As part of the Anacostia Watershed Society’s Rice Rangers educational initiative, Ariel Trahan would teach elementary schoolers to smoosh wild rice seeds into mud balls and fling them into the wetlands along the Anacostia River, planting the native species. She would then ask her students: How can we clean up the river?

“They always want to make some robot to come get the trash, make some filter that they could put in the river,” Trahan said in late July while assessing the wild rice in Kingman Lake , a tributary of the Anacostia.

A better answer, she added, is to simply let wetlands do their thing.

“We really need to just get back to like, okay, how can we utilize these natural systems that already provide these services?” said Trahan, who now works at the DC Department of Energy an

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