by Sarah Friday Peters 



over Werian 



The issues tie so closely to the 

 land. But so much seems to be up in 

 the air for one of North Carolina's 

 most important natural resources. 



Once, people considered wetlands 

 to be wastelands. The filled, open 

 waters, marshes, floodplains, bogs 

 and pocosins made good farmland 

 and terrain for forests. Wetlands 

 covered 1 1 million acres of the state 

 in 1780, according to the U.S. Fish 

 and Wildlife Service. Now about 5.5 

 million acres remain. 



State and federal regulations are 

 intended to protect remaining 



Bald cypress trees in a pocosin lake 



The problem 

 becomes muddy in 



North Carolina 

 because d iffer ent sets 



of rules govern 

 different types 

 of wetlands. 



wetlands. But the laws wind and 

 tangle like roads with no destinations. 

 No one has a road map, either, as 

 comprehensive wetlands policies 

 don't exist. Loopholes open avenues 

 to bypass the laws. And hazy defini- 

 tions of wetlands muddle the protec- 

 tion process. 



Recent attempts to streamline 

 wetland management sparked new 

 controversies between environmental- 

 ists and developers. The furor fumes 

 mostly over revisions to the 1989 

 Federal Manual for Identifying and 

 Delineating Wetlands and a bill before 



6 MARCH/APRIL 1992 



