Swamplands

Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat

By: Edward Struzik

Narrated by: Christopher Grove

In a world filled with breathtaking beauty, we have often overlooked the elusive charm and magic of certain landscapes. A cloudy river flows into a verdant Arctic wetland where sandhill cranes and muskoxen dwell. Further south, cypress branches hang low over dismal swamps. Places like these - collectively known as swamplands or peatlands - often go unnoticed for their ecological splendor. They are as globally significant as rainforests, and function as critical carbon sinks for addressing our climate crisis. Yet, because of their reputation as wastelands, they are being systematically drained and degraded to make way for oilsands, mines, farms, and electricity.

In Swamplands, journalist Edward Struzik celebrates these wild places, venturing into windswept bogs in Kauai and the last remnants of an ancient peatland in the Mojave Desert. The secrets of the swamp aren't for the faint of heart.

Swamplands highlights the unappreciated struggle being waged to save peatlands by scientists, conservationists, and landowners around the world. An ode to peaty landscapes in all their offbeat glory, the book is also a demand for awareness of the myriad threats they face. It urges us to see the beauty and importance in these least likely of places­. Our planet's survival might depend on it.

©2021 Edward Struzik (P)2021 Tantor

Fossil Fuels receive 5.9 Trillion, science barely 1M

Many great (and depressing take aways), but this one stuck out. The US govt spends bonkers (number above from Yale) on subsidizing Fossil Fuels but next to nothing (number from book) on scientific protections on bogs, wetlands and other critical habitat and responsible water policies.