Bogs exist in the liminal space between water and land, haunted by will-o’-the-wisps and home to carnivorous plants, equally ready to suck in unsuspecting wanderers or disgorge eerily preserved ancient artifacts—or bodies. Long relegated to the purview of horror films or dismissed as wastelands, bogs have been sites of historical resistance and refuge in the past while quietly resisting the greatest threat to humanity in the present: climate change. Bogs sequester a third of the world’s soil carbon while only covering a measly three percent of the Earth’s surface, but their reach is under even more threat due to peat harvesting and palm oil plantations. The ecologist Merritt Turetsky has spent decades studying the peaty places of the world, untangling sphagnum moss and dissecting cores from the boreal forests of Canada to the jungles of Borneo. Her new book, Bogland, is both a love song to the lands of peat and a plea for preservation. “Neither alive nor dead, suspended between present and past, peat is one of the strongest and most resilient resources on our planet,” she writes. “And yet, it is easily destroyed by human hands.”
Merritt Turetsky is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she runs the very boggy Ecosystem Analysis Lab.
Go beyond the episode:
- Merritt Turetsky’s Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life
- Check out the boggy beauty of Tierra del Fuego
- Peruse the Faddan More Psalter text (discovered in a bog)
- Behold the Hjortspring Boat (also discovered in a bog)
- And read about nine noteworthy bog bodies
Get mired in fictional boglands:
- Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, obviously, including its finest adaptation
- Graham Swift’s Waterland
- Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox
- Phillip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage
- Kasi Lemon’s Eve’s Bayou
- Paul Maslanski’s Sugar Hill
- Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride
- Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God
- Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon
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