But if the plants die out leaving behind dead muddy banks, all that carbon quite literally goes “puff.” The dead plants rot, decompose and dissolve into carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that’s heating up our planet. And the third problem is that healthy coastal marshes are a very efficient carbon sink-more efficient per square inch than forests, thanks to all the thick heavy grass and other plants that sprout up, sequestering carbon in their biomass. The second problem is that marshes serve as nurseries for fish and other creatures, and when these populations collapse so do our food sources-no more shrimp cocktails, crunchy crabs or fried fish that feeds on marsh-dwellers. In the era of sea level rise and increasingly severe hurricanes, the marsh destruction problem is more dangerous than ever-because destroyed marshes exacerbate coastal flooding. Overfertilized, nitrogen-polluted marshes turn to mud flats that can’t absorb the tides. They absorb the incoming currents-the waves sink into the marsh rather than smash into houses and structures, which is becoming an ever-more important aspect of life because of climate change and extreme weather events. First, marshes act as storm and flood protectors. So even though your poop doesn’t physically pile up in the ocean, its nitrogen-rich vestiges are ruining the ecology.Ĭollapsing marshes present not one but three problems. Instead, we release nitrogen-rich effluent into the water while the remaining biosolids, aka sludge, is burned or put in landfills, rather than into the fields. We solve this problem by putting in more fertilizer, but we don’t have a good way of trapping the excess of nutrients on the other end. With our changing climate, unpredictable weather, droughts, floods and heat waves, barren soils only add to the already pressing food security problems. As a result, our continuously depleted farmlands will require more and more fertilizer to produce food. “You’re taking all this biodiversity out of one ecosystem and creating these piles of shit somewhere else,” Waltner-Toews says-hence farm soils turn to dust while waterways suffocate from toxic algae blooms and marshes fall apart. Canadian epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews calls this a “redistribution of nutrients on the planet,” that ruins the nutritional balance of ecosystems.
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