Since Hurricane Katrina swept through, there's a fair chance that Americans know more about wetlands than they did before. Wetlands help control floods, filter toxins and impurities from water, and support migratory birds. If Louisiana's coastal wetlands had remained intact, the devastation from Katrina would have been less severe.
The Houston-Galveston area of the Gulf Coast of Texas, which was hammered by Hurricane Rita three weeks after Katrina, once had a lot of wetlands, too. But few areas of the country have lost so many so fast. The pace has accelerated since a 2001 Supreme Court decision that removed protection from "isolated wetlands" that could be used by migratory waterfowl. The Galveston Bay wetlands are among the most important bird migration pathways in the country.
According to a November 2004 report by the National Wildlife Federation, the drain-fill-and-pave approach of Texas developers and politicians has put at risk 3.3 million acres of coastal-plain wetlands in the Army Corps of Engineers' Galveston district. Since 2003, scientists at the Texas Coastal Watershed Program, an extension of Texas A&M University, have examined hundreds of aerial photographs to document wetlands loss in the Galveston Bay watershed. This 2002 image shows the destruction of a formerly protected wetlands area, outlined in yellow, two miles from Galveston Bay and adjacent to Interstate Highway 45.
||Fuqua Park and Ride lot for cars and buses, built in 1996 by the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Texas.|
At the time these two "isolated wetlands" areas were paved over they were protected under federal law. Texas has no independent regulatory program to protect wetlands.
|Top: Carmax auto dealership, built in 1997. Bottom: Home Depot, built in 1998.|
|This remaining wetlands area, undeveloped at the time this photograph was taken in 2002, now houses a gated community called Alexan Gulf Pointe Apartment Homes. Units in the development include The Seagull, The Pelican, and The Sandpiper, in keeping with a time-honored tradition in the world of real estate that upscale residential areas be named in honor of the natural features (or creatures) that are bulldozed to make way for them.|
-- Josh Harkinson