(soft music and birds chirping) - [Emily] I feel like the marsh is just like running in my blood.

(soft music) It just smells right.

It feels right.

And it's where I just wanna be.

(soft music) And then I looked up the salinity of he human blood and it's the exact same as an estuary marsh.

Like 8 to 10 batch per thousand.

It's a sweet spot.

(laughs) So I'm a marsh.

(laughs) (soft music) - [Commentator] Emily Howe is an aquatic ecologist with the Nature Conservancy.

But her connection to the environment she studies goes beyond her research.

- [Emily] Estuaries are enigmatic places.

They only exist in places where the river meets the sea and they form this incredible transition from the terrestrial landscape out into the Marine waters.

And in the middle, there's a spectrum of low vegetation marsh, high grasses, cattails, scrub shrub.

So it's this full continuum that has no edges.

(soft music) The human landscape is so straight and has such hard boundaries.

And the marsh ecosystem is so soft and everything is just a curve and it all blends.

(soft music) It's that fluidity and the mess that works with me.

We're gonna dive in.

(laughs) - [Commentator] The fluidity and complexity of the food web present in marshes makes them unique.

It also makes them incredibly resilient.

So resilient that they can actually heal and clean the ecosystem around them.

(soft music) By square meter, marshes can absorb as much carbon a year as a tropical rainforest.

(soft music) - [Emily] Estuaries are quite underappreciated.

These are some of the most if not the most productive ecosystems on earth.

(soft music) We talk about them as the river's liver sometimes or it's kidney system.

They are the filtration systems for everything that pours off the land before it hits the sea.

If you lost both your kidneys and someone was to give you one back you would kind of hope that one kidney was operating at 100% rather than like a 25% kidney.

And that's how I think about the estuary marsh restoration work that we do.

- [Commentator] When Emily wades out into the marsh, her team runs a transect.

Basically, this is a long invisible line connecting the plants that will be on her path of study.

Along this invisible transect, she and her colleagues will count and measure plants, record salinity and monitor the overall health of the marsh to see how it changes as temperature and sea levels increase over time.

(indistinct chatter) - [Emily] The data that we collect on vegetation, fish distribution and poor water salinity, all of those data get combined to tell us how well each step of our restoration process is recovering the marsh.

- That's kind of where the mouth of the bay is.

We should try to just point end of our quadrant that way.

- [Emily] For long long times in human history, they've been regarded as wastelands.

Our whole infrastructure system is sort of built to either obliterate them or avoid them.

(soft music) - [Commentator] In the recent history of the Pacific Northwest, human behavior has tilted heavily towards obliteration.

With few flat places to farm or build cities, white settlers chose to literally drain these life-giving wetlands.

Up to 90% of marshland on the West Coast is gone.

Removing an invaluable resource for the diverse flora and fauna that relies on them.

(soft music) - [Emily] They've been filled.

They've been dredged.

They've been turned into industrial lands.

Things that are often considered, 'higher uses'.

The nursery ecosystems, baby fish do really well there.

If you get rid of them, you lose all of your fisheries.

You lose all of that filtration capacity.

So you lose your water quality.

You lose an enormous carbon sink.

Ooh, the channels full of fish.

There are a few of us who have the chance to spend our lives listening to what an estuary or a marsh might need.

And when you are someone who has the privilege of doing that, I think it carries with it an enormous responsibility to return that favor and to listen to what that marsh is saying.

(soft music) - [Commentator] For all the wet wonders contained within the marsh, it's still a marsh.

It's one of the rare places humans are poorly adapted to and moving through it is an acquired skill.

- [Emily] There's really dense stands of abrusian sages that you could just barely crash your way through.

There's the cattail forest.

(indistinct chatter) They're 15 feet high.

You can't see past your hand when you're in them.

And then there'll be sort of a low bumpy area that's got all these really tiny green plants that look like a golf screen.

And those are the places, they look so inviting and you should not go anywhere near them.

Those are the suck holes.

(laughs) This is a good spot to like start toe walking.

The marsh teaches you something about humility.

Either it just takes you out in the mud or it turns your thinking on its head.

Good one Mia.

(indistinct chatter) There's something that is really beautiful about being challenged to the edge of your limits.

(soft music) And I think as humans, we carry quite a lot of hubris that we can make the world to our liking.

And I really like those reminders that there are places in the world that are still bigger than me.

(soft music)