My house is built on a swamp. My suburb, my town, my region, is built over one of the most extensive networks of wetlands to have existed in New Zealand, fed by the pluvial superfluity of the southern Tararua range, before flowing, pooling, oozing, seeping its way across the Wairarapa plains to the sea.

There was a time when you couldn’t have walked a morning in this country without sinking into a mire. Some regions, like the Hauraki Plains, were nothing but bogs, tarns, fens, peat fields, swamps, estuaries and lagoons. They punctuated and perforated our flat lands, soaking up the legendary rains and offering them to plants, insects, amphibians and birds as food and shelter.

Maori knew wetlands as larders, troves of seasonal sustenance and a store of materials to fashion into mats, ropes, walls, clothes. Healers knew them as dispensaries of medicines, tinctures and supplements. Europeans knew them as a blight. Wetlands had no place in the agrarian ethic they brought here—flat land was coveted; where Maori saw resources, colonists saw pasture, sheep and fences. Prosperity. Progress.

The rigour which with they liquidated the wetlands is remarkable. A Landcare Research study in 2008 calculated that wetlands once covered 2.4 million hectares—nearly 10 per cent—of the country; just less than 250,000 hectares remain. The loss was greatest in the North Island, where less than five per cent of wetlands survive. The South Island has kept 16 per cent of its wetlands, which make up 75 per cent of our national extent.

In all, 90 per cent of our wet places are lost. With them went a host of endemic fish and fowl, banished to obscurity or extinction. That loss has not sobered some of us. Today, our wetlands still face drainage, clearance, pollution, choking sediment, invasive weeds and mammalian pestilence.

But others have decided enough is enough. In 2006, the then Labour Government and the Greens agreed on a funding package, called Arawai Kakariki (“the green waterway”), for intensive, large-scale conservation projects and asked DOC to come up with some deserving causes.

“There’s been a general decline in the condition of a lot of our wetlands,” says Richard Suggate, the department’s Arawai Kakariki national co-ordinator. “Traditionally, the focus has been on forests and mainland islands, but wetlands have been neglected for a long time.

“We were looking for large sites with significant values in relatively unmodified condition,” says Suggate. “So we chose Whangamarino, a flooded peat system in the Waikato, as one; an inland river, lake and wetland basin system in inland Canterbury, the Ashburton Lakes, or O Tu Wharekai, as another; and Awarua–Waituna in Southland, a coastal lagoon system with a peatland catchment, as a third. They’re three completely different wetland types, which meant that whatever we learned, we could then apply across a broad range of other wetlands.”

Awarua and Whangamarino are listed as Ramsar Convention sites, wetlands of international significance as determined by a gathering of the world’s wetland scientists at Ramsar, Iran, in 1971. The funding, says Suggate, will help New Zealand to meet its obligations to protect them. “Our attention to Ramsar sites in New Zealand [we have six] has been a bit spasmodic, to put it nicely, and wetland management throughout the country has been variable.”

But Arawai Kakariki means to turn that around and win wetlands some friends; banish the image of the fetid, mosquito-plagued quagmire and reveal instead one of the most wondrous, the most complex, the most elegant of webs. “Let everybody know what we have,” as wetland ecologist Hugh Robertson puts it. “People are starting to see that the clearing and drainage of wetlands has got an endpoint, and we want to protect what we’ve got left.

“Christchurch is built on a swamp, Invercargill is built on a swamp. There are a lot of places in New Zealand where maybe, if we had moved to the side a little, we could still be enjoying all those services—flood protection, water purification, recreation—that those swamps once provided.”