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FEN, BOG & SWAMP

A SHORT HISTORY OF PEATLAND DESTRUCTION AND ITS ROLE IN THE CLIMATE CRISIS

An eloquent, engaged argument for the preservation of a small and damp yet essential part of the planet.

The noted novelist turns to environmental history to describe the workings of the world’s wetlands.

“A swamp is a minerotrophic peat-making wetland dominated by trees and shrubs,” writes Proulx in an opening introduction of terms that contrasts swamps with the fens and bogs of her title. All these bodies yield peat, partially decomposed vegetable matter that humans have used for various purposes over the centuries, including fuel and fertilizer. The problem is, in the world-destroying period that Proulx brightly calls the “psychozoic,” with the increased exploitation of wetlands, the greenhouse gases held in peat formations are being released into the atmosphere, a vicious circle of climate change that continues to get worse. “That is the frightening side of peatland’s ability to hold in huge amounts of carbon dioxide: rip or burn the cover off and it is in your face,” writes the author, who ranges widely in this short book. She provides a particularly good compact history of the draining of the fens of eastern England in an act pitting capitalists against working people and turning the vast wetlands, “one of the world’s richest environments,” to farmland—and, of course, releasing greenhouse gases to accompany those generated by the first factories of the Industrial Revolution. A proverbial “pot of gold” awaits those who undertake such conversions. As Proulx writes, the swamp, fens, and bogs of North America, once drained, yielded valuable hardwoods, while the mangrove swamps of Mexico are being “deliberately destroyed…to open an area for the construction of a large Pemex oil refinery.” Remaking the world inevitably impoverishes it and us, as Proulx writes in a crescendo that damns the damming of the Mississippi River, turning it into “a large mud canal” in the bargain, its delta now being swallowed up by rising seawater.

An eloquent, engaged argument for the preservation of a small and damp yet essential part of the planet.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982173-35-7

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022

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THE BACKYARD BIRD CHRONICLES

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.

In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”

An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.

Pub Date: April 23, 2024

ISBN: 9780593536131

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

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IS A RIVER ALIVE?

Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.

The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.

In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.

Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.

Pub Date: May 20, 2025

ISBN: 9780393242133

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025

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