches that predate the law can be
maintained.
Officials agree most of the logging in coastal Georgia wetlands is
legal. But they disagree on whether it could be affecting crabs and
other aquatic species.
"I asked him, 'James, your crab count is down -- how do I know
you're not overfishing the resource?' " said Frank Green,
wetlands coordinator for the Georgia Forestry Commission. "You
need to look at your own glass house first."
But King of the Fish and Wildlife Service says Holland's complaints
make sense.
"There has been a lot of real minor drainage here and there all
through the system," King says. "It's logging interests,
basically, trying to get better production in their system"
"That has a real impact down there on the crabbing industry where
the salinity is right on the edge."
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