Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Another alarming trend in soil

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Laurie Ann Powell <laurie@powellclan.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Another alarming trend in soil
  • Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:13:50 -0500

Something is Killing the Marsh grasses

Paul Harvey mentioned that "marsh grass in the coastal areas is dying" in New England, and I thought that sounded kind of serious. When I googled it, Louisiana came up,too , and several other areas ... It seems like there is not much cross-discussion. But what comes through is that the coast as an eco-system is dying -- as the marsh grass is evidently what holds the whole ecosystem together.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/02ctmarsh.html?ex=1156392000&en=2cfe9839f1bc8e6c&ei=5070

Said this:

Scientists call it sudden wetland dieback, but they are not sure how it started and what they can do to end it.

To be sure, the problem is still relatively small, and it takes an expert to notice it. The marshes at the Neck River looked perfectly serene last week. A family of ospreys had built a nest on a wooden post in the middle of the grass. Seagulls rested on a dock. Birds called to each other — there were at least a half dozen different songs in the air. None sounded like complaints.

Anyway, when I heard that I thought, "this sounds small, but I bet it is much bigger than it seems... "

I found this summary at American Scientist (though I didn't subscribe to the site to read it all).

Abstract:

In North America, salt marshes once lined much of the Atlantic coast. Such a collection of salt-tolerant plants protects the shoreline from storms and filters pollutants from water flowing to the sea. Unfortunately, human activities, such as farming for desirable grasses and development, have destroyed many of the marshes—up to 70 percent of them along some stretches of coastline. Today, imbalances in nature—a foreign strain of reed, enormous flocks of geese and over harvesting of blue crabs—threaten salt marshes from Georgia to the Hudson Bay. Here, Bertness and his colleagues detail salt-marsh research and predict the loss of most Atlantic coast salt marshes, unless society fights back, and soon.

I'm sure there are many things to be concerned about for those of us living on the soil, but the two that strike me are that if any natural system is showing such widespread distress, it could be problems "upstream" - it could be here, too. And second, that if "farming for desirable grasses" would be cited as a potential cause, that has the potential to become a government control issue for land use.

Laurie Ann



  • [Livingontheland] Another alarming trend in soil, Laurie Ann Powell, 08/23/2006

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page