World Wetlands Day and the Gutting of the Clean Water Act
On February 2, 1971, the Ramsar Convention was signed, a day celebrated each year as World Wetlands Day
On February 2, 1971, representatives from around the world gathered in the Iranian city of Ramsar and signed a treaty aimed at protecting some of the most important, yet also most underappreciated, ecosystems on the planet.
The elaborate name of the international gathering says it all: the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat.
Recognizing that the soggy, muddy, low-lying places most people overlook are essential to life on Earth, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands was the first modern global agreement focused on a specific ecosystem. It acknowledged that wetlands regulate water, sustain wildlife, and protect human communities in ways no engineered system can fully replace.
Now, more than half a century later, World Wetlands Day, celebrated every year on February 2, commemorates that signing.
In the United States, however, the day arrives at a time when many of the legal tools that once mirrored Ramsar’s ecological understanding—especially within the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act—are being narrowed.
As definitions of what counts as protected “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) shrink—more on that below—the gap between necessary wetland and wildlife protection, and the political will to actually do so, widens.
Wetlands rarely feature on postcards, in Instagram posts, or in TikTok videos. They’re flat, quiet, and easy to dismiss. Yet these low places perform some of the highest public service in the American landscape.
They hold back floods before levees feel pressure. They clean water before man-made treatment plants even come into play. They harbor the fish, crustaceans, insects, and birds that sustain entire food webs. And they do it across millions of acres of publicly owned lands and waters.
Some American wetlands are recognized under Ramsar as “Wetlands of International Importance.”
The blackwater labyrinth of the Okefenokee Swamp, where peat soils store vast amounts of carbon and slow-moving channels temper downstream flooding; the cattail seas of Horicon Marsh, where migrating waterfowl refuel on a continental flyway; the drowned trees of Caddo Lake; the old-growth bottomland hardwood forests of Congaree National Park, discussed wonderfully here by Will C. De Man on his National Park History Substack; the slow sheet flow and mangrove estuaries of Everglades National Park; and the almost unimaginable abundance of the Izembek Wilderness in Alaska, which is currently threatened by a road proposed by the Trump administration, are listed as Wetlands of International Importance.
Their ecological function is so obvious that it warranted global recognition.
Yet, almost shockingly, many of the most iconic wetland systems on America’s public lands and waters—places every bit as vital—are absent from that list.
The crane-filled shallows of Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, which is on my list of threatened public lands to visit this year. The marsh geometry of Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. The vast marshes of the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex. And of course, then there are the Boundary Waters, located within the single largest interconnected freshwater system in North America, and currently our biggest public lands battle. All easily meet Ramsar criteria. None are designated.
Those wetlands aren’t internationally designated Ramsar sites because they lack significance. It’s because Ramsar designation requires national nomination, and the United States has—for whatever reason—historically been selective, even hesitant, in submitting its own sites.
The result is a quiet irony on World Wetlands Day: some of the most ecologically productive wetlands on Earth, held in public trust for all Americans, lack even the symbolic international recognition afforded to lesser-known sites elsewhere.
For context: despite the sheer abundance and diversity of ecologically important and environmentally vulnerable wetlands across the sprawling United States, we only have 41 internationally recognized Ramsar sites.
Denmark has 43; Ireland has 45; Finland has 49; Algeria and the Ukraine have 50; France has 55; the Netherlands, which is about 235 times smaller than the United States, has 58; Italy has 63; Spain has 76; China has 82; India has 98; Mexico has 144; and the U.K. has 176.
The United States, if it wanted to, could easily lead the world in terms of wetland protection—which would, if we’re being real here, greatly improve national security across the entire country. Securing clean water is securing life and food in the future.
The United States has the huge river deltas, it has the vast swamps, it has the meandering rivers, it has the pristine coastal lagoons. But it doesn’t increase their protections—and it’s a political choice to remain a minor conservation actor on the international scene.
Before anyone says ‘yeah but America came up with the national park idea,’ I’d like to say that, yes, of course it did. But that doesn’t mean the country is actually doing a good job protecting its natural areas.
While we talk a lot about public lands—which encompass 640 million acres—it’s important to remember that, while publicly owned, much of that is, in fact, unprotected land. Most BLM land, for example, which is the largest type of public land in the country, is not set aside to protect its natural resources. Rather the opposite, that’s where most of the drilling and mining takes place.
Public lands are not the same as protected lands.
Again, allow me to provide some context. (This might blow your mind.)
According to aggregate 2024 data reported by the World Bank, in terms of terrestrial protected area as a percentage of total land area, the United States, with its 12.9% of protected land, ranks 139th in the world (in a list of independent nations and autonomous regions/territories).
139th.
Let that sink in.
For anyone who has the impression that the United States is a global leader in conservation, how’s that for a reality check?
America is behind Nigeria (13.9%), Mexico (15.3%), South Sudan (15.4%), China (15.6%), Ukraine (16.8%), Saudi Arabia (18.5%), and Mongolia (19.8%).
And it’s way behind Mozambique (29.5%), Brazil (30.6%), Bolivia (30.9%), New Zealand (33.4%), Germany (39.3%), Tanzania (40.0%), Bulgaria (44.3%), and yes, Venezuela (56.8%), which is the third most conservation-minded country on the planet.
If you’re looking for something “positive,” though, the United States performs as well—or, rather, as poorly—as Canada (also 12.9%) but better than Russia (11.5%), Kazakhstan (10.1%), the West Bank and Gaza (10.0%), Argentina (8.8%), and Iran (8.6%), which, perhaps ironically, is where the Ramsar Convention was signed.
Pardon the rabbit hole I just went into, but I thought this was absolutely fascinating context.
Back, now, to the United States itself.
Domestically, right now, the United States is actively and rapidly forsaking the future of its own clean water, which depends massively on the health of its wetlands.
For decades, the Clean Water Act recognized that wetlands connected to streams, rivers, and lakes deserved protection because they function as part of those waters. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) recognized that the survival of species depends on intact habitat, much of it wet, seasonal, and extraordinarily sensitive to pollution.
Those statutes worked in tandem across public lands. A wet meadow in a national forest filtered sediment before it reached a trout stream. A marsh in a wildlife refuge buffered storm surge for coastal towns. A bog on BLM land stored centuries of carbon while providing breeding grounds for migratory waterfowl protected under federal law.
Last November, however, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency issued a change to the definition of “waters of the United States,” also known as WOTUS, under the Clean Water Act. Under this new definition, federally protected public waters would be limited only to those that have a clear, continuous surface connection to larger, navigable waters.
The word ‘surface’ is crucial here because the proposed change to what WOTUS means would eliminate all water that’s either underground or not connected to navigable waters from federal protection.
Places that are seasonally wet or waters that are subsurface-connected—such as desert washes, ephemeral streams, subterranean lakes and aquifers, and especially seasonal wetlands—would no longer clearly qualify for protection under this narrower framework. The science has not changed. The guardrails have.
This also matters because roughly 60% of total U.S. river discharge originates from streams that do not flow year-round.
Additionally, across the prairie potholes of the Dakotas, shallow spring basins become the most productive waterfowl nurseries on the continent. In the high desert wetlands of southeastern Oregon, spring snowmelt spreads into shallow lakes that become essential breeding grounds for waterbirds in an otherwise arid landscape. Inside the soaked peat soils of Pocosin Lakes, red wolves and black bears move through shrub wetlands that store water like a sponge.
These species stories are wetlands stories. When wet places shrink or disappear, migration falters, breeding fails, and recovery under the ESA becomes more difficult and more expensive.
Wetlands slow water down long enough for life to do its work. Sediment drops. Nutrients are taken up. Pollutants are transformed. What flows downstream is clearer and more stable. Remove the wetland, and the burden shifts to pipes, pumps, artificial filtration systems—to metal and concrete.
Wetlands are not unusable tracts of land. They’re cost-effective, self-maintaining public works. These are the waters that filter pollutants, regulate temperature, recharge aquifers, and sustain downstream flows.
When they’re degraded, no amount of downstream protection can fully compensate. When they stop working properly, taxpayers pay elsewhere and pay more—through higher flood damages, more expensive water treatment, collapsing fisheries, and emergency habitat restoration for species sliding toward listing under the ESA. Yet they’re routinely excluded from conservation planning, now weakened under Clean Water Act interpretations, or dismissed as expendable because they lack year-round flow.
World Wetlands Day is not about distant deltas alone. It’s about the soggy meadow beside a forest trail, the marsh beyond a refuge dike, the floodplain that disappears under brown water every spring and reappears greener for it.
It’s about recognizing that the places least likely to be celebrated are often the ones doing the most essential work for clean water, wildlife, climate stability, and community safety.
And, perhaps more currently and urgently, it’s about acknowledging that recent environmental rollbacks by the current administration are widening the gap between what these landscapes provide and what our laws actually protect.
Wetlands don’t ask for attention. They’re not imposing like a towering redwood forest. They’re not awe-inspiring like the jagged peaks of the Teton Range. They’re not picturesque like a summer meadow on the slopes of Mount Rainier. They’re not jaw-dropping like the chasm of the Grand Canyon.
What they do, however, is function—absorbing, filtering, storing, buffering, raising life—until the day they’re filled, drained, or fragmented. By then, the losses show up somewhere else: in higher flood crests, dirtier water, disappearing migrations, and species pushed closer to the edge.
On this World Wetlands Day, the call is simple yet important: see those unassuming low-lying places for what they are.
The health of America’s public lands and waters, the future availability of our drinking waters, the protection against destructive floods, the strength of the Clean Water Act, and the power of the Endangered Species Act are all braided through lands where water lingers and life begins.
Without healthy wetlands, everything else collapses.
If you’d like to help protect America’s wetlands, streams, and rivers, I strongly recommend supporting American Rivers, one of my favorite national conservation organizations.
Thanks for reading!
See you on our public lands and waters,
Bram
Photo 1: Wet meadows at Blacktail Ponds Overlook, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
Photo 2: Great blue heron in Shark Valley, Everglades National Park, Florida
Photo 3: Turtle in Beaver Marsh, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio
Photo 4: Seasonal Medano Creek in Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado
Photo 5: Snowy egret in Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida
Thanks for the focus on wetlands!