There鈥檚 an invisible kingdom in the Lower Mainland. It鈥檚 known mainly to early morning joggers, streamkeepers, dog walkers, birders, tug boat captains, kayakers, and kids who peer into tidepools.

It鈥檚 the wetlands and tidal shorelines 鈥� the places too soggy to be considered land, not damp enough to be navigable by anything bigger than a paddleboard.

Even here in 91原创, the Fraser River is tidal, rising and falling on a regular cycle, cresting higher for spring tides and lower for neap tides.

Once you start poking around in the parts of this territory that are accessible to humans 鈥� at least those without hip waders 鈥� you realize that there used to be a lot more of these lands.

Travel north on 208th Street out of Walnut Grove, and you鈥檒l pass over the dikes that were built decades ago to keep out the water.

Much of central Abbotsford used to be a vast shallow wetland, Sumas Lake, until it was drained in the early 1920s.

Richmond, including Lulu Island, Sea Island, Iona, and Mitchell are all guarded by dikes and pumps and fill.

I鈥檝e lived in the Lower Mainland my whole life, and I鈥檝e only realized piece by piece that the biggest change we鈥檝e made to the landscape wasn鈥檛 cutting down the forests and replacing them with farmland, it wasn鈥檛 building cities and suburbs, it was the way we鈥檝e fenced off the water from the land.

It didn鈥檛 used to be that easy, to tell where one ended and another began.

Consider Fort 91原创, preferably from one of the hills that rise up steeply to its south or east. From there, you can see the vast, flat sweep of land that arcs around the high ground where the village sits today. Now, the land is golf courses and farms. Hundreds of years ago, it was the Fraser River, and the land where the village sits was an island.

Someday, it might be an island again.

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The thing about water is, it鈥檚 going to get in eventually. And I don鈥檛 mean that all these engineering projects are bound to fail in the near future (although sea level rise and global climate change and the storms it brings certainly seem to be trying to give them a run for their money).

But those islands and sandbars and wetlands were carved out by a river that鈥檚 been here since the glaciers melted 10,000 years ago. That鈥檚 the time scale we鈥檙e talking about. We can build dikes and causeways, and bring in truckloads of fill, but eventually, maybe long after we鈥檙e all gone, there鈥檚 going to be a storm, or a flood, or a king tide backed up by a typhoon. And then a lot of what we have built is going to be swept away.

Off the coast of Egypt, underwater archaeologists have spent the last couple of decades going down with scuba gear to study Heracleion. It used to be one of the biggest ports on the Mediterranean. But it was built on a collection of islands in the Nile estuary. Eventually, it was hit by tsunamis and flooding and quakes, and the sea level rose, and the people left, and the city sank, temples and statues and all.

I鈥檒l just bet you 2,000 years from now, there鈥檒l be some interesting undersea archaeology to be done in Richmond, and Sumas, and maybe even Fort 91原创.