Sometimes, cruising around on the web is like getting lost in the Fun House: you’re just as likely to scream as you are to laugh. I started out looking for the status of EPA’s proposed rule to reclassify certain pharmaceuticals as universal waste. The comment period has been extended, so there’s no way of knowing what the revised version will look like. From there, I stumbled across the Drug Take-Back Network (www.drugtakeback.com), a partnership of the Product Stewardship Institute and King Pharmaceuticals. The website features a directory listing drug take-back programs around the country and a “Green Pharmacy Program Toolkit” produced by the Teleosis Institute. The Toolkit provides a pile of information for pharmacists, doctors and municipal officials to establish drug take-back programs.

The next stop was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has information about pharmaceuticals in public waters, and from pharmaceuticals to a new report that documents an annual loss of 59,000 acres of wetlands in the coastal watersheds of the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Great Lakes. Eighteen percent of that loss was to saltwater marshes along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Obviously, the greatest loss was up in wetlands higher up in the watersheds, but the loss of salt marsh stopped me cold.

To someone who loves salt marshes, the numbers are ugly, ugly. They’re dangerous numbers for the millions of people now living on increasingly vulnerable coasts and they’re probably distressing numbers for people looking to catch a few fish. They’re undoubtedly disturbing numbers for the scientists singing away like canaries in mineshafts about the links between salt marshes and fish populations. My response is more primitive, closer to a kick in the stomach than a tap on the shoulder or even a whack on the back of the head. Salt marshes don’t come back, at least not in one human’s lifetime. And, if that report is correct, last year we lost another 10,620 acres of them. Nothing funny about that.