Waterlogged Wealth: Why waste the world's wet places? by Edward Maltby PDF

do not drain the swamp!

Man's conventional reaction to swamps, marshes and lavatories has been to empty them.

But wetlands are usually not wastelands. Coastal marshes are one of the world's most efficient ecosystems. They make many advertisement fisheries attainable and defend coasts from floods and hurricane surges. Wetlands are pollutants filters, water reservoirs. they're one of the final wild locations in the world, delivering houses to endangered vegetation, birds and animals.

Attitudes to wetlands are altering, yet no longer speedy adequate. As scientists are documenting the wealth in rainy locations, governments and builders are draining them, damming them, logging them and construction inn lodges the place ', they as soon as have been. Destruction generally is a terrible trade-off: well-managed wetlands in Louisiana are generating fortunes in seafood and timber.

Waterlogged wealth examines the worth of swamps and marshes, in addition to the threats opposed to them. In doing so it takes the reader to a couple of the world's such a lot strange landscapes: the 'inland delta' of the Niger River in drought-stricken Mali; the wildlife-rich Okavango swamps of Botswana; the waterlogged Sunderban forests of India and Bangladesh, the place tigers devour fish and crabs. Civilisation started round wetlands; cutting-edge civilisation has sturdy cause to depart them rainy and wild.

Dr Edward Maltby is a lecturer in geography on the collage of Exeter(UK). He has performed large learn on wetlands either within the North (UK, US, Canada) and the South (Fiji, Jamaica, India and the Falklands/Malvinas Islands). he's at the IUCN Wetland Programme Advisory Committee.

Originally released in 1986