FIVE DAYS before 2005 began, a wall of water rose in the Indian Ocean and scoured more than 280,000 souls from the Earth. And this was literally just the beginning. By the end of 2005, nine additional Class Three floods battered nearly every quarter of the globe. Both fresh and salt water systems were repeatedly overwhelmed; millions of people were displaced; complete villages and towns washed away; hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed; untold numbers of wild and domesticated animals killed. Damages are estimated in the hundreds of billions U.S. dollars and cost projections continue to rise.

All this was on top of an already soggy situation, as 2004 was also an astonishing year for global flooding. Besides the tsunami, two other Class Three floods and 30 Class Two events drenched this precious planet and her inhabitants during 2004.

Class Three (C-3) events, as designated by the Dartmouth Flood Observatory, are those which are extreme, with an estimated recurrence interval greater than 100 years; Class Two (C-2) are very large floods, with a recurrence likelihood of more than 20 years but less than 100 years.

Cool, Clear Water

Numerous freshwater systems, those which allow us and all land-based living things to survive, were demolished in 2005. Tumultuous water struck every continent on our beloved planet. The tiny island world of the United Kingdom suffered two C-3 floods. China witnessed two C-3 and two C-2 floods. The United States was deluged with four C-2 floods; nearly every state in the US survived one major flood during the year. Within months of the tsunami, Thailand sustained two more C-2 inundations. India, Taiwan, and Malaysia, too, were hit again shortly after the pummeling they'd received from that phenomenal wall of water.

Fresh water systems are regional in scope. They recognize no man-made boundaries such as state lines or national demarcations, and they encompass streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands, plus all the agricultural and urban areas in between, everything eventually draining into one or more large rivers, which in turn drain into the oceans. There are virtually no natural water systems left on the Earth, which means that all fresh water is dammed, controlled, channeled, filtered, and medicated.

Even normal rain showers stress dams and filtration plants, but a C-3 flood overwhelms all such systems. Torrents of water deluge homes, crops, businesses, dams, and levees. People die; crops are submerged. Sewage treatment facilities quit functioning, water filtration plants become clogged, and thousands (perhaps millions) of gallons of toxic sludge pour into storm sewers and on into local rivers. In an ever-escalating pattern, these polluted rivers then flush residue from parking lots, oil refineries, landfills, superfund sites, feed lots, chemical manufacturing facilities, gasoline fueling stations, and who knows what else, all churning together and heading downstream towards the seas.

Floods were once a natural mechanism of land re-fertilization and delta renewal. Wetlands around rivers and lakes are designed to be filtration systems that absorb flood waters, cleanse them, and release them into larger rivers. Silt washes over wetlands and then churns into lower rivers to renew the banks and channels of those rivers and feed the deltas even further downstream. It is this process that created the land on which New Orleans was built. In the natural cycle, nutrients from the upstream lands also nourished saltwater swamps and estuaries, those buffer zones between sea and land.

Ole Man Mississippi drains nearly 40 percent of the continental US; as much as 90 percent of all freshwater dumping into the Gulf of Mexico is from this huge river system. Runoff from the Mississippi has become so toxic that a "dead zone" now exists far into the Gulf of Mexico.

The most fragile piece of this river drainage is the three million acres of coastal wetlands in Louisiana, also one of the most valuable ecosystems in the world. Until Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana fisheries produced 50 percent of the oysters consumed in the U.S.

Worldwide, most large rivers and their drainage basins are heavily polluted, particularly from intensive agriculture, manufacturing, and urban environments. Besides all this extreme flooding, large-scale pollution events are becoming commonplace. More than 300 tons of oil recently spilled into the Caspian Sea from Russia's River Terek. Ten trillion or so gallons of untreated storm waters enter U.S. surface waters each year and the EPA believes as many as 850 million of those gallons are raw sewage. Annual runoff from a city of five million people is similar to a large oil tanker spill. The Spokane River in Washington state now hosts fish with extremely high concentrations of toxic flame retardants. PBDEs ( polybrominated diphenyl ethers) are chemicals used in electronics, plastics, building materials, and fabrics. They build up in animal tissues and can cause neurological damage in human babies, acting in a manner similar to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).

Today, clean water is unavailable to 1.465 billion people. In China, 400 cities are short of water and the source of the Yellow River, which provides water to 120 million people, is drying up. Nearly two-thirds of our life-sustaining ecosystems are damaged. Intensive farming is one culprit. Another is urban pollution. Surprisingly, another stress factor, especially to river basins, is glacier melting.

About 70 percent of all freshwater supplies are ice, mostly glaciers, and all measurements demonstrate a faster rate of glacier melting than was generally predicted in the 1990s. Glaciers around the world are losing as much as 22 miles of ice annually; this melting is attributed to accelerated global warming in the past 30 years.

As glaciers melt, they release an enormous amount of water. For 300 years this has been a slow process. Now the rapid glacier melting is creating floods and overwhelming river drainage systems. Exposed ground from glacier retreat is often fertile and can provide new land for planting. However, the water to nourish it is no longer available. All that fresh water races to the oceans, which not only increases sea levels worldwide, but eats up coastal regions in turn, submerging the most fertile ecosystems in the world, wetlands.

Desertification is a fancy word for this drying up process. First, global temperatures rise, then glaciers melt. Next, rivers flood and dump copious amounts of water across the lands and into the oceans. For a while, more and more acres of land are put into service and, usually, large amounts of fertilizers are used to boost crops to help make up for the shortfall that resulted during the floods. But then, rivers start disappearing because their primary source of water was the glaciers. When rivers dry up, irrigation becomes infeasible. When rivers dry up, we have less water to drink and less food to eat.

Mother, Mother Ocean

Separated by a short eight months, the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina serve as a sort of horrific bookends to 2005. These two catastrophes were the only two C-3 saltwater inundations during the twelve-month period and they account for nearly 98% of the destruction created by C-3 floods.

Communities along the coasts of 12 countries were erased by the onslaught of the Asian tsunami, and damage to the environmental systems alone approaches $700 million. Nearly 300 kilometers of coast have been severely damaged or destroyed. In Aceh and North Sumatra, 25,000 hectares (one hectare = 2.4711 acres) of mangroves are gone, 30 percent of their coral reefs washed away, and 20 percent of seagrass beds are severely damaged. Estimating the costs to rebuild human lives is nearly impossible.

Statistical data about the Asian tsunami are more difficult to accumulate than similar information for Katrina. Reporting systems vary for each country harmed by the tsunami. Few people paid for insurance, either for themselves or their property, and that industry is usually the group toting up the numbers. And, the horrendous devastation is daunting. We can assume that the pollution swept into the ocean was at least as foul as that swirled away by Katrina.

Repairing New Orleans and its surroundings -- if it is ever done -- will cost more than $125 billion, and the dollar figure rises weekly. Environmental damage from Katrina, and her little sisters Wilma and Rita, is unprecedented in the United States. Facts are staggering and numbing. Tens of thousands of acres of freshwater marshes were deluged with saltwater. Massive oil spills, millions of gallons of raw sewage, thousands of dead bodies (animal and human), a plethora of pathogens, and untold amounts of toxic chemicals including benzene, xylene, dioxin, PCBs, lead, asbestos -- all these and more -- were washed inland, then carried back to the Gulf of Mexico, either by storm surges or later by polluted waters draining from the rivers and lakes.

At least 22 million tons of debris must be removed (1.5 million tons of debris were cleared after the demolition of the World Trade Towers). New Orleans is an old city and the amount of asbestos in the debris will be quite high. None of the wood in the debris can be shipped to landfills outside the state because of a long-time infestation of Formosan termites (extremely ravenous and most difficult to eradicate or control), so much will have to be burned, a significant air pollution nightmare in itself. Other air pollutant releases include spills of volatile chemicals, leaks from industrial plants, dust from building demolition and debris transport, and contaminated sediments that can be re-suspended as dust when they dry.

Katrina engulfed more than 500 sewage plants, most of which are either severely damaged or destroyed. An estimated 350,000 automobiles were submerged. Before these can be crushed and recycled, the tires must be removed, all fluids drained, and all switches that operate anti-lock brakes and automatic-on lights must be taken off (these switches contain mercury which is toxic to nerves).

At least three EPA superfund sites were flooded. In downtown New Orleans, the Agriculture Street Landfill was completely submerged. The poisons contained within this site are horrific; millions of tons of waste, including two pounds of dioxin, were stored there. It was once sprayed with DDT and then covered; underground fires at the site have earned it the name of Dante's Inferno. It is believed that the site was seriously compromised by both hurricane surges and that all previous restoration may have been destroyed.

This bitter brew, estimated at billions of gallons, simmered for days, was agitated by Hurricane Rita, then pumped into Louisiana's wetlands, Lake Ponchartrain, or the Mississippi River, for eventual release into the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and ultimately the Atlantic. Tons of sediments, from earlier floods upstream and the churning action of the tidal surges, plus all that poisonous water join the toxic plume already strangling the Gulf of Mexico.

Called the "dead zone," this damaging swath of sediments from the Mississippi River drainage is visible (via satellite and some ships) from the Louisiana Delta around the Florida Straits and up into the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean off Georgia coasts. Appearing generally in the warm months (April through September), this plume has been as large as 12,000 square miles. It results from excess plant nutrients, especially nitrogen, being washed down from mid-North America. These nutrients encourage algal and phytoplankton blooms, deplete dissolved oxygen which supports fish and crustaceans, and destroy seagrass beds. This form of pollution is pervasive and is becoming viewed as the highest risk for resource diversity in coastal environments. Besides the Gulf of Mexico, extensive damage exists in the Baltic Sea and parts of the North Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Black Sea, and Japan's Seto Inland Sea.

Earth's salt waters are becoming increasingly acidic, which is extremely harmful to organisms, such as shellfish, corals, and crustaceans, which make their exoskeleton with calcium carbonate (alkaline, destroyed by acid). One reason for the acidity is that an astonishing 24 pounds of carbon dioxide per day for every person on Earth is spewed into the atmosphere.

Eventually, all that carbon dioxide gets mixed with the ocean and generates the corrosive chemicals which are so harmful to exoskeletons. Until recently, studies of this process were focused on warm water oceans and, although harmful, the general thinking was that severe damage would take hundreds of years. A recent study, conducted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, included cold water oceans in its scope and found that the intensity of acidation is happening faster than earlier believed and that it is more lethal to cold water systems. "Basic chemistry tells us that within decades there may be serious trouble brewing in the polar oceans," said James Orr, lead author and ocean modeler from the French Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environment. "Unlike climate predictions, the uncertainties here are small."

As with fresh water systems, the accelerating glacier melt harms salt water ecosystems. First, the additional water released raises the sea level and destroys wetlands, which filter nutrients, pollutants, and sediment, clarifying water before it's released into the oceans. Next, the salt water reaches farther inland, mixing with fresh water supplies. This process not only contaminates fresh water, it also concentrates and intensifies the pollution being carried downstream through those river drainages. And, then, there is great concern that the huge additions of fresh water to the oceans will "shut down" the Gulf Stream. "When it [the Gulf Stream] failed before, 12,700 years ago, Britain was covered in permafrost for 1,300 years," so ends Geoffrey Lean's "The Big Thaw...."

The Veil Between the Worlds

Wherever two worlds parallel each other, there exists a zone between the two which shares aspects of each world but is itself a unique plane. In esoteric knowledge this space is known as the veil between the worlds. 'Wetlands' is the general term for the fragile, yet strongly resilient region between land and water; specific names include estuaries, beaches, riparian areas, saltwater marshes, and tidal freshwater marshes.

These wetlands are critical to the health of the Earth. The Chinese call them the kidneys of the planet and indeed that is precisely what they do: filter, eliminate, modify, and cleanse. A relatively small area of wetlands performs the same filtration of a mechanical wastewater system costing millions of dollars and it does the job much more efficiently. Wetlands serve as a vital buffer between land and ocean surges and tides. They are the most productive land on Earth and the overall global benefits of wetlands far exceeds any other environment, including forests and agricultural lands. For example, before Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana's coastal wetlands yielded a billion pounds of fish, crab, and oysters annually, about one-third of the U.S. commercial seafood produced.

One problem for wetlands is the human propensity to build dams. Whereas beaver dams generally benefit vast areas, our dams benefit some humans by bringing them electricity and providing a wonderland of boating and swimming. But, dams also dramatically harm the environment and the surrounding communities. Estimates for the number of people displaced worldwide because of dam projects are as high as 80 million. Some of the environmental difficulties posed by dams are that they change the river flow, reduce the sediments that nourish beaches and riparian areas, and alter the temperature of the water pouring towards the oceans. These changes starve the wetlands below the dam and submerge those surrounding and above it.

Humans love to live on wetlands and during the past century drained and paved 50 percent of the world's wetlands to create miles of homes and acres of parking lots; only 10 percent of the remaining wetlands are protected. Nearly 1,300 people per day move to the coastal lands of the United States, which has ruined more than 215,000,000 acres of its wetlands. The Chinese drained three million hectares of their richest marshland for agricultural use. France has destroyed 67 percent of its original wetlands, Germany 57 percent, and Spain 60 percent.

Most urban flooding these days is a direct result of the devastation of wetlands. Plus, " stormwater discharges from roads, buildings, industrial sites, construction activities, and other impervious surfaces are the largest known cause of beach closures and activities. Sewage pollution is the second largest known cause." (Testing the Waters, 2005, p. 1.) Further, wetlands are known to be extremely efficient about reducing the amounts of nutrients and sediments dumped into the rivers for eventual depositing in the oceans. Restoration of wetlands would greatly reduce and in some cases eliminate the plumes of algae and the water-darkening walls of sediment that harm our oceans.

Good News

All of this is enough to make you weep with frustration, but there is heartening change. The Chinese government implemented an ambitious plan: By 2010 there will be no more wetland degradation in their country and by 2020 most of China's wetlands will be restored. The Audubon Society in the United States works to restore the Mississippi River, from its headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico, a campaign they call the "largest and most complex environmental restoration project ever undertaken." Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have stimulated enormous interest in this sort of restoration project because many people believe the effects of those huge storms would have been significantly lessened had wetlands in Louisiana and Texas been healthy.

Canada is becoming assertive about protecting its enormous reservoir of fresh water and continues to work to prohibit bulk water removal from Canadian boundary waters and the Great Lakes.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) actively stimulates research and discussion about world water problems. Each year UNEP honors seven "Champions of the Earth," a person from each continent who has actively promoted sound environmental practices or served as leaders in turning around current degradation.

There are two active forums for the international exchange of scientific research on wetlands and water: World Wetlands Day and World Water Day. Both these days are also focal points for community organizations whose charters promote healing water everywhere. Annually, February 2nd is World Wetlands Day, a day that seems appropriate as it is also Candlemas, a day of celebration of love and light, a day of hope and promise.

Water, water everywhere
Clearly tells us we must dare
Heal our Mother's holy sea.
As we will, so mote it be.

Flood Waters, image courtesy of Eye and Dundsen Paris Counsel