I grew up on the water in Norfolk – both at play in boats and with its daily presence through my living room window.  Tidal marshes were a part of the landscape in which we as children would muck about, watching fiddler crabs scurry into their burrows and periwinkles glacially climb the marsh grass away from the rising tide.

That marsh is gone now, a victim of people’s quest for deeper water in a place nature said none should be.  But, as if to remind them of that folly, ever-higher tides are nurturing new wetlands on once dry ground in my childhood neighborhood.

John earned a M.S. in Geology from Old Dominion University and taught Earth Sciences and Oceanography for nine years at a Virginia Beach high school.  He is a co-founder of Wetlands Watch.