It's like watching the Earth breathe.
Twice a day you get this breath that comes in and floods it
and then [water noise] they exhale and the water goes back out.
As you look out here, we can see all the elements working together.
We can see a very particular and deliberate system of creation
designed to maintain balance.
From a distance it just looks like a flat platform of green grass,
but underneath is this extensive system of roots.
Worms and crabs and all kinds of things are down there in that sediment
thriving on all that organic matter produced by the salt marsh.
The U.S. has some of the largest areas of salt marshes in the world
and they're especially concentrated in the Southeast coasts.
And because states have done an effective job of protecting salt marsh
there is a great expanse of it
from North Carolina to northeast Florida.
Pat Conroy, the famous writer from Beaufort, South Carolina,
said that salt marsh was seemingly the source of all life.
It's a source of beauty to some,
a source of inspiration to others,
a source of nourishment,
a source of protection to communities that are surrounded by it.
A lot of our ocean-going creatures
will spend at least some point of their life here in the salt marsh
and so there's millions if not billions
of tiny little fish that are living out there.
Every little baby shrimp, every little baby crab,
depends on our local marshes
Without our marshes
and the millions of little critters that live in those marshes,
we wouldn't have product to harvest.
It's a place of nurturing.
It's not only a nursery
to the blue crabs and things like that,
but it's also a place that we go to as native Gullah/Geechees
to just renew our spirits, renew our souls.
To just literally pause
in the same place where our ancestors paused.
As salt marshes go,so go the communities.
In terms of resilience from a storm or extreme weather event,
these salt marshes are the guardians of the coast
where they absorb wind energy, wave energy,
and that makes sustaining them that much more important.
The Department of Defense has a fairly large footprint
in the Southeastern portion of the United States.
All of our services are represented there –
Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force.
Many of those installations are on or close to the shoreline.
We need healthy, robust ecosystems
that allow us to train the way we need to train.
Some of the best habitat for endangered and threatened species
are on DoD installations.
It's essentially public property we have to protect.
Protecting these same areas off installation
helps protect the mission here,
which is making Marines.
The thing about salt marsh is
that we all depend on it in different ways
and that it brings us all together.
The almost universal love of the coast,
I think, is in large part,
a love of salt marsh and the benefits it provides.
40 percent of the world's population lives along the coast
and the ecosystems that are along the coast
protect those communities of people
and that is essentially coastal resilience –
the linkages between coastal ecosystems
and coastal dwelling people,
which includes most of us.
[phone ringing]
Hello?
Hi, Daddy. How you doing?
I'm doing alright, how you?
Good. What you up to?
I'm at the shop washing some oysters and doing some filming.
Some filming?
Filming, yeah.
Oh, go ahead then big shot.
Yeah, I'll hit you back.
Alright.
We got the cleanest water on the East Coast,
and you can taste it.
Not only in the oyster, but the fish, the crab and all.
Where else can you get that?
It'll make you feel like, you know, you're blessed.
But it's a different feeling, man.
Yeah it's changing.
It's getting harder and harder, every year.
See them oyster right there?
There used to be salt marsh up against that.
Long time back you could see oysters
on the low water line.
It ain’t like that no more.
The tide are coming up more higher
and it's eroding the marsh.
Now only thing you see is dead shells.
That’s all.
I can just barely see the cylinder
right there below that group of oyster shells.
These line of poles marked the marsh shoreline,
so that is the SET that was established inside the marsh in 2004.
That cylinder is like this high above the mud bottom
and when we installed them it was even with the marsh surface.
And so, since 2008 sea-level rise in this area
has been on the order of seven millimeters per year.
The peninsula here is probably one of the most fertile
farmlands there is in the United States.
We can easily average 200 bushels of corn per acre here,
with no problem at all.
When saltwater comes in and it stays long enough,
it goes from 200 bushels to the acre, to as low as zero.
And here it is, this is the Swan Quarter Dike.
I’ve seen water right here where this truck is now,
this high up on the dike.
And on an average, I’d say we’re
a good six inches higher than we were when I was young.
Six inches is a big percentage when you’re not
but a foot above sea level to start with.
Has a storm ever been over this dike where we’re standing?
No.
Is it?
Yeah.
One day, there’s gonna be enough farmland lost
that nobody’s going to be able to make a living here.
We are capturing these birds because
birds are indicators of what’s happening in their environment.
Coastal areas and marshes in particular are very threatened habitats.
What we’re seeing with Seaside, Saltmarsh, and Nelson's Sparrows
is that they require certain habitat structure
in areas that are threatened by rising sea levels.
Despite the fact that these are really considered expansive salt marshes,
they’re really narrow.
There’s just nowhere for these marshes to move,
and this is essential habitat for these sparrows.
They are endemic to this
high to low marsh gradient, that they have to have to survive.
NOAA released a report earlier this year
which highlights the fact that by 2050,
they're expecting another foot of sea-level rise.
Right?
And then by the end of 2100,
they're expecting another two feet of sea-level rise.
So, you know, what we're seeing right now is a relatively high tide.
Imagine another foot or two feet on top of that by 2050 or 2100.
Everything that you see around here will be altered dramatically.
I'm trying hard to stay the objective scientist, but
yeah, it would be heartbreaking to lose a lot of this.
I have to admit, I look at these maps of sea-level rise and it's,
it's like a punch, punch in the gut.
This is really happening,
and I think now is the time to do everything we can to find solutions.
The reality is we're late.
We're out of time.
We already know that.
And we have to move out with a sense of urgency and purpose.
But that's no excuse to move out unwisely or without broad collaboration.
So, if you're in a hurry
and you don't have stakeholders involved, you're likely to fail.
So it's better to have broad stakeholder involvement,
community engagement,
interagency work,
to get a project that is successful from the beginning.
It's a wonderful thing when you grow up in a place
and other people come to that place and start valuing it.
And that was kind of the introduction to
the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative for me.
Here were people who all came together saying,
"this thing is so unique and so special and does so many valuable things,
we want everybody to value it."
So how do we do that?
The South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative is a partnership
between federal and state natural resource agencies,
including the Department of Defense,
and other partners ranging from the Gullah/Geechee Nation,
to private landowners, to environmental groups
all working together to conserve the one million acres of salt marsh
that currently extends from North Carolina down through Northeast Florida.
We’ve lost a lot of marsh and wetland habitat
in the United States over the last several hundred years.
On the order of 50 to 60%
of historic wetlands have been filled and or developed
along the east coast
and this continues.
We do have the "no net loss" of wetlands policies implemented in the '70s.
So that has helped.
Development has slowed.
The biggest problem we have now is really sea-level rise driven.
Sea-level rise is very likely to result in
devastating habitat loss to tidal marshes
within the next 50 to 100 years.
The saving grace is that
we do know that upland habitats are readily converting to tidal marsh
through marsh migration.
That conversion may not look pretty
because it affects coastal landowners and coastal land uses.
We can see ghost forest forming where
forests die off due to the influence of salt water,
but that process, is what will allow
tidal marshes to survive into the next century.
We have to act in such a manner so as not to eliminate choice.
As soon as you start to take choices off the table,
such as destroying a salt marsh, you can't undo it.
You can't go back.
You can't reverse it.
We have to really be looking forward 10 to 20 years
and it's going to take a lot of people
trying a lot of different things
and trying a lot of different ideas to solve this problem.
We talk about long term protection against erosion, coastal storms, sea-level rise,
there's a lot at stake here...
If we don't get it right,
we stand to lose the very foundation of our existence
in terms of our economy,
in terms of our desire to live, here, at the edge of the sea.
When you see it from the air you get a completely different appreciation
for just how interconnected our coastline is.
It doesn’t stop at state lines.
And that’s why I’m so excited when we’re
able to work with our partners in other states
because really having that uninterrupted
marsh protection is going to help all of us.
So, it's going to take a network and collaboration
and a consistent, codified effort
from these states to come up with a unified way of doing that.
We've got a lot of different people, a lot of different opinions,
a lot of different expertise working across different jurisdictions,
political boundaries.
So, it's no small task,
but the resources are there.
And there's a lot of momentum right now.
The salt marsh is easy to love;
our job is to help people understand it,
what it really does,
this natural resource that is so vital.
and we need to do that on a broad scale.
I’m seeing nature again through the eyes of my grandkids.
And it is phenomenal.
I just... I can't imagine their grandchildren not being able to enjoy that.
And so I'm going to do everything I can
and partner with as many organizations as we can
to make this
that's before us now – this salt marsh –
be here for ever, ever and ever.
The marshes and the rivers, to me, are just like my family.
You don't let anything happen to your loved ones, your family, or your kids,
without giving it all you've got.
I want to leave this world knowing
that it's not been destroyed on my watch.
If we squander this gift,
then what does that say to the sacrifice of our ancestors?
That's what motivates me.
To do them proud,
to live a life that they would say,
“I went through all of what I went through so you could have what you have.”
And then so the generation after me can do the same.
We stand at a pivotal moment
to think about sustainable future for coastal wetlands, for salt marsh,
because the issuance of the Conservation Plan for salt marsh
gives us all a great opportunity to "marsh forward" together
and to apply funding and other resources
to the principal recommendations and objectives
that are listed in the report.
I just hope that 600 years from now,
the salt marsh will still be providing
the wonderful benefits that it provides to people today
and that people down the road will be saying
“they did a good job back then,
the folks that thought about conserving and protecting
and sustaining this wonderful resource.”