City of Belmont - Ruth Faulkner Public Library

Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth’s 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, Proulx’s explanation of wetlands takes listeners to the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay Lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire and America’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and introduces the 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 and 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.

BORROWBOX:BOL_3996896

eng

Fen, Bog and SwampA Short History of Peatland Destruction and its Role in the Climate Crisis