Can I get interesting enough? I ask myself. How am I going to pull through the monotony of speaking about environment and social change without putting you off, my dearest friends? I don’t know. Please bear with me, and I compel you to read on.

Talking about wetlands - I’m certain - create little sentiments among us. To put it into perspective, how many of us are even accustomed to the word wetlands, or to put it more aptly in our mother tongue, tanah lembap?

Wetlands wastelands

People go to the beaches or rivers for a picnic, or perhaps to national parks for a bit of more adventurous excursions. But wetlands remains unheard of as destinations for holiday or worse, a place to be conserved. People wants to hear orang utan, tigers, elephants and magnificent streams. But not wetlands.

Even in biological terms, wetlands are not really a place for a variety of beautiful creatures to thrive. Think more of lake placid, a sink for processing waste and nature by-products, a lake where you cannot reach its bottom surface if you’re swimming in it, the water so dark you wonder if a Tioman fish might come and take a bite at your toes.

The world celebrate wetlands

So, why in the heaven, we ask - are we celebrating the World Wetlands Day for?

In a way, I suppose the apathy presents a larger problem which reside in our society. Our line of thoughts often stops at the stage where we dispose things; garbage, landfill, poop, shit. No one wants to talk about dirty things.

Unfortunately, these businesses of pakai buang - use and abuse, as appropriately termed by the Ramsar secretariat, are not affecting wetlands alone, but the whole chain of water resources we depend on at present. Wetlands, lakes, swamps, rivers and creeks all make up a system of river basin which works together to provide the clean and cheap water we so comfortably use at home.

Wetlands in particular, functions as the sink to treat sediments, store excess water to regulate flooding and keep groundwater and river flow recharged. However, continuous land clearing for agriculture (of palm oil plantations, especially) caused erosion and sedimentation of soils and dirt, which at times could exceed the capacity of wetlands to process such loadings.

The result? The infamous teh tarik-coloured rivers we can see everywhere from Klang to Kelantan rivers.

So what, now?

Having known the basic importance of wetlands, we ask ourselves, now what are we to do as young people? We are certainly limited in both skills and resources, we say.

Nothing beats the world cliche tak kenal maka tak cinta, why not in the next excursion pay a visit to a wetland closest to you; be it natural, artificial lake or mangrove swamps. Get yourself immersed in the calm and reflective waters of the lake and savour the quietness around only to be broken up by occassional chirpings of birds and monkeys.

See the other side of your land, sometimes not only it’ll make you fall in love with the place, but also with each other. Because nature has its way of stripping us of our human insecurities and helps us become a more honest version of ourselves.

Try it with wetlands, you’ll be surprised at how it may change you.

This entry is written in conjunction with the celebration of the World Wetlands Day on February 2 every year. The theme for 2009 is Upstream-Downstream: Wetlands Connect Us All. Read more about it at Ramsar’s website.