From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx â whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth â comes an urgent and riveting history of wetlands, their ecological role and how the loss of them threatens the planet.
Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earthâs most desirable and dependable resources, and in four illuminating parts Proulx documents the emergence of their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit and the consequent release of their stored carbon. Wide-ranging and idiosyncratic, Proulxâs explanation of wetlands takes readers to the fens of sixteenth-century England, Canadaâs Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russiaâs Great Vasyugan Mire and Americaâs Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and introduces the nineteenth-century explorers who launched the ravaging of the Amazon rainforest.
Proulx was born in the 1930s, a time, as she says, when âin the ever-continuing name of progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife.â is both a revelatory history and an urgent plea for wetland reclamation from a writer whose passionate devotion to observing and preserving the environment is on glorious display.Fen, Bog & Swamp
âMagnificent, bringing to life hitherto overlooked habitatsâGuardian
âProulx's sparkling book will open your eyes to humanity's reckless trashing of wetlandsâTelegraph
âA haunting tribute ⊠Proulxâs poetic description of these places, and peat itself, is a pleasure to readâFinancial Times
A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week âA subject that could not be more important. A compact classic!â Bill McKibben âI learned something new â and found something amazing â on every pageâ Anthony Doerr, author ofAll the Light We Cannot See