Wetlands Watch –
Conservation Today, Tomorrow, Forever

“In the absence of adequate funding and staffing, Virginia relies on everyday citizens to oversee its most significant piece of environmental legislation. This requires a corps of volunteers observant enough to know something is wrong, aggressive enough to delve into complex regulations, and persistent enough to combat an often-hostile bureaucracy.”
Virginian Pilot, July 30, 2001, “Failed Law Fails the Chesapeake Bay”

That statement summarizes why Wetlands Watch was formed and what keeps us going.

Wetlands Watch believes that Virginia’s residents can best know the value of wetlands and coastlines. Our citizens properly informed and motivated, will be the source of the energy and vision needed to guide Virginia through the difficult times ahead.   Wetlands Watch will make this happen.

Wetlands Watch works throughout Virginia to protect and conserve the state’s wetlands and shoreline environment.  We use advocacy, education, and activism to reverse historic losses of wetlands, seeking to insure that our children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy Virginia’s environmental treasures.

On the state level, Wetlands Watch studies trends in wetlands-disturbing activities and regulatory practices, identifies the factors that undermine wetlands protection, and develops recommendations to promote more effective stewardship of our wetlands resources.

Wetlands Watch works in three ways:

ADVOCACY – We work to create and expand market incentives and regulatory programs to improve wetlands stewardship
EDUCATION – We help people make informed choices to conserve wetlands
ACTIVISM – We motivate business and governments at all levels to increase wetlands protection

We use tried-and-true wetlands conservation approaches as well as developing new approaches to deal with sea level rise.  We work in partnership with other large and small groups, and also work independently when needed.

Since John Smith landed in 1607, Virginia has lost half of its wetlands to development.  Now the rest are at risk.  Virginia is last in the nation in per-capita natural resource spending, leaving many natural resources under-protected.  While Virginia has made promises to protect and restore wetlands, it is making scant progress toward those goals.  Now, with sea level rising, many of the remaining wetlands are at risk.

Wetlands Watch is small, smart, and growing, having evolved in a measured and careful way since its start in 1999:  from local activism, to regional volunteer group, to statewide organization.   We received our first grant in 2004 and were asked to sit on statewide panels and environmental agency committees. One such assignment with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality resulted in their directing a significant wetlands penalty payment to Wetlands Watch in 2005.

This funding triggered our decision to move to a paid staff operation and seek our first major foundation grant in 2006. Wetlands Watch has been recognized for its work in many ways, most recently with the appointment of its Executive Director to the Virginia Commission on Climate Change.

Our early regulatory and policy work focused on local, state, and federal wetlands permit decisions, but we soon learned that this did not get us far – in a strong property rights state, land use decisions often trump the regulatory process.  Today, we spend much of our time helping individuals, organizations, and local governments to make better land use decisions to protect the coastal and wetlands environments.

The newest chapter of our work is focused on sea level rise and the threat to Virginia’s remaining coastal wetlands.  Realizing we could not wait for the state and federal governments to respond, Wetlands Watch is conducting its own programs at the local level, raising its own funding, to help Virginia’s coastal communities plan for sea level rise.  Our objective is to develop models that can be replicated by other tidewater communities.

Wetlands Watch has launched a campaign to mobilize the people of tidewater Virginia, to address sea level rise. Our top-down and bottom-up approach — working at both the state and local levels — will create a network in Virginia dedicated to sustaining our coastal ecosystems, the land at the margin that maintains our habitat, heritage, and economy.