Encore: The Weekly Anthropocene Reviews Fen, Bog, & Swamp by Annie Proulx

A The Weekly Anthropocene Book Review

Fen, Bog, & Swamp is an unusual book. It’s essentially a personal nonfiction essay¹ about wetland ecology by Annie Proulx, an acclaimed writer who’s penned award-winning works like The Shipping News (1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) and Brokeback Mountain (the one the movie’s based on). Pulitzer-tier Literature with a capital L writers like that don’t normally write environmental books; Ms. Proulx just wrote this because she was passionate about wetlands, and you can really tell. The prose of Fen, Bog, & Swamp is positively lyrical, elevating the quotidian biological wonders of wetlands to the grandeur they deserve. Take this description of the reproductive cycle of the water-storing, wetland-building, peat-depositing sphagnum moss.

“Close to the ground the air is still-the laminar boundary. About 10 centimeters above the sphagnum the turbulent air rolls. The sphagnum is aware. It must get its spores into that transport zone. So, when the sun heats its spherical spore capsules they tighten their shape from sphere to cylinder. Cooking in solar heat, internal pressure builds up inside the constricting capsules until they explode, hurling the spores out in a mushroom cloud of vertex rings that exceed the heights of mere ballistics and put the spores in the passing lane. Most travel only a few meters, but some may catch a transoceanic long-distance ride to new territory.”

-Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog, & Swamp

The book is organized by ecological succession stages, from sedge and grass-dominated surface- or groundwater-fed fens to moss-dominated rainwater-fed bogs to tree-covered, nearly-forest swamps. At each stage, Ms. Proulx discussed the biology, ecology, and history of this sort of wetland, the cultures and species that grew up in them, and the great losses they have almost almost suffered from human-caused drainage, pollution, and climate change. Wetlands have often been viewed as “wasted land” unfit for agriculture, and vast swathes of them were destroyed in the Industrial Revolution.

Fen, Bog, & Swamp is a real pleasure to read, with a consistent flow of minor revelations and intriguing anecdotes. For example, this writer had heard of the famed English Fenlands before, but was surprised to read about quite how large and important they were, supporting human populations and an array of rare plant species from the Neolithic until the draining projects of early modernity.

This writer had also never realized that the famed and historically pivotal Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, where Germanic tribes under Arminius ambushed and destroyed three Roman legions, is now thought to have taken place at the edge of the Great Moor of Kalkriese. (The confusion apparently arose due to a mistranslation from Tacitus). The Germans trapped the legions against the impassable bog, which modern archaeologists have found to be full of legion artifacts. One could say that this particular wetland halted the expansion of the Roman Empire.

“The victors nailed Roman heads onto trees, gathered up Roman weapons and equipment, some kept and used, many weapons, coins, amulets, bells, and a silver-plated parade mask all flung in votive thanks to the avid water gods of the bog. They could hear the black bog waters glugging as they accepted the offerings.”

-Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog, & Swamp

Inset from The Grand Kankakee, an oil painting of the Grand Kankakee Marsh by General Lew Wallace (of Civil War and Ben-Hur fame)

The Swamp chapter also has a series of loving profiles of forgotten, mostly-drained American swamp ecosystems, many of which were obscure even to an American natural history buff like this writer. Have you ever heard of Indiana’s Grand Kankakee Marsh, once known as the “Everglades of the North” and home to a superabundance of wildlife? It was almost all drained for farmland starting in the 1850s, with its waterbirds shot by the train car load and sent to Chicago restaurants. In the early 1900s, the Kankakee River was dredged into a much-shorter straight line, losing 64% of its 250-mile length and eroding the local topsoil with the faster water flow. The glories of the Kankakee are not completely lost, though; in 1997, The Nature Conservancy began a project to restore a tiny fragment of the marsh, which has since attracted 240 species of birds and seen the reintroduction of bison.

“Farmers noticed that the raised stream banks in parts of the swamp were made of dry black soil. They picked up handfuls of it, rubbed it between their fingers, judged its tilth. Then they cut down the stream bank trees, plowed and planted and harvested tremendous crops. They said what every farmer in newly opened peatland has ever said as they gathered the first harvests: ‘this is some of the most productive soil on Earth’…A few generations later the productive soils were depleted; organic soils disappear when they are not replenished.”

-Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog, & Swamp

In short, Fen, Bog, & Swamp is a fascinating, fast-paced, and consistently interesting book, ideal for anyone who’s ever enjoyed the subtle beauty of a swamp or mire. It calls for wetland preservation and highlights the importance of their carbon sequestering ecosystems in the fight against climate change, like many recent papers and articles, but it adds extra depth and humanity to this issue by sharing some of the intertwining history of fens, bogs, swamps, and humans. A great read!

1. I say “essay” because it’s the terminology Ms. Proulx uses, and also because it’s fairly brief, at under 200 pages.