University of Chicago Press
Columbia University Press
MIRED in difficulties, in a slough of despair, bogged down or simply just plain swamped, wetlands tend to conjure negative visions. Often regarded as the last refuge of the desperate, a place of outlaws and outcasts, historically they have had few fans. The name of Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp (one of North America’s biggest wetlands) isn’t exactly one you would pick for a place that is loved.
Draining wetlands, on the other hand, has always been seen as land reclamation, as bringing it back into the realm of the useful, the valid and unsullied. Yet, wetlands brim with life. Buoyed by water, smaller plants are freed from the need to invest in supportive structures and can devote their full attention to growth and reproduction. The vigour with which they do this makes wetlands the most fertile non-marine ecosystems on the planet.
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While tropical forests produce biomass equivalent to an annual 2 kilograms of carbon per square metre, the world’s marshes and wetlands manage 2.5 kg. Faced with this bounty, nature declares a biodiversity party, with densities and diversities of fish, dragonflies and other life forms higher here than anywhere else.
Yet the swamps, marshes, fens, bogs, quags and swales continue, as they always have been, to be generally misunderstood and largely unloved. Clearly, these amazing habitats need serious PR. Enter environmentalist Catherine Owen Koning and ecologist Sharon Ashworth, with their book Wading Right In. Both have spent years as swamp biologists and want to share their passion.
“Drought will not only inform, but make you turn the tap off when you brush your teeth”
“People are more moved by stories than statistics,” they write. The book, they say, is “not a checklist of characteristics, but an immersion in… real events”, and off we go, on a book-length exposition of the joy of all things marshy, told by people whose joy in life is to “wade into the muck”.
Their story runs from vignettes about the school parties that come to Ashworth’s ecology extension programmes to oral history-style treatments of the memories of retired biologists, and the hopes of those just starting. All are full of enthusiasm and love for the various water-soaked wildernesses they have peered in, poked at and published about.
Koning and Ashworth also treat us to a global tour of Earth’s inundated habitats. Their diversity is extraordinary: from seasonally flooded vernal pools in California, where ephemeral plants form temporary rings around a central pond, via the permanently flooded palm swamps of the Congo basin, to the wetlands of Louisiana, where slow-growing cypress trees can live for hundreds of years.
Written with immense brio, the text is littered with fascinating facts and memorable descriptions, such as “these freshwater marshes are critical places for children to explore, for rails to squawk and toads to trill… and for biologists to learn how the world works”. By the end, armed with information and the experience of experts, you find yourself looking for your wellies and planning a trip to the nearest soggy spot.
And, as the authors remind us, wetlands need all the individual and institutional support they can get. They are the most endangered ecosystems on Earth, disappearing three times faster than forests, with 1000 monitored sites lost between 1978 and 2010.
Benjamin Cook’s Drought couldn’t be more different and makes for a stark contrast. It is, no pun intended, a very much drier book. This is to be expected, since it is hard to feel good about an event synonymous with cessation, and, depending on its duration, disaster, catastrophe or collapse.
After all, simple lack of water has done for many great forests, such as those of the Sahara, and a series of mighty human empires across the globe, from the Middle East to Meso-America and beyond.
But if the end results are often simple, swift and calamitous, the causes of drought tend to be complex, subtle and take a long time to have their effects fully felt. If the origin of the dust devil lies in the details, then those details are an intertwined mix of diffuse and non-linear interactions that require multidisciplinary expertise to fully extricate.
Hence the “interdisciplinary” in the book’s subtitle. Luckily for us, Cook, a climatologist based at NASA and Columbia University in New York, is good at crossing subject boundaries and as much at home explaining atmospheric physics as he is clarifying the subtleties of tree ring growth.
Having covered everything from how hydrological cycles work at local and global levels, to past climatic cycles and the methods used to measure them, Cook continues with case studies of the Dust Bowl in the US during the 1930s and the African Sahel, the transition zone between the Sahara desert and savannah to the south. These show how a variety of drivers can push systems past their hydrological tipping points.
The final chapters look to the future, to direct impacts of human use of water so profligate that we are exhausting reserves laid down millennia ago, and to the likely impacts of climate change. Clear, factual, informative and concise, Cook treats a complex subject with aplomb. You may not set out to engage with this book, but you should: reading it will not only inform you, but also give you a real determination to turn the tap off when you brush your teeth.
