Joel Caldwell and two friends have been working to improve wetlands in Charleston, South Carolina.

All three had kids around COVID, prompting them to reexamine their surroundings. They found Halsey Creek, a tidal marsh that was dirty and neglected. To clean, expand and preserve it, they started The MARSH Project.

Their work involves planting pollinator gardens, trash pickups and testing the water quality with others in the community. The work comes at a time when federal wetlands protections are being rolled back. Caldwell believes local, tangible actions can make a difference.

Their answer was improving the creek that snakes into their section of Charleston -- preserving its tidal flow, expanding its reach and rewilding its edges. This wetland is a life-supporting transition zone where the bigger river meets the land. Their work here is small in scale and local, but it is tangible and has built a community at a time when it has gotten easier to destroy such places. 

With fewer wetlands there are fewer fish, fewer plants, fewer insects and birds, dirtier water and less protection against floods. That flooding is a special concern in hurricane-prone Charleston. Storm threats are compounded further by sea rise, which is being driven by climate change. The trio's restoration work fits into a growing public appreciation over the last 10 to 15 years for how wetlands help absorb floodwater.

Halsey Creek is mere blocks from Caldwell's house. The tidal salt marsh extends a few thousand feet from the Ashley River, one of three rivers that meet at Charleston, snaking between blocks of single-family homes many squeezed on one-tenth-of-an-acre lots.

Over the years, they’ve pulled tires, radios, televisions, "generations of garbage” and even brought over winches to remove a car engine from the marsh.

Americans historically viewed wetlands like these as impediments to progress, better drained, filled and built on than saved. As a result, there’s far less of them and their decline has accelerated in recent years, according to a 2024 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report. Plus, two years ago, the Supreme Court weakened modern Clean Water Act wetlands protections, a rollback the Trump administration is likely to expand upon.

The wetlands around Charleston support oyster beds that filter water and cling to long, wooden piers that stretch over shallow water and into the Ashley River. Kingfishers and egrets fly between the cordgrass. It's a humid, sticky place during blazing summers in the South. A vein of the river becomes Halsey Creek, shooting into the Wagner Terrace neighborhood, a suburban area north of Charleston's historic downtown. 

To help protect the wetlands, the MARSH Project's first significant conservation step was buying an acre of land from a local landowner.

That acre is not obviously remarkable, running along a sloped strip that hugs the water, a runway of backyard grass on one side and bushes crowding the other.

But the purchase ensures it will stay wetlands, not become new houses.

The trio of founders are now starting to look outside of their neighborhood to create a corridor of native plants and trees to connect wildlife across the city’s few remaining creeks. It builds on four years of hosting public lectures, trash pickups, bringing in students for water quality testing and a host of other community events.

Through them, they’ve found success focusing on an issue, and local actions — not broader politics.

(AP Video by Joshua A. Bickel)