or show me the money!
If I told you one-eighth of the world’s inhabitants depend on wetlands for their livelihood you would probably say I’m crazy. They’re just swamps, right? Yes they are swamps, and yet, the Chesapeake Bay, the Louisiana Bayou, the Okefenokee Swamp, and the East Kolkata wetlands, to name a few, are not only some of the most hardworking environmental resources around with their fishing, crabbing, birding, aquaculture, ecotourism, and wastewater treatment abilities, but these ancient, massive primigenial havens of swampy, boggy, marshy, peaty, watery goodness are intrinsically cash cows.
The Chesapeake Bay alone is estimated to bring in approximately $33 billion a year across the spectrums of fishing, tourism, real estate and recreation, among others things, across six states: Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia and all of D.C.
Louisiana’s commercial fisheries supply 25–35% of the United States’ total catch, while their wetlands protect the coastal zones along the Gulf where Louisiana’s oil and natural gas industries live, adding approximately $73 billion to Louisiana’s GDP in 2020 and responsible for one out of every nine jobs in the state. However you feel about oil and gas drilling, fossil fuel energy is a resource America still needs while we make the…
