Sinking Delta: Where tules replace corn, they grow soil. It's no quick fix, but it could save levees

TWITCHELL ISLAND – A stretch of dirt road cutting through this 3,500-acre island near Rio Vista offers a stark look at two different futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

One side of the road is a farm field, with corn stretching in orderly and silent rows across hundreds of acres. It sits at least 5 feet lower than the road, a result of decaying peat soils that have made many Delta islands into deep bowls through a process called subsidence.

On the other side is a soggy marsh, its floor nearly level with the road. The marsh is thick with tules and cattails reaching 10 feet overhead. Songbirds and waterfowl rise between pockets of open water. The air is filled with chirping and quacking.

This side of the road was once a subsided bowl, too, and filled with corn. But 10 years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey converted it to marshland, allowing tules and other native plants to grow and die back with the seasons as they once did.

http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/436685.html

Another example of what some of us here at DU have known - swampland is not meant to be anything but swampland. And it is more valuable being swampland.

Bronze-age humans seemed to understand this better than 20th century humans.

That's just superstition. :P

... maybe the water-gods will reclaim the lost parts of their kingdom?

(Not to mention the coast-lines, the swamps and the ports ...) :evilgrin:

Just the more irritating ones. :)

And also as a source of making fuel. We should be planting cattails all around our roads so they can absorb the pollution, then harvesting the starchy cattails for fuel.

http://www.permaculture.com/site/node/360

The book tells how.