The United States of Vanished Wetlands

Abstract

Before he became a revolutionary general and the nation’s first president, George Washington was a destroyer of wetlands. In 1763, he surveyed the edges of a million-acre expanse of wet forest that lay along the Virginia–North Carolina state line. He described the Great Dismal Swamp as a “glorious paradise” full of wildfowl and game. Still, he seemed to have no qualms about dismantling Eden. In 1764 he applied with five partners for a charter to create a business called “Adventurers for draining the great Dismal Swamp.” Their goal was to chop down and sell the timber from majestic cypress and cedar trees, then to plow the land for crops. The brutal work of digging drainage ditches and canals was done by slaves. By the time of the Revolutionary War, the Adventurers Company was producing 8 million shingles a year for sale—valuable slivers of wood cut from the swamp’s enormous bald cypress trees. There was profit in undoing wetlands. Draining a wetland also seemed to make a place healthier. People who colonized swampy land were plagued by a dreadful illness, one that often killed, and left survivors with recurring bouts of a bonerattling fever. Malaria—the name itself means “bad air”—was believed to be triggered by poisonous vapors rising from still waters. The drainage and destruction of wetlands was an unwritten founding principle of the US. The pattern began with some of the earliest European settlers. Well before the colonies won their independence, the loss of wetlands had led to pollution that changed the ecology of rivers and bays. Over the centuries, wetlands loss and water pollution have accelerated in tandem, driven by the need for farmland, the urge for profit, and the fear of disease. The history of these interwoven changes on land and underwater begins in the Chesapeake Bay, the site of the first permanent British colony in America. In the summer of 1608, Captain John Smith and the colonists of Jamestown were starving.