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American universities were not doing very well in the 1970s and early 1980s in developing rigorous interdisciplinary programs on the environment for the benefit of graduate students. Rather, relatively few graduate programs named environmental science existed in those early days and fewer had a true mix of interdisciplinarity. This chapter describes a multi-year undertaking that I initiated in the late 1980s to develop a robust interdisciplinary graduate program in environmental science at The Ohio State University (OSU), soon after I arrived there in 1986. It involved dozens of meetings interspersed with two or three years of small victories and setbacks typical in universities. But persistence paid off and, in the end, we developed and received administrative approval a formal program labelled the Environmental Science Graduate Program (ESGP) that was and continues to be housed in OSU's Graduate School and has now flourished there for almost 35 years. It has produced hundreds of M.S. and Ph.D. students, who are now labeled environmental scientists, including 31 ESGP graduate students completed by me with thesis or dissertation (13 M.S students and 18 doctoral students) over a 25-year period of 1989–2014. Many of my ESGP graduates are now leaders in environmental science and related programs around the USA and world, some in academic institutions including Kenyon College, Morehead State University, the University of Louisiana, Louisiana State University, Oregon State University, George Mason University, Dennison University (OH), The Ohio State University, Duke University, Central College (Iowa), and the University of Oklahoma. Importantly, hundreds of ESGP graduates have learned how interdisciplinary science works and are either teaching this in universities or practicing it in consulting firms and government environmental agencies and are active in solving big environmental issues such as climate change, harmful algal blooms, wetland and river restoration, or hazardous and industrial waste disposal. The net effect is that we have a much more sustainable landscape and waterscape in many states and countries where our ESGP students settled.

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I was born and raised in the Upper Ohio River Valley in Wheeling, West Virginia. After going away to college at the University of Notre Dame (1965–69), then spending a couple years getting my M.E. and Ph.D. at the University of Florida (1971–75) and then teaching ecological engineering in Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology (1975–79), I joined the University of Louisville in the late 1970s as a systems ecologist (1980–1985). I noted that the Ohio River, which in the first half of the 20th century was labeled in The New York Times as “an industrial aorta” of the United States because it drained a vital industrial corridor in the USA, was not getting the environmental attention that other major waterways in the USA were receiving in terms of research funding. It was not as glamorous as Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River, the Hudson River, and the Great Lakes, probably because it drained Appalachia, not some high population corridor. I began meeting with professors in other universities in the watershed and we started the Ohio River Basin Consortium for Research and Education (ORBCRE) with a grant from The Virginia Environmental Endowment. The ORBCRE still exists today to link researchers in the watershed. The Consortium also provided a network for our reenactment in 1987 of an 1826–27 “Boatload of Knowledge” journey down the Ohio River, ours with professors and graduate students rather than the utopians and restless scientists of the original voyage. The attention that our “boatload” received from the press from Pittsburgh to Louisville was significant. This history and beauty of the Ohio River especially in its post-industrial condition are reminders that the Ohio is a great river in American history. Our second “Boatload of Knowledge” down the river in 1987 also taught us that a river can be a teacher too, something I have never forgotten.

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Perhaps for a century from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, the states of Indiana and Illinois were essentially in a civil war over whether a magnificently large riverine wetland where the two states meet just south of Lake Michigan be conserved or drained. Before its draining, the Kankakee Marshlands were one of the largest freshwater marshes in the United States. They are still referred to by many conservationists today as having been the “Everglades of the North.” This chapter discusses the drainage history of this vast wetland, the conflict between these two states, and a project that I worked on in the late 1970s with the state of Illinois to estimate the value of some of the remnant wetlands in terms of dollars using what at that time were early procedures in a new field referred to as ecological economics. Our study must have had some effect because today Indiana and Illinois are currently involved in restoring the Kankakee Marshlands in many locations.

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I have been active in China since my Danish friend Sven-Erik Jørgensen and I were first invited to the country in fall 1987 (I was 40 years old then) after meeting some Chinese scientists at an International Ecology (INTECOL) conference in Syracuse, New York. Early collaborations were with Chinese scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing and Beijing. In Beijing, we worked with Professor Ma Shijun and his colleagues. Ma was considered the “father of ecological engineering in China” at the time. We toured their ecological wastewater treatment projects, one of which utilized beds of water hyacinths (Eichhornia crassipes) for removing both nutrients and organic matter from polluted rivers and then recycling to consumers such as fish, snails, ducks, pigs, and oxen. We also set up collaborations with Nanjing University. Particularly with Professor C.S. Chung who taught there, on his coastal restoration approaches with Spartina and related grasses for protecting China's fragile coastline. For the next 20 years, we pretty much visited all corners of China, giving guest lectures at universities and later at international conferences. In total, I have given more than 100 presentations over 30 years in 25 cities and towns in China. And we have received many visiting Chinese scientists at my labs, particularly at The Ohio State University's Olentangy River Wetland Research Park in Columbus and Florida Gulf Coast University's Everglades Wetland Research Park in Naples.

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On January 23, 2020, the Donald Trump administration, through the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), redefined “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) and removed many of our small streams and isolated wetlands from federal government protection. Within days, I feared that I would be dragged into this fray once again. The debate is on how wetlands fit into another revised definition of wetlands and WOTUS under the Clean Water Act. A blog reporter interviewed me soon after this Trump story appeared and published his blog with the title: “FGCU Wetlands Professor Blasts Trump Water Rules, Calls for Citizen Action.” Had Trump not been defeated for a second term, this change could have resulted in the complete annihilation of wetlands in the United States. It sounded like déjà vu all over again for me—to a time 25 to 30 years earlier in the early 1990s when wetlands were threatened by redefinitions of WOTUS and wetlands under a different president. I was then, for a much longer time, in the crosshairs of the dispute, fighting for the survival of America's wetlands. This chapter discusses mostly the 1990s and how we were in a position to save wetlands as WOTUS. The procedure for obtaining a “404 permit” for dredge-and-fill activity in wetlands has never been simple since the first procedure for delineating wetlands was developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1987, well after the Army Corps of Engineers were teamed up with the new U.S. EPA to “define” what a wetland is with indicators. The enabling legislation then and now was the Clean Water Act of 1972, even though the Act did not mention wetlands when it was first passed. In the initial screening of a project that involves potential effects on wetlands, the following three approaches are evaluated in sequence: Avoidance: Taking steps to avoid wetland impacts where practicable. Minimization: Minimizing potential impacts to wetlands. Mitigation: Providing compensation for any remaining, unavoidable impacts through the restoration or creation of wetlands. This chapter reviews a period in the early 1990s when Congress, the federal government, and countless scientists and engineers were lined up and debating once again whether and how wetlands fit into the WOTUS and how we should define them.

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Connecting rivers with their historic floodplains has been a cornerstone of my research for much of my career. When I returned to Chicago, Illinois, after my Ph.D. years at University of Florida, I was at first lamenting the fact that I no longer had access to Florida freshwater cypress swamps. Luckily, a knowledgeable natural resource scientist from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, told me, to my astonishment, that Illinois had many cypress (Taxodium) swamps, but in the southern tip of Illinois at the northern extreme of the Mississippi Embayment, where the great rivers of North America—the Ohio and the Mississippi—merge. I was directed to Heron Pond, one of the most majestic riverine floodplain cypress swamps I have ever seen anywhere, tucked on the Cache River tributary, at different times in its history a tributary to both the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. I had a few grad students at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, notably Carol Dorge and John Wiemhoff, who were a great help in establishing a research program that emphasized the hydrologic and nutrient connections between the seasonal flooding Cache River and Heron Pond on the floodplain. We were fortunate to be able to gather water quality and sedimentation data during a historic flood in late March 1977 that we published in the distinguished journal Ecology. We were able to develop a well-quantified phosphorus budget of Heron Pond, illustrating how important the exchange of phosphorus from the river is for the riparian swamp, even though a tiny percentage of the river's phosphorus deposited onto the floodplain was enough “fertilizer” to support massive-sized cypress and tupelo trees and the ecosystem structure for many organisms. We also found that this one flood brought in ten times more phosphorus than what flowed back to the river for the rest of the year. Fifteen years later, just as I was moving to The Ohio State University, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a brilliant engineer and long-time friend Donald Hey and other wetland scientists at the Des Plaines River Wetland Demonstration Project in Lake County, Illinois, where Don was using pumps to optimize exchange between the Des Plaines River and created riparian wetlands. I finished five Ph.D. students in and near the Des Plaines River experimental wetlands even though Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago was a very long drive. We had a three-year experiment at the Des Plaines site where we investigated nutrient retention of low- and high-flow floodplain wetlands. Again, the right mixture of grants, grad students, and experienced scientists and engineers were in the right place at the right time for our eventual creation of floodplain wetlands on the campus of The Ohio State University that is described in the next chapter.

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I spent 22 years at The Ohio State University designing, constructing, managing, and financing (including an $1.8 million endowment), with a master plan: a 20-hectare (50-acre) wetland research and teaching facility immediately north of the campus, called the Olentangy River Wetland Research Park. From the beginning, I was told by naysayers that it would never be built, not out of their malevolence but out of their experience in trying to do things at a mega-university the size and complexity of Ohio State. I viewed my then-new university differently. The Ohio State University was one of only a few universities in the USA that had all academic fields possible in one location, so it was fertile ground for pulling together interdisciplinary research and teaching. After the research park was constructed, it became, to our biased eyes, the second most popular site of activity at The Ohio State University, second only to the Buckeyes football team's Ohio Stadium. Seventy masters and Ph.D. students and 20 post-docs completed their research there in the first two decades with our team of professors, attracting millions of dollars in grants and donations and contributing significantly to wetland science, with more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and a dozen books. But that is only part of the story. First, the wetlands needed to be built. But like many good things on academic campuses, some university bureaucrats would see the site as a threat to their power base and/or only as an asset they could sell off “for a mess of pottage.” Both eventually happened.

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This chapter summarizes several of my research projects related to the Florida Everglades, mostly during to my time at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU). It is proper that we should do research in the Florida Everglades, given that I named my new center in FGCU The “Everglades Wetland Research Park.” The restoration of the Florida Everglades, one of the largest wetland areas in the world, actually involves hundreds of separate initiatives being carried out in the 4.45-million hectare (11-million-acre) Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades (KOE) region in the southern third of Florida. One of my projects involved working with the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) that began while I was still at The Ohio State University was entitled, “Assessing nutrient removal efficacy of wetland plants in the Florida Everglades.” Another study supported by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection on controlling algal blooms in lakes in southern Florida was entitled, “Monitoring, predicting, and controlling harmful algal blooms by buoy ultrasonic technology in a range of lakes in southwest Florida” and was completed in my final two years as a full-time professor at FGCU. Another notable project I did in the Florida Everglades was supported by the Friends of the Everglades on evaluating a plan developed primarily by the SFWMD to mitigate coastal pollution that has resulted from discharges from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coastline and eventually to “send the water south” to the Florida Everglades instead. This “EAA Reservoir” project was to be supported by the Federal Government through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and also by the state of Florida for $2 billion. I remain staunchly opposed to the construction of the $2 billion EAA Reservoir in Lake Okeechobee. If it is ever constructed as design, it will be because of politics, not because of the merit of the project.

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My Everglades Wetland Research Park in Naples, Florida, was on a roll as 2019 was ending. We were recruiting several new graduate students, chasing a $1 million grant on the horizon, and hosting many visiting scholars who were flocking to be a part of the action in our Everglades lab. Even our Moonlight on the Marsh lecture series planned for winter-early spring 2020 had an outstanding program scheduled. As depressing as the COVID-19 pandemic became starting in early March 2020, the nine months prior to that time from June 2019 through February 2020 created some of the most enjoyable moments ever for our Everglades Wetland Research Park in Naples. We hosted international visits by two Polish scientists and their families through the Midwest USA, including visits to the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, the Lake Erie coastline, and Columbus, Ohio. We had separate trips to Sucheon and Seoul Korea (August) Tartu, Estonia (December), New York City (November, January, February), and greeting several new international visitors from China, Poland, Spain, and Australia as the fall semester was beginning. We were excited that the spring 2019–2020 academic semester would break all the records.