Posted on December 17, 2024
By Stephanie Hunt; photos by Joel Caldwell
Wetlands are wonderlands. These interstitial spaces between land and water are the superheroes of ecology and our environment, doing everything from serving as buffer and safeguard for storms and flooding, to capturing and storing carbon. While varying in shape and form — from bayou to bog, marsh to mangrove, blackwater swamp to Carolina bay — our nation’s wetlands today all have two things in common: they are vital to our health and well-being, and they are in danger.
For more than 50 years our nation’s wetlands enjoyed broad protection under the federal Clean Water Act. Then, in a stark reversal, the Trump administration moved to dramatically curtail those protections and, in 2023, the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. EPA followed suit, severely narrowing safeguards for these magnificent places. In the wake of Sackett, this loss is felt particularly hard in the South, where there is an abundance of wetlands and development pressures growing at an exponential rate.
Across the South, people are responding by protecting these precious places in any way they can. Wetlands are irreplaceable buffers between land and waterways, but they’re also buffers for our spirit. Their beauty and vitality move us, as they’ve moved the people we meet below into action. From chef to preacher, photographer to young entrepreneur, these individuals are using their unique talents to ensure the Sackett decision is not the last word for the South’s wetlands.
The attorney
GEORGE NOLAN, FROM CRAWDADS TO THE CAPITOL
Director of SELC’s Tennessee Office George Nolan on his family farm in Bon Aqua, Tenn.
“I doubt many SELC lawyers know what it’s like to go frog gigging, but I do. I know firsthand how important wetlands are,” says George Nolan, SELC senior attorney and director of the Tennessee office. Nolan hails from a cattle farm outside of Nashville in the Duck River watershed, where creek-bottom wetlands keep one of the world’s most biodiverse rivers healthy. “It was a great place to grow up, with five miles of dirt road to get to our house and not another structure in sight,” adds Nolan, who, in addition to frog-gigging, is an expert crawdad-catcher and angler, thanks to his bucolic childhood with the run of the farm’s creeks. “I’d leave the house in the morning with a little fishing pole and coffee can I’d fill with nightcrawlers, then fish all day — obsessed. I once caught an 8-pound, 24-inch rainbow trout in that creek,” says Nolan. “I still can’t believe it.” Today he can’t believe that, post-Sackett, the streams, creeks, and rivers he fell in love with as a child are in danger, with legislation pending in the Tennessee statehouse aimed at stripping away state wetland protections.
“We have more than 430,000 acres of wetlands in Tennessee that no longer have federal protection after the Sackett decision, but are presently protected by state law,” he explains. “Our development community, buoyed by a state representative who is also a developer, is pushing legislation that would change that.” Nolan feels the threat; he regularly receives unsolicited offers to buy his property, as developers gobble up acreage around the farm where he and his brother still raise a small herd of “Baldies,” a hybrid of commercial Angus cows and Hereford bulls. While he enjoys spending weekends out on his beloved land, he rarely has time for fishing anymore. He’s too busy organizing a broad coalition of wetland advocates across the state and lobbying the legislature.
“We successfully prevented that bad legislation from passing in this last session,” he says, but the bill was sent to a “summer study,” which means more lobbying when legislators reconvene in early 2025. “We’re intent on educating our lawmakers about the fact that wetlands protect us from flooding and ensure our aquifers and streams contain clean water. Protected wetlands are critical for wildlife and important for Tennessee’s economic prosperity,” he says, noting his fellow Tennesseans spend billions on fishing, hunting, and outdoor recreation annually, generating local and state tax revenue.
Development pressure in Middle Tennessee, Nolan realizes, isn’t going away. “We’re either going to do it well or not,” he says. “Protecting our wetlands and managing growth with thoughtful conservation is key to doing it well.”
The reverend
PASTOR ANTWON NIXON PREACHES SWAMP POWER
It has been more than three decades since Antwon Nixon saw Oscar on an elementary school field trip to the Okefenokee Swamp, but he vividly remembers being mesmerized by the 13-foot, 1,000-pound alligator. “He was huge, swam around in the blackwater like he owned the place. I was infatuated,” says Nixon, a native of Folkston, Georgia, a tiny railroad town — population 4,600 — bordering the primeval wetlands of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.
When Nixon first learned about an Alabama company’s plans to mine titanium near the Okefenokee in 2021, years after that childhood visit, he thought of Oscar. “Something dormant in me became vibrant again once I realized the swamp was under threat,” he says. On a return visit to the rare wilderness in his backyard — the largest blackwater swamp in North America and home to one of the most well-preserved and intact freshwater ecosystems in the world — he found Oscar’s impressive skeleton on display in the visitor’s center. The nearly century-old gator had died of natural causes, but generations of his offspring now thrive amid the refuge’s more than 400,000 acres of pinelands, open wet prairies, and forested cypress swamps, and Nixon is determined to protect them, along with the red-cockaded woodpeckers, gopher tortoises, and other species who live there.
“We’re now, like the Bible says, in perilous times,” notes Nixon, senior pastor of Folkston’s Mt. Carmel Baptist Church and a community activist. His nonprofit, Sowing Seeds Outside the Walls, expands opportunities for youth in this lower-wealth region. “I’m here to make positive, productive change in Folkston,” he adds. “We can’t sell out our community and the swamp to a private company seeking to extract public natural resources.” The mining operation wants to mine 700 acres adjacent to the Okefenokee refuge, endangering the swamp’s complex hydrology.
An eagle glides overhead as Nixon gazes out over mirrored surface where canals lead to the Okefenokee’s wilds; a great blue heron fishes on a small peat island, unconcerned by the gators stealthing by. “Wouldn’t ecotourism be better? The animals would win, the land and swamp wins, the community wins,” Nixon says. With efforts pending to designate the Okefenokee swamp as a UNESCO World Heritage site, he foresees more people coming to experience this pristine wilderness, in turn creating demand for new outfitters, hotels, and restaurants — i.e., more jobs for Folkston folks. By attending statehouse rallies, lobbying, and campaigning on behalf of the Okefenokee, he’s honoring Oscar’s spirit — “living out my childhood imagination,” says Nixon of the mystical swamp that enchanted him long ago. “Lots of people don’t realize what we have right here at our backdoor. I’m speaking out to change that, before it’s too late.”
The innovator
AN EPIPHANY TURNS BOTTLES INTO BAYOU-SAVING SAND
A pick-up truck reverses past a kaleidoscopic mural into the drop-off zone at Glass Half Full, a glass recycling center on an industrial strip in New Orleans. Two men from a Catholic church the next parish over unload empty wine bottles and glass jars etched with a cross. “Candle holders,” one explains. “We clean out the wax but hate to throw them away, so we bring them here.” Ashes to ashes, glass to crushed glass, communion wine to coastal sand — call it holy recycling, or at least a wholly original take on it, thanks to an “aha” moment when Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz were seniors at Tulane University.
While enjoying wine one evening, Trautmann and Steitz bemoaned the number of bottles thrown away in their party-centric city. Back in 2019, Louisiana was one of several Southeastern states with no glass recycling program. “But there should be one,” thought Trautmann, now Glass Half Full’s 26-year-old CEO and co-founder, alongside Steitz. “Then we saw this machine that crushed glass into sand and realized, Louisiana needs recycling and sand. Our coast is eroding at some mind-boggling rate — a football field an hour,” says the Louisiana bayou native. “We were young. We had no idea what all it would entail, but we thought, why not? Why can’t this work?”
With an $8,000 GoFundMe in 2020, Trautmann and Steitz launched a backyard operation, feeding bottles, one by one, into a small crushing machine. Their market quickly grew. Today, the company’s $1 million annual budget supports 17 regional collection routes and a staff of 20 diverting 150,000 pounds of glass each month from landfills and producing 2,000 tons of sand annually for use in coastal restoration, disaster relief, landscaping, and construction. Due to sea-level rise and levee-induced erosion, the state has lost a quarter of its wetlands since the 1930s. Sourcing new sand is urgent, but also expensive. “Coastal researchers call us a ‘pop-up quarry,’ creating sand economically in the middle of a city instead of through detrimental mining practices,” she says.
Those same researchers are studying whether Glass Half Full sand can slow the state’s coastal and wetland loss. Initial studies demonstrated it is nontoxic to marine life and effective for growing native flora. One demonstration wetland is on New Orleans’ industrial edge, along Bayou Bienvenue. This is also where they are building a new $6.5 million warehouse to expand operations. Beyond New Orleans, Glass Half Full has opened a warehouse and collection sites in Birmingham, with other locations to come.
Having turned a wide-eyed college idea into a profitable, expanding, and sustainable enterprise, Trautmann remains most energized by these demonstration islands and their potential for wetland restoration. “We’re literally filling in holes in the marsh,” she says, looking out over the bayou, dragonflies zooming about. “There’s marsh grass that was inches high when I planted it, and now it’s huge, taller than me. That’s incredible.”
The chef
RICKY MOORE CELEBRATES NORTH CAROLINA’S SEAFOOD BOUNTY
Chef Ricky Moore
A long line trails outside the front door of Durham’s Saltbox Seafood Joint. It’s lunch time, and the mouthwatering cooking smell of fresh, local seafood lures the construction workers, medical professionals, college students, and business execs waiting for a flounder platter or plate of perfectly fried croaker with a side of zingy “S.S.J.” slaw.
“My customers know they’ll get whatever’s fresh and in season,” says Moore, who grew up in New Bern, North Carolina, where the Trent and Neuse Rivers join before entering the Pamlico Sound — the gateway to the Atlantic and North Carolina’s fisheries and one of the largest estuaries in North America. “They’ll ask, ‘hey, is blue fish ready yet? What about soft-shell crabs? Or is sheepshead available?’ That (seafood availability) is a direct reflection of the fisherfolk I work with and how we are managing and preserving our wetlands. If we don’t protect our wetlands and marshes the way we need to, the fishing industry and those they serve, including my business, will be affected.”
As a young boy with a creative bent, Moore craved the openness of coastal wetlands, where his imagination came alive. “I felt a sense of peace when I went out to the marsh. It was so cool, my place to escape. I still need the marsh to be there for me,” says the James Beard-award winning chef. He remembers going flounder gigging at night and “hanging around in the marsh, catching crabs with a net and fishing for spot and croaker with my grandmother, using a pole with a string, no rig.” Those salty, formative memories stuck with him as Moore’s artistic inclinations took a culinary turn after joining the army at age 17. Soon Moore was cooking for the 82nd Airborne, then went on to the Culinary Institute of America. His career has taken him to Michelin-starred kitchens in Paris, Singapore, and Toronto, and to top restaurants in restaurants in Chicago and Washington, D.C., but Moore knew he ultimately wanted to return to North Carolina, to his native and culinary roots. Saltbox is nothing fancy, just a country cooking “joint,” soulful and refined.
“I love showcasing North Carolina’s seafood bounty and the fisherfolk who bring it to us, in the simplest, purest way possible,” he says. His livelihood depends on not only feeding his customers the best local seafood delicately fried with a light cornmeal dusting or spiced and griddled, but educating them about sustainable fisheries, and how dependent the industry is on water quality and wetlands in North Carolina, particularly now that more than 2 million acres of wetlands are endangered after the state legislature embraced the Sackett decision. “Our wetlands are like sponges, like a filter,” Moore explains, and without them, the estuaries and fisheries that depend on them are imperiled. “We need to think long range, about how we manage and maintain wetlands generationally. As a business owner who serves North Carolina seafood directly, that’s important to me. This is real. We can’t let it fall. We are all accountable.”
The photographer
STEVEN DAVID JOHNSON’S PASSION FOR VERNAL POOLS
A spotted salamander surrounded by tiny copepods. @Steven David Johnson
Steven David Johnson pulls on his waders and lugs heavy camera equipment through the woods of the George Washington National Forest, about an hour from his home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. These woods are home to vernal pools, temporary basins that fill up in spring from snowmelt and rainwater then dry up in summer. Johnson has fallen under the spell of this little-known type of wetland.
“Vernal pools are ephemeral, that’s part of their magic,” explains Johnson, who reverently crouches down, genuflecting to the water, his voice hushed and soothing as if he’s in a baby’s nursery. Which he is. Vernal pools are basically aquatic cribs for next-gen salamanders and frogs wiggling into the world.
While these types of ephemeral woodland wetlands are not explicitly protected federally or by the state, many of the endangered species dependent on them, like the tiger salamander, are. That’s why Johnson, a professor of photography at Eastern Mennonite University with a background in fine art, uses his images to raise awareness about these little-known aquatic havens. Plus, he loves the visual exquisiteness of vernal pools — how the water-filtered light imbues a Dutch Old Master quality to his artwork. “It’s a good day when I get that Vermeer lighting,” he says.
“When I moved here 20 years ago and discovered that central and Southern Appalachia was a biodiversity hotspot — home to some 50 species of salamanders — I realized that documenting salamanders and their life cycle was the story I wanted to tell,” he says. Camera in hand, he moves stealthily through the tea-colored water of Maple Flats, where beavers have engineered a new shallow pool. Dragonflies loop-de-loop overhead; water bugs skate across the surface while green frogs and cricket frogs fill the air with their cacophony. From dry land, Maple Flats looks like a big puddle, but Johnson’s lens proves otherwise. His close-up images — luminous orbs of salamander eggs, larval newts donning frilly gills, fairy shrimp and damselflies looking like something out of the Star Wars bar scene — reveal an intimate, astonishing aquatic underworld, the inhabitants of which are integral to the ecosystem.
Photographing these amphibians, copepods, and insect larvae in a more familiar fine-art framing “helps people connect and gives them a glimpse of these very secretive lives,” says Johnson. “My hope is that by getting imagery out, people will start to realize, oh that’s not just a mudpuddle, there’s something there.” And that something is startlingly gorgeous and needs protection.”
