Eco Warrior, You Say?

           Planting mangroves in Kuala Selangor's sodden, dirty marshes will most likely save some lives in the future. With the looming threat of rising sea levels due to global warming, I'm certain that there will be floods on coastal areas caused by sea storms and other natural causes (at least I hope they are natural), because mangrove swamps have the capacity to absorb large quantities of water, which will save lives.
           Take Hurricane Katrina as an example. The Gulf of Mexico used to have mangrove swamps lining the coasts, but these were destroyed to make room for towns, hotels, theme parks, housing developments and so on. So when Hurricane Katrina came along, there were no more mangroves to absorb all the floodwater. New Orleans was swamped and, at least 1,836 people perished. It was one of the five most dangerous hurricanes in recorded history. If the mangroves had still been around, there would have been far less damage caused by flooding and fewer people would have lost their lives.
          Another example of unnecessary loss of life due to habitat destruction was the 2004 tsunami. If the mangrove swamps had been preserved in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the damage caused by the massive wall of water would have been lessened by a lot because the mangroves would have acted as a wall. But no, people went and obliterated the mangrove swamps to build hotels and all the other tourist attractions. In the end, nature got back at them, in one of the worst ways possible.
          In Kuala Selangor, our planting of the mangrove trees will make a mangrove wall so that if there is another tsunami, which hopefully there won't be, the wall will no doubt prevent some loss of life unlike in previous disasters.