Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth 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 earths 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, Proulxs explanation of wetlands takes readers to the fens of sixteenth-century England, Canadas Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russias Great Vasyugan Mire and Americas 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 in the ever-continuing name of progress, Western countries busily raped their own and other countries of minerals, timber, fish and wildlife. Fen, Bog & Swamp 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.

Magnificent, bringing to life hitherto overlooked habitats Guardian

Proulx's sparkling book will open your eyes to humanity's reckless trashing of wetlands Telegraph

A haunting tribute Proulxs poetic description of these places, and peat itself, is a pleasure to read Financial Times