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

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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 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. 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.

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. 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).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. Instead, Proulx makes a more difficult and unsettling argument: that we are all, in our own way, complicit in the environmental despoliation happening around us. She doesn’t blame Donald Trump or Joe Biden – her beef is with the Judeo-Christian belief that creation is made for humans, meaning we can use the world as we wish: “The attitude of looking at nature solely as something to be exploited – without cooperative thanks or appeasing sacrifices – is ingrained in western cultures.” It’s this instrumentalist view of nature that means wetlands are happily drained to make land for farming, releasing monumental amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. (Proulx revels in the irony that destroying our historic wetlands may be precipitating global warming, which in turn is causing waters to rise, so creating more wetlands.) This book narrowly avoided earning my first 1-star rating by actually containing interesting factual information. The tone throughout is that of a satirist trying to parody a passionate conservationist, except that as far as I can tell, this author is taken seriously as a conservationist by some people, including herself. 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:

From this beginning she recalls growing into the knowledge that the decade was characterised by ‘vile human behaviour’: ‘In the ever continuing name of Progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife. They built dams and drained wetlands … I can see the period as a harbinger of the awfulness of the present.’ The fate of such places seems to stand in for Proulx’s catastrophic disillusionment with our relationship to the natural world. ‘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.’ Suffering and affliction and apocalyptic imagery are abundant: zombie fires in Arctic permafrost, ‘incinerated trees and understorey’, ‘millions of animals and birds roasted alive’, ‘poisonous smoke that makes breathing creatures retch and strangle and die’. I don’t always share Proulx’s disappointment with the state of nature, but it’s less because I think her pessimism is misplaced than because I have misgivings about a prelapsarian environmentalism wistful for ‘the sweet days before drainage when the fens were fecund’. Peatlands occupy 12 per cent of the UK’s land area and store more carbon than all the forests in the UK, France and Germany combined, but 80 per cent of them are in a degraded state. This leaves us with more than just the usual problems of a diminished carbon sink, as when forests are felled and the timber burned: drying and decaying peatlands continue to emit greenhouse gases. In 2019 it was estimated that they added 23.1 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent, accounting for 3.5 per cent of total UK emissions. A report in March found that the UK’s peatlands released GHGs nearly equivalent to the amount absorbed by our woodlands. The worst cases of degradation don’t look denuded, as Papa Stour does, or have the sculpted modernism of a Hebridean peat bank, but take the guise of our most productive and valuable agricultural land. In the East Anglian Fens or the low-lying basin peat of the Somerset Levels, devastation looks more like improvement. But although agricultural peat soils account for only 15 per cent of the UK’s peatlands they emit more than half of the GHG emissions. The problem of our peatlands, in other words, is in the food we eat. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.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.” This sobering history of our world's rich wetlands explains the chilling ecological consequences of their destruction" ESQ: When discussing the draining of wetlands, you make several tongue-in-cheek references to the resulting “most productive soil in the world.” I think you’d agree that our society tends to have a rather toxic concept of “productive.” Where do you think this mania for productivity comes from?