Sorting the Swamp Things: Wet and Political Ones

Great Swamp Links

National Geographic swamp article
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Swamps in politics
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Short film about draining a swamp Sometimes it's good.

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Whirlpool Tour of Applied Swamp Wisdom

1) "Was there ever a good park or a bad swamp?" They need management. Swamps are a kind of wetlands, and those cover a proportion of Earth's land area that is comparable of the share of federal employees as a percentage of all workers in the United States. There is much diversity in some swamps, and not so much in other swamps.

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2) Swamps occur where water pools because it doesn't roll down a slope. How is this like a political swamp?

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3) Draining swamps helped create ancient Rome, Chicago, St. Petersburg, & posh areas near San Francisco.

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4) Federal employees, like swamp residents, are sometimes under-appreciated. Still, we should appreciate there truly can be scary times in a swamp! It's not always the visitor's fault!

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5) "The Fertile Crescent," a cradle of civilization, was built from the swamp between the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers.

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6) Factoids quoted from a Wikipedia article about wetlands:

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"(Wetlands) have mitigation effects through their ability to sink carbon, converting a greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide) to solid plant material through the process of photosynthesis, and through their ability to store and regulate water.[63]

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Wetlands store approximately 44.6 million tonnes of carbon per year globally.[64]

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In salt marshes and mangrove swamps in particular, the average carbon sequestration rate is 210 g CO2 m−2 y−1 . . .

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However, depending on their characteristics, some wetlands are a significant source of methane emissions and some are also emitters of nitrous oxide[67][68] which is a greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 300 times that of carbon dioxide and is the dominant ozone-depleting substance emitted in the 21st century.

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[69] Excess nutrients mainly from anthropogenic sources have been shown to significantly increase the N2O fluxes from wetland soils through denitrification and nitrification processes (see table below).[70][67][71]

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A study in the intertidal region of a New England salt marsh showed that excess levels of nutrients might increase N2O emissions rather than sequester them.[70]"

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