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.
Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery
