Fen, Bog and Swamp: from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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Will we pay heed? Sadly, I’m not confident and neither, it would seem, is Proulx: “The waters tremble at our chutzpah and it seems we will not change.” Swamp" is the last and most climate-focused chapter which totals the loss of bird species, naming and describing the obliteration of the great American swamps, including the excellently named "Great Dismal". Proulx is a mistress of fascination, pulling the reader deep within her love for these places, then turning around and arguing furiously against their destruction. She shows us how they can be restored, how they can help heal a warming world, and makes clear their potential to both provide the cure and put the final nail in the coffin if they continue to be mismanaged. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

This little book is dedicated to the people of Ecuador who made their land the first country in the world to include legal rights for natural ecosystems in its constitution. The recent ruling against mining companies to protect the Andean cloud forest Los Cedros is a significant event for the world. Why fens, bogs and swamps? A fierce declaration of peat’s importance to climate stability and human survival. Proulx does not imagine she can plug the holes in the peatlands, but she is determined to plug the peatland-size hole in our histories.” — The New York Review of Books Proulx, mainly known for writing fiction and guides to smallholdings, has become a champion of fens, bogs and swamps, the mulchy sinking places she loves and which are both a victim of and solution to humanity’s catastrophic exploitation of the earth’s ecosystems. and after presenting basic arithmetic about microorganisms that resulted in a number with lots of zeros at the end, “If you are an earth-moving machine operator planning to drain bog land, think on this [number] and resist.” AP: Bog bodies, mummies, the corpse in the library—endless detective stories and murder mysteries all show that we have a kind of morbid fascination in unknown corpses. With ancient bodies, we want to know not only what brought these people to their ends, but who they were and how they lived their lives. We don’t know, we can’t know, but we want to know what happened. Perhaps the “why” is our in-built hunger for stories, or perhaps it is related to the slowdown of traffic passing by a vehicle accident—a kind of learning about danger that will make us wary of suffering the same event ourselves.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. 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. 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. Hunter S Thompson once said that to get at the truth, especially about something terrible, you had to “get subjective”. He was talking about his sworn enemy Richard Nixon, but it applies just the same to the appalling damage we’re doing to our planet. Newspaper articles, charity reports and activist speeches abound – all earnest and arguably objective, but they somehow fail to capture the true meaning of what’s being lost in the natural world. A lifelong environmentalist, Annie Proulx brings her wide-ranging research and scholarship to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important yet little understood role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that greatly contribute to climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources, and in four stunning parts, Proulx documents the long-misunderstood role of these wetlands in saving the planet.

Esquire: You’re primarily known as a novelist, and this is your first major work of nonfiction in a while. Why fens, bogs, and swamps? What about them caught your interest? An enchanting history of our wetlands... Imbued with the same reverence for nature as Proulx’s fiction, Fen, Bog, and Swamp is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action." —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire I'm still not at all sure just how I would classify the book, which is divided into three sections, the first being fens, the second bogs, and the third swamps. (Since these three types of what Proulx terms “peatlands” comprise the title of the book, this division is not at all surprising.) Each section includes a bit of scientific information intended to help the reader distinguish just what comprises a fen or a bog or a swamp and how each differs from the other two. Dabs of history relative to the topic of each section are mentioned as well as the author's own experiences with each of these types of wetlands. I followed William J. Mitsch and James G. Gosselink, Wetlands, 2015, 5th ed. (Wiley), for definitions and explanations of wetland processes. 1. Discursive Thoughts on Wetlands In the book, Proulx reveals the extensive harm that civilization has inflicted upon wetlands, but also highlights those who are taking action to mitigate the damage. While pragmatic about the severity of the situation, as she explained to Esquire, Proulx also finds reasons for hope and even joy in the wide-ranging efforts to adapt in the face of an increasingly inhospitable climate. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

1.

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. My four possible conclusions for why this book is a hot mess are as follows ranked from most generous to least generous: 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). Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Literary Hub!* A Finalist for the 2022 NBCC Awards in Nonfiction, the 2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award, and the NEIBA 2023 New England Book Award* 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.

By and large, our enterprising American ancestors hated swamps, which they saw as obstacles to travel and agriculture. In the timeless war between swamp folk and swamp drainers, most were firmly in the latter camp—supported with vigor by the government. I think that Proulx's inclusion of so many varying treatments of her subject—a little science, personal observations and even imagination, lament over environmental destruction by ill-advise wetland management—left me feeling that the book is weak in unity and focus. However, the book also has several strengths that recommend it to readers: 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.” This book is an incoherent mess of emotions and contradictory views and statements. The essay on swamps was the least frazzled section in this book. I'd hardly call this a history of wetlands and their destruction. Rather it is a history of her emotions and the judgements she makes based off of those emotions. And because emotions vary and shift they aren't a good thing to base value, moral, or scientific judgments off of. A swamp is a minerotrophic peat-making wetland dominated by trees and shrubs,” writes Proulx in an opening introduction of terms that contrasts swamps with the fens and bogs of her title. All these bodies yield peat, partially decomposed vegetable matter that humans have used for various purposes over the centuries, including fuel and fertilizer. The problem is, in the world-destroying period that Proulx brightly calls the “psychozoic,” with the increased exploitation of wetlands, the greenhouse gases held in peat formations are being released into the atmosphere, a vicious circle of climate change that continues to get worse. “That is the frightening side of peatland’s ability to hold in huge amounts of carbon dioxide: rip or burn the cover off and it is in your face,” writes the author, who ranges widely in this short book. She provides a particularly good compact history of the draining of the fens of eastern England in an act pitting capitalists against working people and turning the vast wetlands, “one of the world’s richest environments,” to farmland—and, of course, releasing greenhouse gases to accompany those generated by the first factories of the Industrial Revolution. A proverbial “pot of gold” awaits those who undertake such conversions. As Proulx writes, the swamp, fens, and bogs of North America, once drained, yielded valuable hardwoods, while the mangrove swamps of Mexico are being “deliberately destroyed…to open an area for the construction of a large Pemex oil refinery.” Remaking the world inevitably impoverishes it and us, as Proulx writes in a crescendo that damns the damming of the Mississippi River, turning it into “a large mud canal” in the bargain, its delta now being swallowed up by rising seawater.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. Delves into the history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis [...] Proulx uses nimble prose to knit together scientific facts, personal experiences, and literary references while deciphering the nomenclature of these three subtly diverse wetlands which collectively hold the key to human history" 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. 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: SWAMP: A swamp is a minerotrophic peat-making wetland dominated by trees and shrubs. Its waters tend to be shallower than those of fens and bogs.