For more than two centuries, New Orleans' builders struggled to expel the soggy wetlands from within their city. Early settlers saw little value in the swamps after they had harvested the virgin cypress forests and marshes held no value as urban real estate. After more than two centuries, the drive to enlarge the drained territory reversed itself. Fundamental changes in public attitudes toward the environment in general and wetlands in particular impeded the Crescent City's ever-expanding drainage program since about 1970. While the city will not abandon the existing drainage system, it has shelved expansion plans. There has arisen an overwhelming urge to protect marsh and swamp in and near the city, along with programs creating wetlands as relicts of Louisiana's natural history. This essay proposes to answer the question why there was a reversal in this fundamental aspect of urban development in New Orleans. It considers the abandonment of the belief that the city was no place for a swamp, and its replacement by practices that preserved wetland tracts to satisfy public will. Beyond sentiments about urban uses of wetlands, a second underlying attitude shift was necessary. This involved the adoption of notions about nature as utility. In order to justify the preservation of wetlands, citizens and leaders in New Orleans first had to embrace the concept that these preserves would serve as educational settings and also provide necessary ecological functions. Finally, while social institutions refer to these preserves as nature, they must invest considerable effort to maintain highly modified environments. By considering the forces and ideas behind the creation and maintenance of the Audubon Zoo swamp exhibit, the Louisiana Nature Center, the National Park Service's Barataria Preserve, and the Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge, this essay examines these sites as landscapes shaped to resemble pre-urbanized environments, that function in an urban setting as part of an evolving concept of parks and open spaces and stand as concrete evidence of changed public attitudes and environmental policies. Taken as a whole, the forces behind landscape modification and the actual transformation or preservation of wetlands speak to fundamental aspects of human use of urban space that are vastly different than a century ago and are altering urban form in the process.
