Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life

Not quite land and not quite water, boglands have long been dismissed as wastelands—too sodden to farm, too perilous to cross, too unruly to be considered beautiful. Come closer, however, and a strange truth emerges: These wild, eerie landscapes stretch our minds, hold the history of humanity, and will shape the future of our planet. In Bogland, acclaimed ecologist Merritt R. Turetsky invites readers to discover the elusive magic and surprising power of these misunderstood places, where the boundaries blur between life and death, past and present, refuge and peril.

Venturing from the boreal forests of Canada to the jungles of Borneo, and from the planet’s oldest bog in Greece to some of its newest in Greenland, Turetsky unveils bogs as marvelous paradoxes that defy categorization and their own systemic undervaluation. Here, radical life forms—acid-flinging mosses, amphibian-eating plants—spring from layers upon layers of dead matter. The past and present commingle with uncanny intimacy as peat safeguards artifacts for centuries, along with ancient lives unearthed later as “bog bodies” so remarkably preserved they are sometimes mistaken for the recently missing. Proverbially dangerous, bogs have offered shelter throughout history to the marginalized and resistance movements from Virginia to Vietnam. Crucially, they also regulate the planet’s climate, sequestering nearly one-third of Earth’s soil carbon while covering just 3 percent of its surface—even as accelerating exploitation risks transforming them from climate allies to climate foes, and erasing these ecosystems just as we’re learning to appreciate them.

The debut of an extraordinary nature writer, Bogland is an ode and a call to action: to defend bogs’ strangeness and stillness from rising destruction, to value them precisely for their refusal to conform, and to learn from them new ways to adapt, endure, and belong on our changing planet—before it’s too late.