Fen, Bog & Swamp
Annie Proulx
Simon & Schuster, $26.99
A current TV advert options three guys misplaced within the woods, debating whether or not they need to’ve taken a flip at a pond, which one man argues is a marsh. “Let’s not pretend you know what a marsh is,” the opposite snaps. “Could be a bog,” gives the third.
It’s an change that most likely wouldn’t shock novelist Annie Proulx. While the assorted sorts of peatlands — wetlands wealthy in partially decayed materials referred to as peat — do mix collectively, I can’t assist however suppose, after studying her newest ebook, {that a} historic distaste and underappreciation of wetlands in Western society has led to the common particular person’s confusion over primary peatland vocabulary.
In Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role within the Climate Crisis, Proulx seeks to fill the gaps. She particulars three sorts of peatland: fens, that are fed by streams and rivers; bogs, fed by rainwater; and swamps, distinguishable by their bushes and shrubs. While all three ecosystems are discovered round a lot of the world, Proulx focuses totally on northwestern Europe and North America, the place the previous few centuries of contemporary agriculture led to an enormous demand for dry land. Wet, muddy and smelly, wetlands have been a nightmare for farmers and would-be builders. Since the 1600s, U.S. settlers have drained greater than half of the nation’s wetlands; simply 1 p.c of British fens stays right this moment.
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Only not too long ago have the implications of those losses grow to be clear. “We are now in the embarrassing position of having to relearn the importance of these strange places,” Proulx writes. For one, peatlands have nice ecological worth, supporting quite a lot of wildlife. They additionally sequester enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, and a few peatlands forestall shoreline erosion, whereas buffering land from storm surges (SN: 3/17/18, p. 20). But the ebook doesn’t spend an excessive amount of time on nitty-gritty ecology. Instead, Proulx investigates these environments within the context of their relationship with folks.
Known for her fiction, Proulx, who penned The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain,” attracts on historic accounts, literature and archaeological digs to think about locations misplaced to time. She challenges the notion that wetlands are purely disagreeable or disturbing — suppose Shrek’s swamp, the place solely an ogre would wish to stay, or the Swamps of Sadness in The Neverending Story that swallow up Atreyu’s horse.
Proulx jumps again so far as 20,000 years in the past to the underside of the North Sea, which on the time was a hilly swath referred to as Doggerland. When sea ranges rose within the seventh century B.C., folks there realized to thrive on the area’s growing fens, looking for fish and eels. In Ireland, “bog bodies” — many considered human sacrifices — have been preserved within the peat for hundreds of years; Proulx imagines torchlit ceremonies the place folks have been supplied to the mud, a connection to the pure world that’s exhausting for many individuals to grasp right this moment. These areas have been built-in into the native cultures, from Renaissance work of wetlands to British lingo equivalent to didder (the best way a bathroom quivers when stepped on). Proulx additionally displays on her personal childhood recollections — wandering by means of wetlands in Connecticut, a swamp in Vermont — and describes how she, like author Henry David Thoreau, finds magnificence in these locations. “It is … possible to love a swamp,” she says.
Fens, bogs and swamps are technically distinct, however they’re additionally fluid; one wetland might transition into one other relying on its water supply. This similar fluidity is mirrored within the ebook, the place Proulx flits from one wetland to a different, from one a part of the world to a different, from one millennium to a different. At occasions didactic and meandering, Proulx will veer off to debate humankind’s harmful tendency not simply in wetlands, however nature on the whole, broadly rehashing points of the local weather disaster that the majority readers within the setting are most likely already accustomed to. I used to be most enthralled — and heartbroken — by the tales I had by no means heard earlier than: of “Yde Girl,” a redheaded teenager sacrificed to a bathroom; the zombie fires in Arctic peatlands that burn underground; and the ivory-billed woodpecker, a hen lacking from southern U.S. swamps for nearly a century.
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