Fen, Bog & Swamp
Annie Proulx
Simon & Schuster, $26.99
A recent TV ad features three guys lost in the woods, debating whether they should’ve taken a turn at a pond, which one guy argues is a marsh. “Let’s not pretend you know what a marsh is,” the other snaps. “Could be a bog,” offers the third.
It’s an exchange that probably wouldn’t surprise novelist Annie Proulx. While the various types of peatlands — wetlands rich in partially decayed material called peat — do blend together, I can’t help but think, after reading her latest book, that a historical distaste and underappreciation of wetlands in Western society has led to the average person’s confusion over basic peatland vocabulary.
In Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate CrisisProulx aims to fill in the gaps. She outlines three types: fens, which are fed from streams and rivers; swamps, which receive rainwater; and bogs. Swamps can be distinguished by the trees and shrubs they have. All three ecosystems exist around the globe. Proulx, however, focuses primarily in North America and northwestern Europe. This is because there has been a tremendous demand for dry land over the past few centuries. Farmers and potential developers were plagued by wetlands that were wet, muddy, or smelly. Since the 1600s, U.S. settlers have drained more than half of the country’s wetlands; just 1 percent of British fens remains today.
These losses have only recently been exposed. “We are now in the embarrassing position of having to relearn the importance of these strange places,” Proulx writes. One, peatlands have a lot of ecological value and support a variety wildlife. Peatlands are also a great resource for wildlife. Carbon dioxide can be sequestered in huge quantitiesPeatlands protect shoreline erosion and buffer land from storm surges.SN: 3/17/18, p. 20). But the book doesn’t spend too much time on nitty-gritty ecology. Proulx instead examines these environments within the context of their relation to people.
Proulx is well-known for her fiction. The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain,” draws on historical accounts, literature and archaeological digs to imagine places lost to time. She challenges the notion that wetlands are purely unpleasant or disturbing — think Shrek’s swamp, where only an ogre would want to live, or the Swamps of Sadness in The Neverending Story that swallow up Atreyu’s horse.
Proulx leapt back to the North Sea’s bottom 20,000 years ago. This was Doggerland, a hilly area. When sea levels rose in the seventh century B.C., people there learned to thrive on the region’s developing fens, hunting for fish and eels. In Ireland, “bog bodies” — many thought to be human sacrifices — have been preserved in the peat for thousands of years; Proulx imagines torchlit ceremonies where people were offered to the mud, a connection to the natural world that is hard for many people to comprehend today. These spaces were integrated into local cultures from Renaissance paintings of wetlands to British language such as Didder(The way a bog quivers if stepped on). Proulx also reflects on her own childhood memories — wandering through wetlands in Connecticut, a swamp in Vermont — and describes how she, like writer Henry David Thoreau, finds beauty in these places. “It is … possible to love a swamp,” she says.
Fens, bogs and swamps are technically distinct, but they’re also fluid; one wetland may transition into another depending on its water source. Proulx moves from one wetland, to another, across the globe and millenniums, displaying the same fluidity. At times didactic and meandering, Proulx will veer off to discuss humankind’s destructive tendency not just in wetlands, but nature in general, broadly rehashing aspects of the climate crisis that most readers interested in the environment are probably already familiar with. I was most enthralled — and heartbroken — by the stories I had never heard before: of “Yde Girl,” a redheaded teenager sacrificed to a bog; the zombie fires in Arctic peatlands that burn underground; and the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird missing from southern U.S. swamps for almost a century.
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