Fen, Bog and Swamp Quotes

“There are people who are fond of tracing ideas and their connections in unlikely places and old books; I am one of them. I am easily enchanted when an odd idea or phrase looms on a page, often showing an invisible link.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Wetlands are actually unsung heroes. They nurture young fish, provide refuge to birds, bats, bugs, and sometimes to big mammals like panthers and bears. Mangroves, for instance, are trees and shrubs that inhabit coastal swamps, and they form peat that is home to clams, snails, crabs, and shrimp, and filter pollution out of the water. Their “interlaced roots protect tiny fish from ravenous jaws of larger fish, and even manatees and dolphins take refuge there.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“I followed William J. Mitsch and James G. Gosselink, Wetlands, 2015, 5th ed. (Wiley), for definitions and explanations of wetland processes.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“This too is part of the human psyche—a burning sense of irrevocable loss yoked to a fatalistic acceptance of “progress” and “improvement” and the hubristic idea that “now”—the time in which we live—is superior to all previous times. The proofs given are usually technological “improvements.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Bog waters tend to be shallower than those in fens.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Indonesia’s richly complex wooded peatlands where entrepreneurs log, burn and plow to make palm oil plantations are one of the saddest examples of great biological loss. In shops and stores I read labels and when I find bars of soap made with palm oil I get a mental image of a ravaged forest. I do not buy that soap.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Quammen compares the human population explosion to an outbreak of tent caterpillars. As we cut down deep forests and convert wild places to feed lots and drained swamp to cropland we encounter other species—birds, mammals, reptiles, bacteria and viruses—alien viruses whose hosts and habitats we have severely disrupted and displaced, so that viruses such as SARS, Ebola, MERS, the cluster of “swine flus” and Covid-19 are forced to find other places, other hosts including humans.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“In the 1990s the trees absorbed 17 percent of human-produced CO2 but in the second decade of this century they took in only 6 percent.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“The legally binding Paris Accord was signed in 2015 by all of the world’s countries except Nicaragua and Syria with a goal of keeping the earth’s temperature rise below 2° C.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Nor do we wish to change. Ancient Judeo-Christian beliefs allow humans to use the rest of the world as they wish:”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“The real triggers for epidemic and pandemics are the societal organization and society-driven human/animal contacts and amplification loops provided by the modern human society, i.e., contacts, land conversion, markets, international trade, mobility, etc.” In that “etc.” lies our future.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Gene Stratton-Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost, my mother’s favorite book in the 1920s when she was a teenager (she loved it for its swamp setting),”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Meanley’s years in and around the southern waterlands are encapsulated in his Swamps, River Bottoms & Canebrakes.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Today as the climate crisis begins to bite and the swelling numbers of the most populous mammal on the planet—7.8 billion people—continues to grow some recognize that it is our ever-expanding human works and vast mechanized agriculture that have flattened the wilderness and introduced us to ever-new micro-organisms, while in the last fifty years more than half of the bird, mammal and amphibian populations have dwindled into memory or teeter on the edge of the extinction cliff. It is our species that seems deranged in its blind despoliations of the natural world. It is we humans who disturb millennia of secluded species with our religions, societies and agricultures, we who bring animals and their viruses out of their remote habitats and into our markets and kitchens. These days Stilgoe’s beast that snuffles about in the human unconsciousness is among us—by invitation.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“Vladimir Nabokov’s story of lepidopterists in a bog—“Terra Incognita”—also strikes the sinister note.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“When he was young Darwin collected beetles and in his autobiography he declared his love: I give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“The sphagnums are the keystone species in peatland ecosystems which hold one third of the earth’s organic carbon.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“At the height of the Ice Age twenty thousand years ago Britain was not an island but a shoreline fringe on the huge landmass of Europe and Asia. This land mass included a swath that extended from the proto-England to the Netherlands on undulating plains now under the North Sea. This was the lost country of Doggerland, a sizeable 180,000 square kilometers of rolling hills.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“The projection was that by the mid-2030s the tropic forests would no longer absorb CO2 but start releasing it. But that tipping point has already arrived, and if climate change seems to be accelerating it is apparently because the Amazonian contribution of ejected CO2 is pushing the process.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“The world’s largest peatlands are Canada’s Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, the Mayo Boglands, America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, Indonesia’s peat forests, the Magellanic Tundra Complex of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands, the marshes of Mesopotamia and the Central Congo Basin’s Cuvette Centrale.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis

“In Yakutia, where the earth’s largest thermokarst—the “Batagai Depression”—a kilometer in length, 100 meters deep and still growing rapidly, is also the site for scientists who are gathering samples of preserved and frozen soils up to 200,000 years old. Using molecular genetic and microbiological procedures they hope to extract bacteria and viruses from the soils that could lead to new antibiotics. But for the third straight year terrible fires are devouring the forests of Yakutia. The smoke drifts out into the Pacific and people on ships and in Alaska and along the North American west coast cough and gasp in the pungent brown haze.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis