SNOW HILL -- In the age-old struggle between man and nature, Bruce Nichols is helping the other side.
The bearded biologist is taking low-lying Eastern Shore farmland that had been laboriously drained over the centuries to raise corn or livestock and making it swampy again.
Roaming back roads like a traveling salesman, Nichols and other conservationists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have been persuading farmer after farmer to let them flood fields and woodlands.
He figures they have returned about 1,000 acres to their natural marshy state in the past few years. He says they can do the same with thousands more.
"It's going to change back to what it was," says Nichols, the agency's district conservationist for Worcester County. "All these areas previously were wetlands."
Nichols is in the vanguard of a new environmental movement. After decades of bitter wrangling over protecting wetlands with laws, many involved in the struggle are coming together to voluntarily restore these dwindling and once-maligned natural systems.
Driving the change is a growing recognition of the vital role wetlands play in protecting drinking water, preventing floods and sustaining wildlife.
Elected officials from President Clinton on down have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to creating new wetlands or restoring those that were drained or bulldozed years ago.
"We seem to be on the verge of a major new effort to restore wetlands and the physical structures of rivers and estuaries," said Timothy Searchinger, with the Environmental Defense Fund Washington.
Duck hunters have long valued wetlands. Hunting groups and government wildlife agencies have been creating or restoring swamps to improve waterfowl hunting for more than 50 years.
Within the past decade, though, large-scale efforts have been launched in the name of flood control or pollution cleanup to restore marshland along the Mississippi River, in Louisiana's bayous and in Florida's fabled Everglades.
In the Chesapeake Bay region, state and federal officials hope creating and restoring wetlands will help revive America's largest estuary, polluted by fertilizer running off farmland and suburban lawns. Until now, much of the bay cleanup has focused on expensive overhauls of sewage treatment plants.
Without setting a deadline, Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening has pledged to create or restore 60,000 acres of marshland. That would replace what the state has lost to development since World War II.
