num_pages: 312
description: 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 thesecollectively known as swamplands or peatlandsoften 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 arent for the faint of heart. Ed loses a shoe to an Arctic wolf and finds himself ankle-deep in water during a lightning storm. But the rewards are sweeter for the an enchanting Calypso orchid; an elusive yellow moth thought to be extinct; ancient animals preserved in lifelike condition down to the fur.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 planets survival might depend on it. 
language: English
title: Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat
publisher: Island Press