Water, Wetlands and Life

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Peace of Wild Things -- Wendell Berry

Since the groundhogs stole the show yesterday, as they always do on February 2nd,  we may have missed that it was also the UNESCO World Wetlands Day. Ruth and I are paddlers, both in kayaks and canoe, and I love the variety of living things in marshes and wetlands. Living in Belleville we are blessed to have ready access to wetlands, large and small,and we are rarely disappointed when it comes to spotting everything from turtles, to herons, to ospreys, beavers and otters. One day I was on the marsh boardwalk in a local conservation area when several deer splashed through the cattails. 

Wetlands are essential for biodiversity, essentially arks for creatures great and small, yet there are under threat, world-wide, because humans choose to drain them rather than letting them flourish. The Holland Marsh in Ontario in now rich agricultural land but it was once a huge wetland, visited by environmental saint, John Muir in the 19th century.  

Most of what became an industrial waterfront in Toronto was once wetlands and the city has suffered because wetlands are protection against flooding and natural filters of toxins They are essential to clean water.. There is an extensive wetland rehabilitation project underway in TO which got underway under a previous administration. 

So, what is the current provincial government doing? Undermining Conservation Authorities which steward wetlands and selling unique habitats to industrial developers. Members of the Greenbelt Council have resigned because of this thoughtless and destructive trajectory.

We can all be vigilant in our responses to what are foolish decisions by Premier Ford's anti-environmental government. He seems incapable of seeing the bigger picture, yet we can't allow the despair which sometimes grows within us to quench our hope. 

We can also enjoy the beauty of wetlands, whether during a walk along a shore or a paddle. Every dragonfly and red-winged blackbird we see can be regarded as a prayer for Creation. It will be a couple of months still before the chorus of frogs returns to the marshes, but in the meantime we'll "walk on water" and dream.