Taking Care of Nature so Nature Can Take Care of Us

Guest column by Mary Jean Huston, State Director

MADISON, Wis. — June 30, 2008 — As the floodwaters in Wisconsin recede and families facing flooded homes, businesses and communities begin to clean up and rebuild their lives, some are asking why this happened and what, if anything, we can do to keep it from happening again.

Flooding is a natural part of a river’s annual cycle and has historically provided many benefits to both wildlife and human communities. In the past, however, when large rain events occurred and rivers flooded, the water poured onto streamside wetlands, bottomland forests and grasslands where it would seep into the ground and help recharge the groundwater supply or be slowly released into creeks and rivers.

But over time, here in Wisconsin and around the world, we’ve altered the natural flow of our rivers. We’ve built dams to generate power, store water and improve navigation. We’ve constructed levees to access rich floodplains for agriculture and industry and built our towns nearby to take advantage of the rivers for transportation, sanitation and recreation.

Today when large rain events occur, the water drains rapidly from the land, rushing downstream and pouring over the rivers’ banks, breaching levees and inundating our farm fields, our homes and our lives.

In the coming days, as we begin to look for solutions to what is becoming a more frequent occurrence, a good place to start may be nature itself.

Our native ecosystems provide many services each and every day that we take for granted. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and clean our air. Wetlands absorb and store rainwater and floodwater. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, an acre of healthy wetland can store up to 1.5 million gallons of floodwater.

At one time, more than 10 million acres of wetlands existed in Wisconsin. Today more than half of them are gone, having been converted to other uses. Those that remain are largely found in the northern third of the state. Even fewer of our native grasslands remain—less than one percent.

Protecting our remaining wetlands, grasslands and forests and restoring others will not stop our rivers from flooding. But it will definitely help reduce the catastrophic impacts on human communities living along those rivers.

We all have a role to play in taking care of nature so that nature can take care of us. Townships, counties and other municipalities working on their comprehensive land use plans can choose to make wetland and grassland protection a priority. Landowners can access government funding programs like the Conservation Reserve Program to keep marginal agricultural land planted in grass and the Wetlands Reserve Program to restore wetlands on their property.

We can all continue to support a strong Wisconsin Stewardship Fund program so that government, land trusts and communities can continue to protect the wetlands, grasslands and forests that provide so many services like flood control that we all depend on.

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. In Wisconsin, the Conservancy has helped conserve more than 140,000 acres since 1960. The Conservancy has more than 21,000 members in Wisconsin and offices in Madison, Baraboo, East Troy, Minocqua and Sturgeon Bay. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at nature.org/wisconsin.