Merritt Turetsky’s Bogland takes the most sneered-at ground on earth—the stuff we drain, mock, and turn into every word for being stuck—and contends it’s one of the planet’s great underrated systems. The carbon science is clear-eyed: These wet places comprise three percent of land and thirty percent of the world’s soil carbon, and fires and thaw could flip it all. Where the book comes alive is in the human connection, like the resurfaced Iron Age bog bodies with their last meal intact, swamps that hid the hunted, fieldwork reported from the muck itself. It leans hard on “liminal,” and the closing pep talk is earnest to a fault, but it’s a great read anyway. Bog? Let’s hear it for wetlands.
Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life