Wetlands provide many different services, each of which is used by a wide variety of people, even if they do not know it. Communities need wetlands for a number of different reasons. First, they provide flood control, which is vitally important, especially for communities that are in flood plains or anywhere on the eastern and southern shores of the US. Second, they are a vital habitat for many animals, birds and fish. And thirdly, they provide green open space for recreation and quality of life purposes.

Wetlands can store large amounts of water in times of flooding. In fact, they are one of the best ways to plan for flooding. In the 1993 floods in the Mississippi river basin, it is has been estimated that if only half of all the wetlands destroyed in the basin since the first Europeans arrived had been recreated, there would not have been a flood. Flooding is a major problem in the US, occurring throughout the country. Just this year alone there has been major hurricane related flooding in North and South Carolina. Much of this flooding did not occur until humans significantly altered the landscape. Part of that alteration has been the rampant destruction of wetlands. It has been estimated that 26 million acres of wetlands has been destroyed in the Mississippi river basin alone since the first European settlement. That is a huge amount of wetlands that no longer exist to store excess water. There has also been heavy destruction of wetlands in hurricane areas, like Louisiana and Florida. These areas need wetlands to help deal with future flooding. In some places, such as the Everglades in Florida, the government and the state have finally realized that wetlands are a key resource, and they are redesigning the human made impediments to water flow and recreating wetlands in key areas. The bottom line is that people need wetlands to deal with flooding and yet there are still too few in many key areas of the country.

Secondly, people love to fish and hunt. And they love to fish and hunt relatively close to home. This is a good reason why wetlands should be left where they are if at all possible. Much of the federal wetland policy today protects wetlands in the sense that you cannot destroy them unless you build the equivalent amount somewhere else. That somewhere else is usually far from where anybody lives, or at least far from where they were originally. This doesnŐt really solve anything, because you are taking the wetlands away from the people. Plus, in mitigation banking, it can take up to ten years or longer for a mitigation bank to fully get off its feet. But, the developer or farmer got to destroy the wetlands as soon as he bought the permit. Therefore, society often looses the benefit that the wetland provided for years at a time.

Thirdly, wetlands are an excellent way to provide open, green space in communities. There is not nearly enough parks and open green space available in most communities. This is a failure of planning throughout the country. And yet at the same time, wetlands are being destroyed all the time to make way for new developments. Instead of destroying wetlands, and then rebuilding them somewhere else, exsisting wetlands should be worked into the development in question, or turned into part of a larger park. Parks can be designed to work wetlands into the park plan by making them into open green space. In this way you save the original wetland and work it into something that will benefit the community. Wetlands can easily be worked into the design of new housing developments. People like subdivisions that have open space designed into the development plan, and wetlands can serve that purpose. Developers need to stop looking at wetlands as something that is in the way of development, and instead look at wetlands as something that enhances the value of the property.