From Duke to the Everglades to Iraq
Curtis Richardson's Wetland Journey Sheds New Light on One
of Nature's Historically Maligned Assets
By Monte Basgall
In introducing his students to the topic
of wetlands, Curtis
Richardson always brings up George Washington. Richardson
tells them that the nation’s first president was also
“the father of drainage in the United States.”
Washington wanted to remove the Great Dismal Swamp’s
tea colored water to better log its cypress and cedar and
possibly grow crops. “They could not drain it successfully,”
he quickly adds.
Since this nation began, then, wetlands have been targets
for exploitation and objects of frustration. Richardson, in
turn, has seen plenty of both as a Nicholas School professor
of resource ecology who founded and still directs the Duke
University Wetland Center.
According to his figures, more than half of the original
U.S. wetlands have been drained. Many historically saw them
as little more than breeding sites for diseases, sources of
effluvial gases and impediments to commerce and transportation.
In these more environmentally conscious times, however, realizations
are growing that wetlands are valuable assets that nurture
and shelter the nation’s wildlife and fisheries and
cleanse waterways of pollutants.
This new attitude has inspired enough political momentum
to invest billions of dollars attempting to reverse human
impacts on wetlands such as the Florida Everglades. There
are also laws on the books that make dredging or filling them
more difficult, says Richardson, who chairs the Nicholas School’s
Division of Environmental Science and Policy.
Wetlands can be generally described as areas of shallow water
containing distinctive soils and vegetation. Legally, they
need only be wet within one foot of the surface for as little
as 5 percent of the growing season to qualify for protection,
sometimes bewildering those who visit them in dry times.
The very complexity and variety of wetland systems, and the
newness of the science used to study them, keeps Richardson
and his colleagues busy as they tackle projects as near as
the edge of the Duke campus and as far as the storied lowlands
of embattled Iraq.
Richardson, a tall robust man who usually sports a moustache,
first got involved with wetlands in 1972 while on the University
of Michigan’s faculty. Because of his particular expertise,
a colleague asked him to help investigate whether the natural
cleansing properties of wetlands could be used to treat sewage.
“The term ‘wetland’ was hardly in the literature,”
Richardson recalls. “There were no wetland courses at
the time. But having a background in soils and having studied
plant ecology, I started to look at this.”
One of the first U.S. scientific conferences on wetlands
ended up being held at the University of Michigan. While “it
was pretty clear that wetlands had great potential, unfortunately
euphoria took off and many got the idea that we could use
them for cheap wastewater treatment,” he says. “That
turned out to be a fallacy: wetlands cannot take raw sewage
nor do they reduce certain constitutions found in wastewater,
like phosphorus.”
Nevertheless, those early studies revealed that wetlands
could filter out many excess nutrients that can rob water
of the dissolved oxygen that fish and shellfish need for respiration.
Meanwhile, wildlife conservationists began tying wetland drainage
to “massive losses of bird populations,” he adds.
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