Earth is a rocky planet—a peculiarly watery one—spinning around a relatively huge, hot, radiating ball of thermonuclear plasma. How water got here and why it hasn't boiled off and blown away to a colder region in our solar system is somewhat of a mystery to scientists; though they're coming up with some plausible theories. Man is a terrestrial chordate, whose niche is dry land. But this niche, nevertheless, is dependent on the water cycle for its wellbeing; weather, rain, rivers, streams give vitality to a place that would otherwise be dryer than desert. Popular media reports, give us the impression that the carbon cycle and man's activities are the major factors controlling weather and whether the arctic regions stay as they are, advance, or retreat. In reality, carbon dioxide is only a factor. There are other factors and other cycles; for example, Milankovitch cycles, a theory that describes the collective effects of changes in our planet's movements upon the climate. This theory is not yet completed, but it is an exceedingly interesting idea, one that would help explain some of the glacial and interglacial activity here on our cozy little rock in space.

Caught up in a triune relationship between sun, water, and land, the best representatives of this confluence are wetlands; in my opinion anyway they are. This is where it all happens: water, land, sky congregate at these mires; life and death coexist and complement one another; time, schedules, governments, wars, and WikiLeaks seem rather unimportant here. By definition wetlands are areas that are inundated by water at a frequency and duration sufficient to support a prevalence of water loving plants typically adapted to waterlogged soils. Wetlands generally include swamps, marshes, bogs, and the like.

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