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

Highly recommend for anyone interested in historical and modern-day environmental issues! Struzik does an excellent job explaining the importance of swamps, such as their high level of carbon sequestration in the face of climate change, in gripping and accessible prose. I also like how he highlights Black history, particularly the history of maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp (maroons = formerly enslaved people who pursued freedom in nature).

First, I should have been forewarned. The reviews cited in amazon were mostly from other authors who mention their own books--usually a bad sign.The book is full of historical and personal anecdotes, sometimes rambling off of the book's central theme. Some of these are interesting, and sometimes they fill space. These often displace systematic descriptions of the geography, biology, chemistry and geology of the swamp.The presentation is incredibly disorganized. If you want to learn--a little--about the everglades, look in the chapter on new york's central park.Some definitions early on would be helpful--e.g, swamp, fen, bog, etc.This book has an intriguing topic, but delivers disappointingly.On the positive side, it, in its rambling way, consistently sends a message that swamps have been treated abusively in public policy and private profitmaking.

For bog people like me, this book is a treat. I recently reviewed "Heathland," by Clive Chitters, here on Amazon.com. It's a book focusing on peatlands in the U.K. This is a book of global scope, though it zeroes in on a few places and case histories, from the Arctic and subarctic to the tropical SW Pacific.Years ago I was living in Punta Arenas, Chile on the Straits of Magellan and needed to visit a place called Pecket where there was an accessible colony of Magellanic penguins that formed a sort of tourist attraction. As a result there was a regular shuttle-van service to and from there, operated by a local tourist agency. It was cheap and convenient and I began using it regularly. The route took us through extensive peat-bog country (they are called "turbales" or "turberas" in South America) and I began giving spontaneous lectures about bog ecology to my fellow passengers, in Spanish or English as need be. None of them had any previous knowledge of the subject except a few Germans, but all seemed intensely interested. I told them how peat offered access to paleoclimates and paleovegetations. Word got back to the agency, and the manager offered me free passage if I would continue offering my lectures. I did, and they gave me free passage, and everyone was happy.Those turbales share species of Sphagnum and sundews with the ones in boreal North America--in itself a fascinating problem for historical biogeography, which refers to such distributions as "bipolar" or, if they extend farther into temperate latitudes, "amphitropical." The low shrub Crowberry (Empetrum), treated as sister-species in the two hemispheres, is the classic example and has now been elucidated via molecular genetics.This book is a gold mine of peatland lore. Most distinctively and rather depressingly, it documents the historic threats to peatlands, almost universally considered "barren" or "worthless" and hence expendable. There once was a crackpot notion to explode nuclear devices in Canadian peatlands! The ecological functions of peatlands have become much better understood in the past 30 years or so and they are now a focus of conservation activity--not least in the tropical SW Pacific, where they have been lost at a terrifying rate for conversion to palm-oil plantations. Struzik is not quite up-to-date on that front.There are very few errors. At one point Struzik talks about arthropod surveys, seemingly unaware that insects are arthropods, but he must know that. On p.20 he says "there are no bogs in the western United States," only fens. But there are actual sphagnum bogs, including about half a dozen in northern California. One of the best of these, the Osgood Swamp just west of the town of Meyers (just south of South Lake Tahoe), may have been burned in the recent Caldor fire--I haven't gotten up to check and no one seems to know if it escaped. It has/had Buckbean, Sundews, Purple Cinquefoil, etc. and plenty of Sphagnum. There are/were boggy elements not far away at Grass Lake, near Luther Pass.Struzik seems unaware of a unique habitat found in northern California and adjacent SW Oregon, the "Darlingtonia fen." Darlingtonia is the California Pitcher Plant or Cobra Plant. It grows not in acid peat but adjacent to streams or seeps flowing from ultramafic (serpentine or peridotite) sources, as in the Trinity Alps, Deadfall Meadow on Mount Eddy, and in a handful of places in the northern Sierra, all of which except Butterfly Valley in the Feather River Canyon are well-guarded secrets, Despite the difference in chemistry, these places are boggy in both aspect and biota. Butterfly Valley has Labrador Tea too.Struzik mentions the high-Andean bogs known as bofedales only very briefly. They are again quite distinctive non-Sphagnum-engineered systems, little known to North Americans but immensely important in their regional ecology. The picture I appended shows a huge one in the Lauca National Park, NE Chile, at about 11,000'.The jacket design includes beavers, which reappear in various places in the book. They were present in pre-glacial time in what are now tundra habitats, disappeared during the Pleistocene, and are busily reoccupying those latitudes spontaneously as the climate warms. Beavers were deliberately introduced in Tierra del Fuego, where--in the absence of predators--they have had massive ecological impacts, one of which is the creation of many new peat bogs as the ponds they create undergo succession. The superintendent of Argentina's Tierra del Fuego National Park told me "We have three plagues: [European] rabbits, beavers, and [Oxeye] daisies." They are all thoroughly naturalized now. Another appended photo shows a turbal at Lapataia, Tierra del Fuego.Despite a few cavils, I loved this book. Peatlands, like a certain comedian, long got no respect. It's high time we recognized them and gave them their due.

I can't add to what Art Shapiro has already said. I found "Swamplands" to ramble and the California areas that were missed may have been for the good. I've seen to many sensitive areas trampled to death. I will be passing 'Swamplands" on to a botanist friend