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Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit.
In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever.
A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is “an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present, fixed on a subject that could not be more important” (Bill McKibben).
“A stark but beautifully written Silent Spring –style warning from one of our greatest novelists.” — The Christian Science Monitor
In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever.
A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is “an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present, fixed on a subject that could not be more important” (Bill McKibben).
“A stark but beautifully written Silent Spring –style warning from one of our greatest novelists.” — The Christian Science Monitor
208 pages, Hardcover
First published September 27, 2022
451 people are currently reading
7852 people want to read
About the author
Annie Proulx
112 books3,342 followersEdna Annie Proulx (Chinese:安妮 普鲁) is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading eight Academy Awards, winning three of them. (However, the movie did not win Best Picture, a situation with which Proulx made public her disappointment.) She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.
She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 534 reviews
October 20, 2022
There are entire paragraphs that are completely unrelated to the topic, which would be fine in a huge book, but she speaks almost not at all about the topic itself and the book is very small, so this does come at the cost of the final product. If she had written the book in beautiful prose, like the Shipping News for example, fine, but it reads too often like a second year English essay and all I could do was visualize the teacher's comments in the margins: "off topic. Dubious claim. Cite. Where did this come from in the narrative? Cite. Extraneous. Personal opinion. Explain. Cut this out or make it part of the book by referring to it again later. Sounds like Wikipedia. Is it Wikipedia?"
For a small, US $27 book, I think they could have worked in some good images, maps, and graphs.
Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of intellectual laziness at work here too. For example: "a global economy that seeks to convert CO2 into money as fast as possible" should say "hydrocarbons," not CO2. Niggling? Perhaps, but this is central to her argument and this is a really short book, so should be better edited.
There are times where it shows that she did not have much experience with the wetlands she writes about. For example (pp. 94-95), she states that Sphagnum moss is notable for its ability to retain tracks. That's simply not the case. Yes, bear trails will show for months or years, but that's because they are constantly maintained. Tracking is difficult whether in large expanses of Sphagnum bog, or in isolated Sphagnum patches in the forest. The instance she mentions of a dead Canadian whose face leaves an impression in a forest tuft of moss is probably not Sphagnum as she suggests without evidence, but it's more likely to be a moss like Leucobryum, not a wetland plant.
All too often the author attempts to cram unrelated material by justifying weak correlations with long sentences of free-association.
Also, she sometimes uses odd words in ways that do send me to Google, but do not add to the story. For example "Byrd's mordant wit colors his 1728 Pepysian account of the trip…" or "yclept," an adjective that I still don't understand why she used it.
Many times she mentions an isolated fact without explaining its relevance to the narrative, to bogs, or to the environment. For example: "bogs in coastal regions nurtured by salt spray will be showered by varying amounts of phosphorus, sodium and chlorine." (P. 80 hardback) okay. That's pretty obvious. Also why not say salt, which would be more accurate because it's the salt not the elements that are thrown by the spray? And why did this matter? Also why "nurtured?" Most authors would say its opposite: "stunted." She never mentions it again.
Annie Proulx takes the popular route of mocking the Victorian medical establishment by listing its most egregious and ridiculous treatments, while extolling the potential of popular medicine, for example mentioning that the very toxic bog rosemary has effects on blood pressure. A pleasing point, perhaps, but I doubt that residents of the fens were taking bog rosemary for blood pressure, which they probably did not understand and probably wasn't the killer then that it is today. What about all the ridiculous popular medicine of the people she glorifies? No, she won't mention those because the point is to marshall any and all arguments to attack capitalist society, whether the arguments are coherent or not.
Geographically, the book is very restricted. The first two third are almost all about northwestern Europe before 1900. The final third is almost all about the Eastern United States. Pages 166-168, titled "other swamplands," briefly go over highlights of the majority of the world. Again, there are no maps.
In the end the topic is vast, the book small, the writing unimpressive, and most of the book is not even on topic. I bought the book because I'm interested in swamps and because of the words "Annie" and "Proulx" on the cover. If it had been anyone else's name on the cover I don't think the publisher would have printed it. Her editor was too deferential. She will sell this book based on the strength of her past books, but it should have been edited down to a magazine feature, or shot down before publication.
For a small, US $27 book, I think they could have worked in some good images, maps, and graphs.
Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of intellectual laziness at work here too. For example: "a global economy that seeks to convert CO2 into money as fast as possible" should say "hydrocarbons," not CO2. Niggling? Perhaps, but this is central to her argument and this is a really short book, so should be better edited.
There are times where it shows that she did not have much experience with the wetlands she writes about. For example (pp. 94-95), she states that Sphagnum moss is notable for its ability to retain tracks. That's simply not the case. Yes, bear trails will show for months or years, but that's because they are constantly maintained. Tracking is difficult whether in large expanses of Sphagnum bog, or in isolated Sphagnum patches in the forest. The instance she mentions of a dead Canadian whose face leaves an impression in a forest tuft of moss is probably not Sphagnum as she suggests without evidence, but it's more likely to be a moss like Leucobryum, not a wetland plant.
All too often the author attempts to cram unrelated material by justifying weak correlations with long sentences of free-association.
Also, she sometimes uses odd words in ways that do send me to Google, but do not add to the story. For example "Byrd's mordant wit colors his 1728 Pepysian account of the trip…" or "yclept," an adjective that I still don't understand why she used it.
Many times she mentions an isolated fact without explaining its relevance to the narrative, to bogs, or to the environment. For example: "bogs in coastal regions nurtured by salt spray will be showered by varying amounts of phosphorus, sodium and chlorine." (P. 80 hardback) okay. That's pretty obvious. Also why not say salt, which would be more accurate because it's the salt not the elements that are thrown by the spray? And why did this matter? Also why "nurtured?" Most authors would say its opposite: "stunted." She never mentions it again.
Annie Proulx takes the popular route of mocking the Victorian medical establishment by listing its most egregious and ridiculous treatments, while extolling the potential of popular medicine, for example mentioning that the very toxic bog rosemary has effects on blood pressure. A pleasing point, perhaps, but I doubt that residents of the fens were taking bog rosemary for blood pressure, which they probably did not understand and probably wasn't the killer then that it is today. What about all the ridiculous popular medicine of the people she glorifies? No, she won't mention those because the point is to marshall any and all arguments to attack capitalist society, whether the arguments are coherent or not.
Geographically, the book is very restricted. The first two third are almost all about northwestern Europe before 1900. The final third is almost all about the Eastern United States. Pages 166-168, titled "other swamplands," briefly go over highlights of the majority of the world. Again, there are no maps.
In the end the topic is vast, the book small, the writing unimpressive, and most of the book is not even on topic. I bought the book because I'm interested in swamps and because of the words "Annie" and "Proulx" on the cover. If it had been anyone else's name on the cover I don't think the publisher would have printed it. Her editor was too deferential. She will sell this book based on the strength of her past books, but it should have been edited down to a magazine feature, or shot down before publication.
October 23, 2022
5★
“The old rhyme says it all:
The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.”
That's what humans have done as we have created settlements and begun using the land for our own needs with scant regard for how things are connected. Annie Proulx set out to write an essay or two, turning her love of nature and her concern for the disappearance of landscapes and species into a research project. That project grew into this detailed, fact-filled book that I will be thinking about for a long time.
Humans have been digging and drying peat and then burning it up for fuel or draining the areas for farmland and houses, or trying to plant directly into some slightly less wet wetland areas, and we have been doing it seemingly forever. We have disturbed and destroyed so much that we have changed whole ecosystems and weather patterns.
She speaks of her early interest, her mother’s passion for exploring the natural world, and recounts a childhood story where she followed her mother, as instructed, through a blueberry thicket to a swamp. Her mother stepped from tussock to tussock, but Annie was scared and saw mud stirred up in the water. She couldn’t bring herself to risk falling into that foreign territory, and burst out bawling, Her mother came and carried her out.
Then, they walked around the perimeter, where Annie was fascinated by all the new things she saw, some she remembers to this day. She was hooked.
“I came away from that wetland sharing my mother’s pleasure in it as a place of value but spent years learning that if your delight is in contemplating landscapes and wild places the sweetness will be laced with ever-sharpening pain.”
I’ve read numerous books which feature fens, bogs, and swamps (and marshlands and wetlands, and all the other names), but they are featured generally as dangerous areas to be avoided, which Proulx acknowledges.
“Suspense writers find bogs very useful. Bogs stir fear. They are powerfully different from every other landscape and when we first enter one we experience an inchoate feeling of standing in a weird transition zone that separates the living from the rotting. Black pools of still water in the undulating sphagnum moss can seem to be sinkholes into the underworld.”
She even refers to discussions about the various levels of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, quoting:
“And when that dismal stream had reached the foot
Of the malign and dusky precipice,
It spread into a marsh that men call Styx”.
She goes into a lot of detail, with examples around the world, of the various types of wetlands, but I’ll quote her simple definitions from the endnotes.
“Fen.
Peatland receiving [mostly ground] water rich in dissolved minerals; vegetation cover composed dominantly of graminoid species and brown mosses.
Bog. (Muskeg is the word used most in Alaska and Canada.)
Peatland receiving water exclusively from precipitation and not influenced by ground water; sphagnum-dominated vegetation.
Swamp.
Peatland dominated by trees, shrubs, and forbs; waters rich in dissolved minerals.
. . .
‘Mire’ is the umbrella word used in Europe for fens, bogs and swamps.”
In addition to the science, history, politics and increasing global environmental devastation, wait till you see her reports about Bog Bodies! People have been sinking bodies into these vast, dark, mysterious areas for centuries, thinking they are gone forever.
Wrong!
“… in fen bodies the soft tissues decompose but the skeleton persists. In bogs the soft tissues are preserved but sphagnan dissolves the bones. So most bog bodies become dark brown bags of skin after several thousand years.”
Get that? Several thousand years. The particular chemical composition of these wet areas affects different objects in different ways, but many are still completely identifiable thousands of years later.
“A two-thousand-year-old lump of ancient birch tar used as chewing gum with the imprint of a child’s teeth in it gave me a smart sting of immediacy. At the same time that I want to know, I shudder internally at my own shameless snoopery.”
These areas were used as graveyards (the boneyard), as places to execute criminals, and obviously as disposal sites by criminals.
There is a sizable section at the end with references, notes, and definitions for those who want to follow up. For me, I can’t get over how much the past is still with us, if we just know where to look.
I enjoy her personal encounters with nature.
“My best near-swamp experience came one summer when I lived in a remote and ramshackle house in Vermont with a beaver-populated swamp half a mile down in the bottom.
. . .
I had started reading Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It for the first time and once at the house decided to read to the end before I went inside. It was an utterly quiet windless golden day, the light softening to peach nectar as I read and ultimately reached the last sentence: “I am haunted by waters.” I closed the book and looked toward the swamp. Sitting on the stone wall fifteen feet away was a large bobcat who had been watching me read. When our eyes met the cat slipped into the tall grass like a ribbon of water and I watched the grass quiver as it headed down to the woods, to the stream, to the swamp.”
Borrowing from Maclean, her final sentence in this book is:
“In the end all humans will be ‘haunted by waters.’”
Many of us are already.
Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the review copy from which I’ve quoted, so quotes may have changed (but the message won’t, I’m sure.)
“The old rhyme says it all:
The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.”
That's what humans have done as we have created settlements and begun using the land for our own needs with scant regard for how things are connected. Annie Proulx set out to write an essay or two, turning her love of nature and her concern for the disappearance of landscapes and species into a research project. That project grew into this detailed, fact-filled book that I will be thinking about for a long time.
Humans have been digging and drying peat and then burning it up for fuel or draining the areas for farmland and houses, or trying to plant directly into some slightly less wet wetland areas, and we have been doing it seemingly forever. We have disturbed and destroyed so much that we have changed whole ecosystems and weather patterns.
She speaks of her early interest, her mother’s passion for exploring the natural world, and recounts a childhood story where she followed her mother, as instructed, through a blueberry thicket to a swamp. Her mother stepped from tussock to tussock, but Annie was scared and saw mud stirred up in the water. She couldn’t bring herself to risk falling into that foreign territory, and burst out bawling, Her mother came and carried her out.
Then, they walked around the perimeter, where Annie was fascinated by all the new things she saw, some she remembers to this day. She was hooked.
“I came away from that wetland sharing my mother’s pleasure in it as a place of value but spent years learning that if your delight is in contemplating landscapes and wild places the sweetness will be laced with ever-sharpening pain.”
I’ve read numerous books which feature fens, bogs, and swamps (and marshlands and wetlands, and all the other names), but they are featured generally as dangerous areas to be avoided, which Proulx acknowledges.
“Suspense writers find bogs very useful. Bogs stir fear. They are powerfully different from every other landscape and when we first enter one we experience an inchoate feeling of standing in a weird transition zone that separates the living from the rotting. Black pools of still water in the undulating sphagnum moss can seem to be sinkholes into the underworld.”
She even refers to discussions about the various levels of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, quoting:
“And when that dismal stream had reached the foot
Of the malign and dusky precipice,
It spread into a marsh that men call Styx”.
She goes into a lot of detail, with examples around the world, of the various types of wetlands, but I’ll quote her simple definitions from the endnotes.
“Fen.
Peatland receiving [mostly ground] water rich in dissolved minerals; vegetation cover composed dominantly of graminoid species and brown mosses.
Bog. (Muskeg is the word used most in Alaska and Canada.)
Peatland receiving water exclusively from precipitation and not influenced by ground water; sphagnum-dominated vegetation.
Swamp.
Peatland dominated by trees, shrubs, and forbs; waters rich in dissolved minerals.
. . .
‘Mire’ is the umbrella word used in Europe for fens, bogs and swamps.”
In addition to the science, history, politics and increasing global environmental devastation, wait till you see her reports about Bog Bodies! People have been sinking bodies into these vast, dark, mysterious areas for centuries, thinking they are gone forever.
Wrong!
“… in fen bodies the soft tissues decompose but the skeleton persists. In bogs the soft tissues are preserved but sphagnan dissolves the bones. So most bog bodies become dark brown bags of skin after several thousand years.”
Get that? Several thousand years. The particular chemical composition of these wet areas affects different objects in different ways, but many are still completely identifiable thousands of years later.
“A two-thousand-year-old lump of ancient birch tar used as chewing gum with the imprint of a child’s teeth in it gave me a smart sting of immediacy. At the same time that I want to know, I shudder internally at my own shameless snoopery.”
These areas were used as graveyards (the boneyard), as places to execute criminals, and obviously as disposal sites by criminals.
There is a sizable section at the end with references, notes, and definitions for those who want to follow up. For me, I can’t get over how much the past is still with us, if we just know where to look.
I enjoy her personal encounters with nature.
“My best near-swamp experience came one summer when I lived in a remote and ramshackle house in Vermont with a beaver-populated swamp half a mile down in the bottom.
. . .
I had started reading Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It for the first time and once at the house decided to read to the end before I went inside. It was an utterly quiet windless golden day, the light softening to peach nectar as I read and ultimately reached the last sentence: “I am haunted by waters.” I closed the book and looked toward the swamp. Sitting on the stone wall fifteen feet away was a large bobcat who had been watching me read. When our eyes met the cat slipped into the tall grass like a ribbon of water and I watched the grass quiver as it headed down to the woods, to the stream, to the swamp.”
Borrowing from Maclean, her final sentence in this book is:
“In the end all humans will be ‘haunted by waters.’”
Many of us are already.
Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the review copy from which I’ve quoted, so quotes may have changed (but the message won’t, I’m sure.)
March 27, 2024
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: First things first: Those title words aren't synonyms, exactly, so much as a family tree of naturally occurring wet places on Earth.
This information is important to fully understanding the scale and cost of wetland losses we've inflicted on the planet. Author Proulx (whose use of "yclept" in this book I note here with a big smile, as it's a favorite underused word of mine) is an experienced campaigner when it comes to putting English through its paces to evoke a sense of place and a perception of mood:
Nothing made by human minds is ever perfect. I'm glad the title gave Author Proulx, eighty-six at this writing, an opportunity to mourn publicly the fens of her Connecticut childhood. I was fascinated by the information about the vanished English fens. But the bogs came in for a cursory examination in comparison, seen mostly through the lens of bog bodies. I acknowledge the personal element of the fact that they're bodies probably gave more heft to the science of peat bogs that really needed to be presented. I found it a distraction, though, while others may think of it as an enhancement.
It is with the swamps and bayous of my erstwhile stomping grounds, Southern Texas and its adjacent lowlands, that the short shrift became apparent. Houston and its urban sprawl could, and should, form a book of damning indictments of greed and stupidity. New Orleans was, for reasons I simply can't understand, rescued as a human habitation after the death of the many bayous and wetlands south of it resulted in its near destruction...an expensive playground for rich people. Another book that should be written (again).
But take away from any read the best, accept that not all of it was made with your taste in mind, and Author Proulx's essential message shines a harsh lime-light onto the instrumentalist Judeo-Christian worldview that's landed us in this awful mess:
Our addiction to Being Right, to understanding the uses but not the purposes of this, our one and only planet, is killing us. And the death sentence has fallen on our generation. Lucky, lucky us we have Author Proulx to bear witness: "The waters tremble at our chutzpah and it seems we will not change."
My Review: First things first: Those title words aren't synonyms, exactly, so much as a family tree of naturally occurring wet places on Earth.
fens, fed by rivers and streams, usually deep, peat-forming, and supporting reeds and marsh grass
bogs, shallower water fed by rainfall, peat-forming, and supporting sphagnum mosses
swamps, a peat-making, shallow wetland with trees and shrubs
This information is important to fully understanding the scale and cost of wetland losses we've inflicted on the planet. Author Proulx (whose use of "yclept" in this book I note here with a big smile, as it's a favorite underused word of mine) is an experienced campaigner when it comes to putting English through its paces to evoke a sense of place and a perception of mood:
The fen people of all periods knew the still water, infinite moods of cloud. They lived in reflections and moving reed shadows, poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummeled the land edge in storms.
–and–
It can take ten thousand years for a bog to convert to peat but in only a few weeks a human on a peat cutter machine can strip a large area down to the primordial gravel.
Nothing made by human minds is ever perfect. I'm glad the title gave Author Proulx, eighty-six at this writing, an opportunity to mourn publicly the fens of her Connecticut childhood. I was fascinated by the information about the vanished English fens. But the bogs came in for a cursory examination in comparison, seen mostly through the lens of bog bodies. I acknowledge the personal element of the fact that they're bodies probably gave more heft to the science of peat bogs that really needed to be presented. I found it a distraction, though, while others may think of it as an enhancement.
It is with the swamps and bayous of my erstwhile stomping grounds, Southern Texas and its adjacent lowlands, that the short shrift became apparent. Houston and its urban sprawl could, and should, form a book of damning indictments of greed and stupidity. New Orleans was, for reasons I simply can't understand, rescued as a human habitation after the death of the many bayous and wetlands south of it resulted in its near destruction...an expensive playground for rich people. Another book that should be written (again).
But take away from any read the best, accept that not all of it was made with your taste in mind, and Author Proulx's essential message shines a harsh lime-light onto the instrumentalist Judeo-Christian worldview that's landed us in this awful mess:
The attitude of looking at nature solely as something to be exploited—without cooperative thanks or appeasing sacrifices—is ingrained in western cultures.
Our addiction to Being Right, to understanding the uses but not the purposes of this, our one and only planet, is killing us. And the death sentence has fallen on our generation. Lucky, lucky us we have Author Proulx to bear witness: "The waters tremble at our chutzpah and it seems we will not change."
August 17, 2022
During the pandemic, Annie Proulx studied, researched and wrote essays on the destruction of the peatlands and what it means for the health of the environment and ultimately the future of all life on earth. These essays, often quite personal in nature, have been expanded into this short book.
So much of this destruction was decided upon before any of us were born. As Annie says, 'Wetlands are classified by the values of what-use-are-they-to-humans.' So often wetlands are sacrificed with the excuse to create more needed farmland to feed the ever-increasing human population, but we only have to look around us to see that existing good farmland is being gobbled up and covered over with massive warehouses for shipping--to fit the desires of entrepreneurial humans rather than the health of the planet.
There are no answers here but many interesting details and past history and perhaps a few hopeful signs in the form of reclamation projects to restore some of the fens, bogs and swamps of the world before it is too late.
I received an arc of this important new work of environmental nonfiction from the author and publisher via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.
So much of this destruction was decided upon before any of us were born. As Annie says, 'Wetlands are classified by the values of what-use-are-they-to-humans.' So often wetlands are sacrificed with the excuse to create more needed farmland to feed the ever-increasing human population, but we only have to look around us to see that existing good farmland is being gobbled up and covered over with massive warehouses for shipping--to fit the desires of entrepreneurial humans rather than the health of the planet.
There are no answers here but many interesting details and past history and perhaps a few hopeful signs in the form of reclamation projects to restore some of the fens, bogs and swamps of the world before it is too late.
I received an arc of this important new work of environmental nonfiction from the author and publisher via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.
November 10, 2022
Sorry to say this is not a winner. History & science thinly skimmed. Focus scattershot. Read Edward Struzik's Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat for a fascinating take on the topic.
August 14, 2022
My house is on swampland. Well, it isn’t swampland now, but it was in the middle of the last century. A woman a block away told me that her son caught tadpoles in the woods were my house stands.
The entire city was once swampland, as was much of Southeast Michigan. The glaciers that carved the land and melted to make the Great Lakes and the thousands of lakes in Michigan left behind waterlogged land.
The year we moved into this house a torrential rain flooded most of the city.
The Oakland County Landscape Stewardship Plan of 2017 stated:
“The development of the southeastern zone, and the conversion of historically wetland area to
residential properties, has led to a number of complications including a major loss in
stormwater storage and flood control capacity. These communities have struggled to adapt to
the loss of these natural stormwater retention areas as hardscape cover has expanded with
continued development. These issues were highlighted in 2012 and 2013 when rainwater from
severe storms closed highways, flooded homes, and stopped commerce and business in this
region for several days. It is important that land managers and foresters understand the
symbiosis that exists between wetlands and forests, and that they ensure the protection of these
adjacent wetland areas is worked into any forest management plan.”
I thought that I had an idea of what the area would have looked like before it was turned into a suburban neighborhood because a few blocks away is Cummingston Park, created in 1925. For as long as I have known the park it has been wet and flooded. But I learned that in the 1950s while a college student, my sixth grade teacher documented it as a wonderful wildflower haven…until the land around it became developed and the water accumulated in the park with no where to go.
Ok, then, I turned to the other local nature park, Tenhave Woods, a mile and a half away, next to my high school. It was formed in 1955. It was fenced after my high school classmate’s brother was murdered in the woods in 1967. Tenhave has a vernal pond and swampland and it is documented that it always had swamp land. It has a high fence to keep out deer and protect the wildflowers. Every spring we visit to see the trillium and other wildflowers that take over the ground. My high school biology teacher was part of the society that formed to protect both of these woods.
My husband’s family also lived on swampland. His great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents settled in Lynne Township, St. Clair County, Michigan on reclaimed swampland. In fact, the 1865 map shows A. Scoville’s land bordered the swampland. The 1897 map shows all that swampland was privately owned farms. When we visited the area we could see the drainage ditches.
How much of its wetlands has Michigan lost? I was shocked to learn that the greatest loss was around Lake Huron and Lake St Clair. Why would I be surprised? Constance Fenimore Woolston’s 1855 story St. Clair Flats tells of a man’s enchanted encounter with the St, Clair marshes only to return five years later to find them destroyed and replaced by a canal.
That’s a lot of wetlands loss.
Annie Proulx wanted to understand and organize the massive amount of information about wetlands and their loss and the impact on climate change. Her essay turned into a book. In brief, wetlands store CO2, and their destruction releases it into the atmosphere. Once lost, wetlands are not easily restores. But across the world, we are endeavoring to reclaim lost wetlands.
The book considers the various forms of wetlands:
fens, fed by rivers and streams, usually deep, peat-forming, and supporting reeds and marsh grass
bogs, shallower water fed by rainfall, peat-forming, and supporting sphagnum mosses
swamps, a peat-making, shallow wetland with trees and shrubs
I was quite charmed by the book. Proulx delves into so many aspects of wetlands. She describes humans who once lived in harmony with the land, before land was privatized and turned into ‘productive’ farmland to increase the owner’s wealth. The English fens once covered 15,500 square miles and now less than 1 percent remains. The abundant life of the fens also disappeared. My mind was set alight reading about the lost Doggerland which connected Britain and Europe, suddenly flooded by seawater from glacial melt at the end of the Ice Age. I dreamed of those people that night. “I wonder if, as the waters rose, metamorphosing proto-England from the doorstep of a vast continent to a small island, some landscape memory of hugeness underlay the country’s later drive for empire,” Proulx muses.
The sphagnum moss of the bogs “holds a third of the earth’s organic carbon,” I learned. When drained, the soil still leaks CO2 for a hundred years. “It can take ten thousand years for a bog to convert to peat but in only a few weeks a human on a peat cutter machine can strip a large area down to the primordial gravel.” In ancient times, humans made offerings to the bogs. Including humans. Bog people have been discovered across the world, preserved by the acidity and low oxygen, telling their gruesome stories of human sacrifice.
In 1849 Congress passed the first Swamp Land laws that allowed states to sell wetlands for draining. The land made first rate farm land. The Great Black Swamp, the Dismal Swamp, the Kankakee, mangrove swamps, the Limberlost–all their stories are told by Proulx.
Proulx describes the beauty of these vanished landscapes.
The fen people of all periods knew the still water, infinite moods of cloud. They lived in reflections and moving reed shadows, poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummeled the land edge in storms.
from Fen, Bog, & Swamp by Annie Proulx
My husband recalled when he worked as a grants officer that Duck Unlimited was a major contributor to wetlands protection as supporting duck hunting. And pages later, Proulx commented on this ironic support. Her descriptions of the multitude and number of species that flourish in wetlands is wondrous. And when we discovered them, what did we do? We brought our guns and hunted for the sake of shooting. As if our only response to being awestruck by the magnificence of the natural world is to destroy it.
And by destroying wetlands, we have increased the CO2 that drives climate change. Some wetlands are being restored as we realize their benefit.
Is it too late to stop or reverse or slow climate change? Can humans alter their concept of using the natural world to respecting it? The rights of nature is an emerging concept, and if we can alter our behavior and laws, perhaps the very worse can be avoided. Maybe.
So, I enjoy my house, inherited from my parents who bought it five years after it was built, a house which sits where once a pond existed, where even fifty years ago garter snakes and toads visited the yard. And realize that my gain and benefit had a huge cost on the local and world environment.
I received a free ARC from Simon & Schuster. My review is fair and unbiased
The entire city was once swampland, as was much of Southeast Michigan. The glaciers that carved the land and melted to make the Great Lakes and the thousands of lakes in Michigan left behind waterlogged land.
The year we moved into this house a torrential rain flooded most of the city.
The Oakland County Landscape Stewardship Plan of 2017 stated:
“The development of the southeastern zone, and the conversion of historically wetland area to
residential properties, has led to a number of complications including a major loss in
stormwater storage and flood control capacity. These communities have struggled to adapt to
the loss of these natural stormwater retention areas as hardscape cover has expanded with
continued development. These issues were highlighted in 2012 and 2013 when rainwater from
severe storms closed highways, flooded homes, and stopped commerce and business in this
region for several days. It is important that land managers and foresters understand the
symbiosis that exists between wetlands and forests, and that they ensure the protection of these
adjacent wetland areas is worked into any forest management plan.”
I thought that I had an idea of what the area would have looked like before it was turned into a suburban neighborhood because a few blocks away is Cummingston Park, created in 1925. For as long as I have known the park it has been wet and flooded. But I learned that in the 1950s while a college student, my sixth grade teacher documented it as a wonderful wildflower haven…until the land around it became developed and the water accumulated in the park with no where to go.
Ok, then, I turned to the other local nature park, Tenhave Woods, a mile and a half away, next to my high school. It was formed in 1955. It was fenced after my high school classmate’s brother was murdered in the woods in 1967. Tenhave has a vernal pond and swampland and it is documented that it always had swamp land. It has a high fence to keep out deer and protect the wildflowers. Every spring we visit to see the trillium and other wildflowers that take over the ground. My high school biology teacher was part of the society that formed to protect both of these woods.
My husband’s family also lived on swampland. His great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents settled in Lynne Township, St. Clair County, Michigan on reclaimed swampland. In fact, the 1865 map shows A. Scoville’s land bordered the swampland. The 1897 map shows all that swampland was privately owned farms. When we visited the area we could see the drainage ditches.
How much of its wetlands has Michigan lost? I was shocked to learn that the greatest loss was around Lake Huron and Lake St Clair. Why would I be surprised? Constance Fenimore Woolston’s 1855 story St. Clair Flats tells of a man’s enchanted encounter with the St, Clair marshes only to return five years later to find them destroyed and replaced by a canal.
That’s a lot of wetlands loss.
Annie Proulx wanted to understand and organize the massive amount of information about wetlands and their loss and the impact on climate change. Her essay turned into a book. In brief, wetlands store CO2, and their destruction releases it into the atmosphere. Once lost, wetlands are not easily restores. But across the world, we are endeavoring to reclaim lost wetlands.
The book considers the various forms of wetlands:
fens, fed by rivers and streams, usually deep, peat-forming, and supporting reeds and marsh grass
bogs, shallower water fed by rainfall, peat-forming, and supporting sphagnum mosses
swamps, a peat-making, shallow wetland with trees and shrubs
I was quite charmed by the book. Proulx delves into so many aspects of wetlands. She describes humans who once lived in harmony with the land, before land was privatized and turned into ‘productive’ farmland to increase the owner’s wealth. The English fens once covered 15,500 square miles and now less than 1 percent remains. The abundant life of the fens also disappeared. My mind was set alight reading about the lost Doggerland which connected Britain and Europe, suddenly flooded by seawater from glacial melt at the end of the Ice Age. I dreamed of those people that night. “I wonder if, as the waters rose, metamorphosing proto-England from the doorstep of a vast continent to a small island, some landscape memory of hugeness underlay the country’s later drive for empire,” Proulx muses.
The sphagnum moss of the bogs “holds a third of the earth’s organic carbon,” I learned. When drained, the soil still leaks CO2 for a hundred years. “It can take ten thousand years for a bog to convert to peat but in only a few weeks a human on a peat cutter machine can strip a large area down to the primordial gravel.” In ancient times, humans made offerings to the bogs. Including humans. Bog people have been discovered across the world, preserved by the acidity and low oxygen, telling their gruesome stories of human sacrifice.
In 1849 Congress passed the first Swamp Land laws that allowed states to sell wetlands for draining. The land made first rate farm land. The Great Black Swamp, the Dismal Swamp, the Kankakee, mangrove swamps, the Limberlost–all their stories are told by Proulx.
Proulx describes the beauty of these vanished landscapes.
The fen people of all periods knew the still water, infinite moods of cloud. They lived in reflections and moving reed shadows, poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummeled the land edge in storms.
from Fen, Bog, & Swamp by Annie Proulx
My husband recalled when he worked as a grants officer that Duck Unlimited was a major contributor to wetlands protection as supporting duck hunting. And pages later, Proulx commented on this ironic support. Her descriptions of the multitude and number of species that flourish in wetlands is wondrous. And when we discovered them, what did we do? We brought our guns and hunted for the sake of shooting. As if our only response to being awestruck by the magnificence of the natural world is to destroy it.
And by destroying wetlands, we have increased the CO2 that drives climate change. Some wetlands are being restored as we realize their benefit.
Is it too late to stop or reverse or slow climate change? Can humans alter their concept of using the natural world to respecting it? The rights of nature is an emerging concept, and if we can alter our behavior and laws, perhaps the very worse can be avoided. Maybe.
So, I enjoy my house, inherited from my parents who bought it five years after it was built, a house which sits where once a pond existed, where even fifty years ago garter snakes and toads visited the yard. And realize that my gain and benefit had a huge cost on the local and world environment.
I received a free ARC from Simon & Schuster. My review is fair and unbiased
October 20, 2022
What the heck was this! I just finished a botany class on native plants of Wisconsin and I thought this would a good follow-through of what I had learned. Instead, the book was all over the place…from how bogs, fens, and swamps developed (good start), to the history of the miseries of old England, to bog bodies, and so forth. It was just all over the place. I listened to it, so I could at least get work done around the house.
![Profile Image for laurel [the suspected bibliophile].](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.gr-assets.com%2Fimages%2FS%2Fcompressed.photo.goodreads.com%2Fusers%2F1645808644i%2F7494844._UX200_CR0%2C6%2C200%2C200_.jpg&w=128&q=75)
December 3, 2024
A short overview of the importance of fens, bogs and swamps to the global ecosystem and how their destruction is leading to the rampaging runaway train that is the climate crisis.
It's short. It's sweet. It's not bad at all.
It's short. It's sweet. It's not bad at all.
May 7, 2022
The opening to this collection wrapped me in the golden glow of nostalgia from a childhood spent immersed in coastal nature then slammed me into the hard truth of climate change. The subsequent chapters on fens, bogs, and swamps kept me mesmerized. Annie Proulx delivers a brilliant mix of biology, ecology, archeology, and history intertwined with literary musings. I enjoyed this deep dive into a topic that clearly fascinated her on multiple levels and appreciate the light she has focused on such a unique and critical biome.
Review copy provided via Net Galley
Review copy provided via Net Galley
October 14, 2022
Maybe I went into this with wrong expectations, but I found it thoroughly disappointing. It seems far more interested in going down unrelated tangents than remaining informative on the topic of the book. I don't often specify when I read a book that was won through a giveaway but I will acknowledge that truth this time. Nothing about the book that I received would indicate that it was an ARC. It was hardcover, and appeared to be the final product, but the fact that there was a notes section and no footnote numbers in the text baffled and frustrated me. I read a lot of books like this and am very eager to check each and every footnote. That issue alone was enough to force me to round down since I was otherwise on the fence between 2 and 3 stars.
Unnecessary politics and religion are brought into the almost random musings of the author without any significant evidence of her claims, and some rather obvious unaddressed refutations to her statements.
Ultimately I was able to find mild interest in the book because I happen to be writing a work of fiction that had a setting which I gained some insight about thanks to this book. However, had that been my intention I believe many other books would have covered the topic more thoroughly, with better additional resources as well
Unnecessary politics and religion are brought into the almost random musings of the author without any significant evidence of her claims, and some rather obvious unaddressed refutations to her statements.
Ultimately I was able to find mild interest in the book because I happen to be writing a work of fiction that had a setting which I gained some insight about thanks to this book. However, had that been my intention I believe many other books would have covered the topic more thoroughly, with better additional resources as well
August 15, 2023
Wetlands: a concept whose emotional valence has turned upside down.
Swamp used to be bad. I have just read James Michener's The Source, and on the several occasions he has to mention "swamp," he cannot do it without pejorative adjectives: "Malarial." "Malignant." "Desolate." A spring bringing water to a town is life-giving, is, in fact, the titular source. A swamp is a spring gone awry.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, wetlands carried that connotation. Draining was good. But swampland and peat holds more carbon than a rain forest, not to mention, methane, 80 times worse than carbon in its climate effect.
And, no, it's not just nature going through one of its warming cycles. According to a story I heard on NPR, what we're in now should have been a cooling cycle. If not for what we human beings have been doing.
Not necessarily so during the prehistorical past (20,000 years ago) when Britain wasn't an island, but the fringe of the Europe/Asia landmass. Rolling plains extended where the North Sea is today, all the way to the Netherlands. It was Doggerland. Such riches from the land: fish, fowl, vegetable. People didn't want to leave, even after the water had been gradually moving in. Peat-preserved remains of long-ago living situations get fished up accidentally in the North Sea.
If ten percent of the Great Black Swamp in Ohio were restored, it could reverse the impact of pollution and runoff into Lake Erie. And there is a growing conservancy movement.
But people whose ancestors have "conquered" swamps tend to have internalized "a deep and abiding loathing of wetlands." That's what's showing up in Michener's mid-twentieth-century book, too. We all tend to have some of that attitude ingrained.
Maybe not such a great slogan.
In more recent centuries people who had ownership of the land in Britain saw where their financial futures led. The fen-dwellers, who held the land in common, couldn't hold off the "owners." Moreover, they were low on the societal totem poll; viewed as low class and primitive. So gradually they lost control of their land, and it was drained. Ninety percent of British wetlands have been drained.
The stink? Mostly when the wetlands were being disturbed.
People see the rich soil associated with wetlands. The common expression is that, once drained, the land is "some of the most productive soil" ever known. That lasts a while, after which the soil requires fertilizer in order to remain productive. And then the polluting runoff.
In the frontier years of North America, huge numbers of the seemingly endless waterfowl were shot and sold at market for pennies. And the market shooters were blamed for the decimation of those seemingly infinite flocks. But this time it wasn't the shooters and their guns. It was the draining of the wetlands. Those habitats are what had generated the huge flocks.
As the author says, there is some movement now toward preservation and restoration. But the process of change has picked up to the extent we're not going to get back.
This is a short book, an easy and instructive read. Not a polemic, except for just a little bit of blaming capitalism in an early chapter.
Vintage Annie Proulx.
Swamp used to be bad. I have just read James Michener's The Source, and on the several occasions he has to mention "swamp," he cannot do it without pejorative adjectives: "Malarial." "Malignant." "Desolate." A spring bringing water to a town is life-giving, is, in fact, the titular source. A swamp is a spring gone awry.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, wetlands carried that connotation. Draining was good. But swampland and peat holds more carbon than a rain forest, not to mention, methane, 80 times worse than carbon in its climate effect.
And, no, it's not just nature going through one of its warming cycles. According to a story I heard on NPR, what we're in now should have been a cooling cycle. If not for what we human beings have been doing.
Not necessarily so during the prehistorical past (20,000 years ago) when Britain wasn't an island, but the fringe of the Europe/Asia landmass. Rolling plains extended where the North Sea is today, all the way to the Netherlands. It was Doggerland. Such riches from the land: fish, fowl, vegetable. People didn't want to leave, even after the water had been gradually moving in. Peat-preserved remains of long-ago living situations get fished up accidentally in the North Sea.
If ten percent of the Great Black Swamp in Ohio were restored, it could reverse the impact of pollution and runoff into Lake Erie. And there is a growing conservancy movement.
But people whose ancestors have "conquered" swamps tend to have internalized "a deep and abiding loathing of wetlands." That's what's showing up in Michener's mid-twentieth-century book, too. We all tend to have some of that attitude ingrained.
"Drain the swamp!"
Maybe not such a great slogan.
In more recent centuries people who had ownership of the land in Britain saw where their financial futures led. The fen-dwellers, who held the land in common, couldn't hold off the "owners." Moreover, they were low on the societal totem poll; viewed as low class and primitive. So gradually they lost control of their land, and it was drained. Ninety percent of British wetlands have been drained.
The stink? Mostly when the wetlands were being disturbed.
People see the rich soil associated with wetlands. The common expression is that, once drained, the land is "some of the most productive soil" ever known. That lasts a while, after which the soil requires fertilizer in order to remain productive. And then the polluting runoff.
In the frontier years of North America, huge numbers of the seemingly endless waterfowl were shot and sold at market for pennies. And the market shooters were blamed for the decimation of those seemingly infinite flocks. But this time it wasn't the shooters and their guns. It was the draining of the wetlands. Those habitats are what had generated the huge flocks.
As the author says, there is some movement now toward preservation and restoration. But the process of change has picked up to the extent we're not going to get back.
As the glaciers and ice melt, as ocean and groundwater rise there will come a world of new estuaries, rivers, lakes, fens, and, eventually--vast bogs and swamps.
This is a short book, an easy and instructive read. Not a polemic, except for just a little bit of blaming capitalism in an early chapter.
Vintage Annie Proulx.
April 24, 2023
I don’t think that the person who wrote the description of this book actually read it. It’s advertised as “a short history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis”, but I would better describe this book as a semi detailed description of fens, bogs, and swamps, which includes anecdotal examples of their influence in history. I came away with almost no meaningful knowledge of wetlands’ impact on the climate crisis, as well as very little concrete information about those types of ecosystems. Instead I learned about Irish swamp people and wars being lost because swamp fighting is too hard. This might be a good book if you’re interested in like stories about swamps, but that’s not why I read it.
I also take extreme issue with the writing style. First and foremost, I think the author was afraid of commas. On top of that, she didn’t even structure her sentences in ways that lent themselves to not having commas, so it was overall just hard to understand. Additionally, the writing style sort of read like a self help book, where the writer makes claims that are not substantiated by any citations, but are stated as though they are common sense facts. “To be feared is AI, geo-engineering and an app-happy gig-rigged future controlled by Big Tech.” Even if I was going to think about publishing a sentence so filled with under researched BS, I would at least add 2 commas for clarity.
I learned very little from this book and did not care for the writing. Maybe 1.5 stars, 2 might be generous.
I also take extreme issue with the writing style. First and foremost, I think the author was afraid of commas. On top of that, she didn’t even structure her sentences in ways that lent themselves to not having commas, so it was overall just hard to understand. Additionally, the writing style sort of read like a self help book, where the writer makes claims that are not substantiated by any citations, but are stated as though they are common sense facts. “To be feared is AI, geo-engineering and an app-happy gig-rigged future controlled by Big Tech.” Even if I was going to think about publishing a sentence so filled with under researched BS, I would at least add 2 commas for clarity.
I learned very little from this book and did not care for the writing. Maybe 1.5 stars, 2 might be generous.
September 17, 2022
An incredible in-depth compilation addressing the earth's wetlands in relation to the climate crisis and the importance of awareness, preservation, and positive progress, Fen, Bog and Swamp is a must-read for a small audience.
I went into this expecting more of the Proulx from her fiction and got an immensely dense and textbook-like approach. While I recognize the liberties taken for novels cannot be replicated for nonfiction, this will remain in its current form, too jam-packed with information, however pertinent, to be accessible to those who truly need to be convinced.
However top-heavy this long-form essay is with the histories of, the scientists involved, the research done, and the results indicates, I cannot help but appreciate all, on top of that, Proulx manages to display right along with it. From a sentence referencing Norman Maclean's closing line from the title short story in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories ("I am haunted by waters."), to a mention of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, to Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation of Rashomon, Proulx brings in and ties together wide swaths of citations.
Her research, no matter what the COVID-19 pandemic hampered, is clearly thorough. And she cannot possibly be faulted here. The inclusion of the newly fascinating Doggerland seems to have held her attention a smidge too long, but she so obviously scoured all potentially relevant research that she regretted leaving anything out, lest she be unable to convince.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This affected neither my opinion of the book nor the content of my review.
I went into this expecting more of the Proulx from her fiction and got an immensely dense and textbook-like approach. While I recognize the liberties taken for novels cannot be replicated for nonfiction, this will remain in its current form, too jam-packed with information, however pertinent, to be accessible to those who truly need to be convinced.
However top-heavy this long-form essay is with the histories of, the scientists involved, the research done, and the results indicates, I cannot help but appreciate all, on top of that, Proulx manages to display right along with it. From a sentence referencing Norman Maclean's closing line from the title short story in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories ("I am haunted by waters."), to a mention of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, to Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation of Rashomon, Proulx brings in and ties together wide swaths of citations.
Her research, no matter what the COVID-19 pandemic hampered, is clearly thorough. And she cannot possibly be faulted here. The inclusion of the newly fascinating Doggerland seems to have held her attention a smidge too long, but she so obviously scoured all potentially relevant research that she regretted leaving anything out, lest she be unable to convince.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This affected neither my opinion of the book nor the content of my review.
January 10, 2024
Annie Proulx wrote a series of essays on the wetlands. This book is a compilation and expansion on those essays. I found this book interesting, informative and well laid out.
Annie describes the differences between fens, bogs and swamps, the various animal & plant life that can be found in each of them and how humans have used changed the land by draining for increased farmlands and agriculture. Most of these changes were done in the earlier days of exploration and pioneering. The destroyed wetlands changed the landscapes, destroyed animal and plant ecosystems and, in the end, were deplenished of rich nutrients.
Today, the restoration of the wetlands is gaining momentum. Let's hope that we can restore enough wetlands to help plants, animals and the World.
Annie describes the differences between fens, bogs and swamps, the various animal & plant life that can be found in each of them and how humans have used changed the land by draining for increased farmlands and agriculture. Most of these changes were done in the earlier days of exploration and pioneering. The destroyed wetlands changed the landscapes, destroyed animal and plant ecosystems and, in the end, were deplenished of rich nutrients.
Today, the restoration of the wetlands is gaining momentum. Let's hope that we can restore enough wetlands to help plants, animals and the World.
April 13, 2024
Most of the world’s wetlands came into being as the last ice age melted, gurgled and gushed. In ancient days fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries were the earth’s most desirable and dependable resource places, attracting and supporting myriad species. The diversity and numbers of living creatures in springtime wetlands and overhead must have made a stupefying roar audible from afar. We wouldn’t know. As humans have multiplied to a scary point of concern about the carrying capacity of the earth, wetlands were drained and dried for agriculture and housing. Today 7.8 billion people jostle for living space in a time of political ferment, a global pandemic and now a war, trying to ignore increasingly violent weather events as the climate crisis intensifies.
Fen, Bog and Swamp is Annie Proulx’s love letter to the earth’s disappearing wetlands and a warning that, as extreme weather events increase, our impulse to drain “useless lands” for development is action we take at our own peril: just as Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t have hit New Orleans so hard had the natural mud-bearing outflow of the Mississippi River not been impeded for decades, Indonesia is currently removing their shoreline-protecting mangrove forests in order to plant oil palms — and at what future cost? With beautiful writing, engaging literary references, and urgent information, I found this to be both rewarding and necessary.
Early northern Europeans lived and prospered among glacial meltwater wetlands for thousands of years. And what if those old people who venerated springs, pools and wetlands as holy places could look into the future and see us? Surely they would be unable to comprehend humans who dirtied, drained and destroyed water sources, who dammed and polluted rivers, who choked the great oceans with debris and plastic.
Proulx begins by defining and differentiating between the three titular types of wetlands and then features a section on each. In addition to describing the natural world supported by each of the three, I was intrigued by the fact that Proulx seemed to really focus on the people who have historically lived in each ecosystem. She describes Doggerland (an area of land that once connected Britain with continental Europe, now submerged beneath the North Sea) and then moves on to the Fenlanders who occupied the hillocky fens of eastern England, with a rich and self-sufficient culture, from Mesolithic times until the Enclosure Acts (which put all common lands into the hands of the wealthy few). When writing on bogs, Proulx describes the generations-long tradition of using peat for home heating (recently banned) and the ancient “bog people” found interred in Celtic lands; the hints given of their shamanic culture by artefacts left behind. In the section on swamps, Proulx primarily writes about those in the United States; over fifty per cent of which have been drained, primarily for agriculture. The good news is that in every one of these areas, efforts are underway to rehabilitate at least a portion of the wetlands.
Painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, archeologists, storytellers, ecologists, botanist succumb to the allure of the bog world, where moss makes its own ecological habitat, trees dare not put down roots, predatory sundews and pitcher plants eat living swamp meat, where bog cotton “breathes” through its air-channeled stems. Everything seems to lurch slightly, to sink and rise fractions of an inch. Decomposing plant material underwater sends up stinking gas that produces the mysterious light that wobbles through evening mists — the famous will-o’-the-wisp or ignus fatuus (fool’s light). In sunlight there is the swamp sparrow’s rapid iteration like a gear in your brain spinning loose. The profoundly unfamiliar setting is not so much a place as the sudden shock of perception of threatened existence, a realization streaked with anxiety.
I enjoyed Proulx’s frequent referencing of art (those old paintings and scientific diagrams that capture something of lost landscapes) and literature: From Kate Marsden (intrepid missionary-nurse who wrote in 1891 of underground “zombie fires” in the Siberian wilderness) and Alexander Pope (whose eighteenth century idea of genius loci urged landscape designers to keep in mind the “genius” or spirit of natural areas) to the settings of fens and moors that feature in the more familiar writings of Conan Doyle, Saki, and Nabokov — even the fact that Robert Frost had contemplated suicide in the Great Dismal Swamp when his marriage proposal had been rejected — Proulx repeatedly, and urgently, makes the point that the wetlands have always loomed large in the human imagination. On the upside, the fact that these stories exist can remind us to lament the lost landscapes: The relatively small Limberlost Swamp in northeast Indiana served as the setting for Girl of the Limberlost, and it was a love for this 1904 novel that prompted locals in the 1990s to purchase some of the original swamp acreage and begin to rehabilitate it. Hope, and seeing where action has had a positive effect, is the first step to change:
It is easy to think of the vast wetland losses as a tragedy and to believe with hopeless conviction that the past cannot be retrieved — tragic and part of our climate crisis anguish. But as we see how valuable wetlands can soften the shocks of change, and how eagerly nature responds to concerned care, the public is beginning to regard the natural world in a different way.
Lovely, urgent read.
June 7, 2025
Finally got the audio book of this back from libby. The part about bog bodies was very interesting, and I thought the best part, even though it had nothing to do with the subtitle of the book. Honestly not a whole lot about the climate crisis. Though I wrote my whole thesis about "Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis" so maybe I have a different background than the average reader.
December 15, 2023
There is lots that is wonderful in here (though I am probably biased as someone who loves swamps). Here, Proulx gives us a thoughtful, inquisitive, expansive dive into several different peatland worlds. Researched and written during Proulx’s isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays feel like spending an evening with a curious and particularly erudite friend who gets on a roll sharing about what’s been intriguing them lately. And I loved that! I learned a ton from this book, and its bountiful asides and passageways left me with more than two dozen Wikipedia tabs open on my computer. The writing is rich, wry, and evocative. It was truly a pleasure to read.
That said, there were also certain aspects of the book that didn’t work so well for me. My biggest qualm is the text’s struggle with focus. Proulx’s examination of fens, bogs, and swamps aspires to be ranging in scope, but it sometimes comes off as veering and uneven. Some fascinating topics will be raised and briefly glossed over before moving on; other topics will get pages and pages and pages of microscopic treatment; yet more topics are raised, partially explored, interrupted by a not-so-related topic, and then returned to. I am a reader who indulges and appreciates a meandering, cerebral examination of a subject — but even I was left craving a bit more structure. I flinch to suggest this, but I think this collection of essays could have used more editing. While reading, I felt like I was encountering a second draft where a third or fourth would have gotten me to the completed text.
I also looked askance, on occasion, at Proulx’s embrace of colonial frameworks that felt like “yellow flags” to me. There are several concerned references to overpopulation and “carrying capacity.” In several places, Proulx describes European settlers as having “discovered” locations that… surely were new to them, but not to everyone. There were not many of these moments, but they were peppered through the text and gave me pause each time. And it was particularly unnerving given that the book is focused almost exclusively on European / US and Canadian wetlands.
But I don’t want to give the wrong impression: on the whole, I am quite pleased to have read this book and spend some time mulling the mires with Annie Proulx. I would give it 4-stars based on how interesting I found the content, but 3-stars based on its challenges with focus. Call it a 3.5 for me. Would recommend to any other swamp-lovers with a rainy day open!
That said, there were also certain aspects of the book that didn’t work so well for me. My biggest qualm is the text’s struggle with focus. Proulx’s examination of fens, bogs, and swamps aspires to be ranging in scope, but it sometimes comes off as veering and uneven. Some fascinating topics will be raised and briefly glossed over before moving on; other topics will get pages and pages and pages of microscopic treatment; yet more topics are raised, partially explored, interrupted by a not-so-related topic, and then returned to. I am a reader who indulges and appreciates a meandering, cerebral examination of a subject — but even I was left craving a bit more structure. I flinch to suggest this, but I think this collection of essays could have used more editing. While reading, I felt like I was encountering a second draft where a third or fourth would have gotten me to the completed text.
I also looked askance, on occasion, at Proulx’s embrace of colonial frameworks that felt like “yellow flags” to me. There are several concerned references to overpopulation and “carrying capacity.” In several places, Proulx describes European settlers as having “discovered” locations that… surely were new to them, but not to everyone. There were not many of these moments, but they were peppered through the text and gave me pause each time. And it was particularly unnerving given that the book is focused almost exclusively on European / US and Canadian wetlands.
But I don’t want to give the wrong impression: on the whole, I am quite pleased to have read this book and spend some time mulling the mires with Annie Proulx. I would give it 4-stars based on how interesting I found the content, but 3-stars based on its challenges with focus. Call it a 3.5 for me. Would recommend to any other swamp-lovers with a rainy day open!
June 8, 2025
I'mma gonna stretch here and give Annie five stars for this effort, after all, I owe her.
Annie Proulx wrote “The Shipping News”, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1993. I did not like that book and gave it a rough review here. I know, I am the outlier here, but I found that book to be corny and a bit boring.
Now, what does Annie do with non-fiction?
She nails it while covering all of the bases.
I had to look beyond her habit of wandering away from her main theme of wetlands and climbing out on several branches of subjects, characters, and anectdotes that she had to share.
Really, many experienced and award winning authors get away with that as their editors have them on a long leash.
Annie pulls it in though and takes us around the world as she shows us the power, importance, and beauty of the wonderful God given gift of our wetlands.
Annie Proulx wrote “The Shipping News”, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1993. I did not like that book and gave it a rough review here. I know, I am the outlier here, but I found that book to be corny and a bit boring.
Now, what does Annie do with non-fiction?
She nails it while covering all of the bases.
I had to look beyond her habit of wandering away from her main theme of wetlands and climbing out on several branches of subjects, characters, and anectdotes that she had to share.
Really, many experienced and award winning authors get away with that as their editors have them on a long leash.
Annie pulls it in though and takes us around the world as she shows us the power, importance, and beauty of the wonderful God given gift of our wetlands.
February 5, 2023
"In the end, all humans will be haunted by waters."
So ends Annie Proulx's "Fen, Bog and Swamp," a solid, if surface level, layperson primer to these less appreciated wetlands, their destruction, and the need to preserve and restore them.
The book is a well-written and enjoyable (if one can say that about books on natural crises), but barely scratches the surface. Maybe a good litmus test of how much you'd get from it is whether or not you think Fen, Bog and Swamp are the same thing? Regardless, it's a great complement to other environmental crises books, providing more specifics on why the restoration and preservation of wetlands are a big enough deal for the UN to designate a whole day of the year to them.
Peatlands, after all, currently store more than twice the carbon as do all the world's forests.
Recommended for the nascent environmentalist... and humans that don't want to die everywhere.
So ends Annie Proulx's "Fen, Bog and Swamp," a solid, if surface level, layperson primer to these less appreciated wetlands, their destruction, and the need to preserve and restore them.
The book is a well-written and enjoyable (if one can say that about books on natural crises), but barely scratches the surface. Maybe a good litmus test of how much you'd get from it is whether or not you think Fen, Bog and Swamp are the same thing? Regardless, it's a great complement to other environmental crises books, providing more specifics on why the restoration and preservation of wetlands are a big enough deal for the UN to designate a whole day of the year to them.
Peatlands, after all, currently store more than twice the carbon as do all the world's forests.
Recommended for the nascent environmentalist... and humans that don't want to die everywhere.
August 12, 2022
This short book started out with the authors memories and continued you into sections about fens, bogs, and swamps and out depletion of them due to climate change and the effects it has on our environment. It can get preachy and text book like in spots, but it’s just the authors passion coming through on the page. As a primarily fiction reader this book was a lesson. 4&1/2 ⭐️
April 3, 2024
3.5 — lots of tangents, but they are for the most part related and relatively enjoyable. my only real complaint is that saying indigenous people are like the contemporary henry david thoreau feels incredibly disrespectful and eurocentric and just as a whole a real weird decision, tbh.
January 3, 2025
This book covers an excellent topic that I have a lot of interest in but it was unfortunately quite dry and the writing was rather scattered. It makes a ton of references that are often rather irrelevant and covers so many topics way too briefly. The author says in the acknowledgments that they were unable to do interviews for the book due to covid so perhaps they should’ve waited to publish until this could be done?
July 31, 2025
Read this to my boyfriend as we drove around the swamps of Virginia and North Carolina (Great Dismal!) — enjoyed her synthesis of research a lot, and her (at times unwittingly comic) personal anecdotes, but its meandering through topics and inability to keep on one track made me feel at times like we were wading through our own kind of mire…
November 10, 2022
This book was... something. Between the emotionally heated ranting in the first half of the book, the dreamy recollections of swamp life in the middle, and the absolute lack of emotion in the end... there's also long tirades of random facts that are wetlands-adjacent... like the enormous section about Bog People... information on the anthropology of ancient Romans... bits on feminism -- ok, it's just all over the place.
I think, in all, there might've been more information about the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest, the how's, the why's, the motivations, than there is about wetland destruction (summed up: people hate malaria and being unable to control nature so they drain it and farm it. Sometimes make snide remarks about colonial era excess hunting. Repeat this for the rest of the book).
This is my first time reading anything by Annie Proulx and I feel like this is possibly the worst introduction to her writing, ever. I'm going to read her older fiction, but if she has/writes more nonfiction, I'm going to steer well clear of it lol. The inability to just... stay on TOPIC - it killed me.
I think, in all, there might've been more information about the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest, the how's, the why's, the motivations, than there is about wetland destruction (summed up: people hate malaria and being unable to control nature so they drain it and farm it. Sometimes make snide remarks about colonial era excess hunting. Repeat this for the rest of the book).
This is my first time reading anything by Annie Proulx and I feel like this is possibly the worst introduction to her writing, ever. I'm going to read her older fiction, but if she has/writes more nonfiction, I'm going to steer well clear of it lol. The inability to just... stay on TOPIC - it killed me.
January 3, 2025
[ hardcover ]
3.5 rounded up
EDIT: *** I just realized it’s a history of Peatland DESTRUCTION, which makes sense. Still a bit drab in spots but far more fitting. My review is a bit misguided. Oops. ***
____
While this book does indicate it’s about the history in its subtitle: I found it more of a “how we relate to the peatland” story.
Personally, if I were to think about the history of swamps and wetlands it would be a natural history rich in stories of flooding areas, continents shifting, monsoons inundating … this book did mention a little bit on the natural history but mostly it was about how humans revered, feared, disregarded and destroyed the marshy areas. Then we also get TONS of info on the older writings of things that happened in and around these areas… only about 50% of which made me feel sleepy.
Overall a decent book. I’m thoroughly thrilled it exists.
Now if we can get someone to write that natural history piece that I was craving all the while, I would be doubly thrilled.
3.5 rounded up
EDIT: *** I just realized it’s a history of Peatland DESTRUCTION, which makes sense. Still a bit drab in spots but far more fitting. My review is a bit misguided. Oops. ***
____
While this book does indicate it’s about the history in its subtitle: I found it more of a “how we relate to the peatland” story.
Personally, if I were to think about the history of swamps and wetlands it would be a natural history rich in stories of flooding areas, continents shifting, monsoons inundating … this book did mention a little bit on the natural history but mostly it was about how humans revered, feared, disregarded and destroyed the marshy areas. Then we also get TONS of info on the older writings of things that happened in and around these areas… only about 50% of which made me feel sleepy.
Overall a decent book. I’m thoroughly thrilled it exists.
Now if we can get someone to write that natural history piece that I was craving all the while, I would be doubly thrilled.
December 8, 2022
I really wanted to love this book. I make my family visit swams and marshes for nature walks and asked to camp next to a cypress swamp for Mother's Day. There was a lot of great information about swamps, but I felt like the book couldn't decide whether to be science writing or personal reflections, and it just was incredibly slow-going. Proulx is indisputably a great wordsmith and the writing was good, but the pacing and the mishmash of science and opining just made the book a bit disappointing.
December 24, 2022
While there are some good points made, the book had a rambling feel that lack any direction. Often it got lost on tangents that didn't have anything to do with wetland conservation. The second part of the swamp chapter was probably the best since it actually talked about the plight of wetlands.
For a better book on wetland specifically on cypress swamps, I'd recommend The Great Cypress Swamps by John V. Dennis.
For a better book on wetland specifically on cypress swamps, I'd recommend The Great Cypress Swamps by John V. Dennis.
June 13, 2023
When I was a kid we had a marshy swamp that we used to cross at times to get to the creek and cross it to the woods on the other side. To go around the swamp was much longer and we usually chose the quick way, jumping from hassock to hassock and hopping not to fall in and get all muddy and slimy with the possibility of losing a shoe. Overall, we didn't view the swamp as a pleasant place and that feeling has remained with me until recently.
Recently, I have been about the positive environmental impacts of wetlands. They are home to so much flora and fauna. They are helpful in this time of climate change as they sequester carbon.
Annie Proulx has written an interesting book on the subject Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis and I was excited to read it.
She does go off in some interesting tangents which I was happy to read about. I also was glad to be informed about the impacts of draining the wetlands and restoration projects.
There were parts of the book which bogged down a little for me and at times I felt a bit swamped, but all in all I did not sink in the mire.
Recently, I have been about the positive environmental impacts of wetlands. They are home to so much flora and fauna. They are helpful in this time of climate change as they sequester carbon.
Annie Proulx has written an interesting book on the subject Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis and I was excited to read it.
She does go off in some interesting tangents which I was happy to read about. I also was glad to be informed about the impacts of draining the wetlands and restoration projects.
There were parts of the book which bogged down a little for me and at times I felt a bit swamped, but all in all I did not sink in the mire.
January 28, 2024
A read making it crystal clear that our world is vastly different that it was 100, 200, 500 years ago and conveying the true and deep sadness that we will never get to see the earth in an undisturbed state. This book is good for peaking curiosity about native landscapes and the wonders of some unassuming wildlife, however, it is also good for seeing the damning (and most likely irreversible) ramifications of taking and using our natural resources without hesitation.
This book married history and biology in a way laypeople like me could get a glimpse at the importance of not only bogs, fens, and swamps, but of coast lines and meandering rivers and streams and permafrost. It is not always the easiest read due to its dense content, but it paints a picture that a simple nature lover could learn from and appreciate.
This book married history and biology in a way laypeople like me could get a glimpse at the importance of not only bogs, fens, and swamps, but of coast lines and meandering rivers and streams and permafrost. It is not always the easiest read due to its dense content, but it paints a picture that a simple nature lover could learn from and appreciate.
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