Marsh Dance: 2025 WET Banquet Keynote

When I turned 12, we moved away from there to live in a house in West Virginia, on a bluff looking down on the Ohio River. For all of my older childhood I had that river in my life, physically, every day.  We drove across this bridge several times a week. I never thought about protecting it or saving it or losing it.   Only recently did I learn there’s now a National Wildlife Refuge extending 362 miles upriver from this bridge. The Ohio was just there, always, with remarkable floods sometimes, with barges traveling up and down continually. A conduit, always moving in one direction, except when it heaved a great sigh and flooded landward. 

Every summer, we visited my grandparents in Norris, TN. In the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority was established to dam the TN River to produce hydroelectric power. Sen. George Norris, a Republican who considered himself an independent and was a supporter of Roosevelt, sponsored the legislation. He lent his name to Norris Dam, the first TVA impoundment, damming the Clinch River to create Norris Lake, and to the town of Norris, the first planned community in the country.  Because the river flows from the bottom of the lake, the Clinch is always the same temperature, in the 50s summer or winter. Summer evenings are magical, with a heavy fog blanketing the river. And hot summer days are pleasant along its banks; wading in it is astoundingly cold. Today there is a grove of mature tulip poplar trees next to the river that my grandfather established as a forester for TVA. He gave me my love of the outdoors, and he taught me that tree’s Latin name, the first I ever learned - Lyriodendron tulipifera. I never thought of losing or saving the Clinch; it was just a part of who I was. I am lucky to still have it in my life.

After college, my new husband and I found ourselves on the Eastern Shore, where all of the rivers are tidal. We sailed, hunted, and crabbed on the Little Choptank River. Later, we moved to Bivalve, close to the river that has defined my adult life, the Nanticoke. At first, it seemed unfamiliar; the brackish water was murky, it was expansive and sometimes scary in its wave energy, because we live near its mouth. As time has gone by, it has become an integral part of my self. Swimming in it, I realized that its salinity was so close to my own that my eyes were comfortable being open. I’ve seen so many facets of it, the creeks, the marshes, the tiny guts that travel through the three   Spartina grasses, the massive cynosuroides that lines the banks, with alterniflora at its toes at the very edge, and patens forming the beautiful inland green salt hay meadows.  Watching crabs and minnows swimming against the current in those little channels, seeing periwinkle snails move up and down the stems of the Spartina with the tide, and fiddler crabs emerging at low tide to feed on the muddy shore highlights the defining importance of tidal pulses in our local rivers. And I’ve gotten to spend countless hours sailing on the Nanticoke, where the tide is often more important than the wind in finding the fastest course to follow.

The best part of getting to know tidal rivers, for me, was immersing myself in their wetlands. Marshes and swamps are where the river interlaces its fingers with those of the land. I fell in love with these lush places, where water and nutrients are always abundant and plants respond vigorously. 

The nature of those tidal plant communities is defined largely by whether or not they experience saltwater. But salinity is never static. It goes up and down with the tides, with the seasons, and with changing rainfall. In the uppermost tidal reaches, there are lush freshwater marshes with delicate floating plants extending out into the water. Showy flowering plants like cardinal flower, pickerelweed, and yellow pond lily, with green tree frogs embracing stems, spiders weaving webs from plant to plant over the water, dragonflies, all thriving on the bounty of abundant fresh water and food. A little downstream, salinity increases, and wild rice and other grasses begin to appear. Closer to the mouth of the rivers are hardy brackish marshes dominated by salt- and wave-tolerant rushes and grasses, especially the three Spartinas. 

These field trips let us connect with the rivers by immersing ourselves in their wetlands. We studied their hydrology, their soils, their water chemistry and plant and animal communities. We explored all three of Wicomico County’s rivers, the lower Nanticoke with its extensive brackish marshes, the upper Wicomico, with freshwater tidal marshes and this nontidal swamp along Beaverdam Creek, and the cypress swamp near Shad Landing on the Pocomoke. The water is always present in these wetlands, and the influence of drought and tides and season on salinity is a major part of that presence.  I was surprised at first to realize that this Pocomoke cypress swamp experiences the river’s uppermost effects of tides. It is at the forefront of sea level rise threats, because it will someday soon be exposed to saltwater reaching further and further inland. My wetlands classes and I saw firsthand the effects of increasing salinity on the plant communities of a freshwater tidal marsh on Wicomico Creek. One very dry summer, 2 or 3 hurricanes passed close enough to generate exceptional tides, with their higher salinity, but not enough to produce any rain. The broad-leafed plants dominating that usually freshwater marsh turned brown and crispy, and the next year, they began to be replaced by wild rice, which can tolerate very low salinity. A few good wet years moved things back around, but the trend is established. I would like to take a look at the same site this year, after a couple of dry summers. These marshes are likely to survive increasing salinity by transitioning to brackish plant communities, with grasses moving upstream to occupy formerly fresh environments. Tidal freshwater forests are more complicated, because though there are some populations of cypress trees that are more salt-tolerant, other forest species are less adapted.

As a graduate student, I studied wetland biogeochemistry. I explored the interplay of salinity with soil chemistry and marsh plants in Monie Creek, a tributary of the lower Wicomico. I interjected as much chemistry as I could in my teaching, since that was actually the subject in high school that first really grabbed me. At first my students thought I was a bit nuts about a seemingly barren mud bed, but I think they grew to appreciate the dynamics where sulfur and iron interact in the absence of oxygen to form black minerals, iron forms an oily sheen of bacterial film, and as the sulfur reaches the air, bacteria oxidize it to white filaments. These transformations represent the amazing energetic center of wetland sediments that functions largely at a microscopic level.

Almost as soon as I moved to Bivalve, I was confronted with the prospect of loss and suddenly I was pulled into the mission of helping to conserve this river I loved so much already. The first battle was stopping a nuclear power plant proposal on Ellis Bay, between the Nanticoke and Wicomico Rivers. The next was to block a condominium development at Hatcrown Point, one of the jewels at the time of that stretch of the river. Perhaps the most positive outcome of that was not saving the Point, which did end up with four very private McMansions on it, but coalescing a group of citizens who were determined to help retain as much of the natural watershed as possible. That’s how the Friends of the Nanticoke River began in 1991. The Wicomico Env. Trust had organized a year earlier, and a few years later, John Groutt left his position as FNR vice president to really get WET off the ground. In the beginning of the 2000s, Salisbury had been plagued with sewage overflows, with a combined stormwater and wastewater treatment system that failed miserably after heavy rains. After an especially serious event in August of 2001 caused 396,000 gallons of wastewater to be discharged directly into the Wicomico River, Sam Gibson and Tom Lilly formed SOS, “Stop Overflowing Sewers,” a group determined to see Salisbury upgrade its wastewater and stormwater treatment. The Chesapeake Bay Found also began working closely on this issue, and before long, the Wicomico Creekwatchers were established in partnership with SU.

Also around 2000, when pressures for development were exploding, WET, the Friends of the Nanticoke, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation began focusing harder to keep environmental conservation in the forefront. At that same time, Eben Fodor wrote a book called “Grow Better, not Bigger.” He examined a number of municipalities across the country, and described how there was no positive correlation between their rates of growth and their quality of life. Our groups joined the Nanticoke Watershed Alliance and the Community Foundation to sponsor a public opinion survey, conducted by SU’s PACE, of ALL OF Wicomico County’s registered voters.  It focused on issues of quality of life, population growth, and development. It also tied together the problems with the wastewater treatment plant and river stewardship. The voters surveyed clearly favored conservation of natural resources over expanding population. They recognized the importance of forestry, fisheries, and agriculture to their quality of life, both esthetic and economic. They did not believe that local government had adequately responded to those challenges to protect the county from poorly planned growth. A majority supported government planning tools to protect their natural resources – farms, forests, rivers and open space – from the impact of development.  They favored a mix of voluntary conservation programs, the use of planning and zoning to direct growth away from environmentally important areas, and providing tax breaks and other incentives to encourage landowners to keep their lands as working farms and forests.

After this poll was released in 2005, a lengthy process ensued that led to a Wicomico County Comprehensive Plan in 2010 that prioritized retention of farmland and natural areas, and to zoning designed to better manage the negative effects of growth on both the local economy and the environment. There was significant guidance from the MD Dept of Planning, with its 12 planning visions that emphasized quality of life and conservation. I believe that period of conservation focus is why Wicomico County largely retains its agricultural base and its rural character and does not look like Sussex County today.

We are now in a time where local pressures for population growth and for development are surging again. The State discarded those 12 visions, and now is emphasizing growth, not conservation, in planning guidance. Salisbury has sought and gained a huge population increase, with little agreement on where and how to provide housing and other resources for these rising numbers.  Developers are lobbying for relaxing building standards and regulations, and farmland and forests are being cleared for “affordable housing” that often is not.

A 2003 EPA study identified a 10% threshold of a watershed’s impervious cover above which stream degradation occurs. Based on the most recent version of the Chesapeake Bay data published in 2024, the Nanticoke is still below that threshold, with 3.4% impervious surface (9.41% total “developed”). The Wicomico River is well above 30% impervious cover. What causes stream degradation? One of the culprits is the toxic components of asphalt, especially polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These are especially concentrated in the blacktopping applied to driveways as asphalt maintenance.

If we really look at our rivers, we can see how they interweave with the land everywhere. How every bit of the watershed is a vital aspect of the rivers’ structure and function, like a body and its blood vessels. The Nanticoke, Wicomico, and Pocomoke are the essential basis of our county’s green infrastructure, and that living landscape in turn maintains and nurtures them.

This slide from MERLIN - Maryland's Environmental Resource & Land Information Network - depicts “Living Resources.” The cross-hatching shows Sensitive Species Project Review Areas; the red dots are Fish Blockage Locations. Now look at how we have parceled it off. Zooming in, we can see the Metro Core, the area set aside years ago for “where we want growth to go.” Much of what looks open is already being filled up with housing. The large empty farm is next in line for high-density development. This area is where we chose to place our landfill, now a mountain over 200 feet high, visible from a large distance. Another open area is mature forest, slated for the next expansion of the landfill. 

Every housing development, every shopping center, every bit of impervious surface removes a piece of the land our rivers depend on for their health. While we can manage the impacts, we can’t make them disappear. If a river is alive, we are bleeding ours to death by steadily degrading the living watershed that gives them life. 

So are these the end times? I am not truly sure. Is there something left worth fighting for, worth being completely present for? I believe it is our rivers, and that we could do no better as a final gesture than to honor them as living beings, a defining part of who we are and want to continue to be.