This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. This effort, which spanned 1928 to 1958, was of central importance to the later emergence of modern environmentalism. Prior to the park’s creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. The region’s unusual makeup also made it an unlikely candidate to become a national park, as it had none of the sweeping scenic vistas or geological monuments found in other nationally protected areas. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland—and thus a region in need of protective status. While these new ideas foreshadowed the later emergence of modern environmentalism, tourism and the economic desires of Florida’s business and political elites also impacted the park’s future. These groups saw the Everglades’ unique biology and ecology as a foundation on which to build a tourism empire. They connected the Everglades to Florida’s modernization and commercialization, hoping the park would help facilitate the state’s transformation into the Sunshine State. Political conservatives welcomed federal power into Florida so long as it brought economic growth. Yet, even after the park’s creation, conservative landowners successfully fought to limit the park and saw it as a threat to their own economic freedoms. Today, a series of levees on the park’s eastern border marks the line between urban and protected areas, but development into these areas threatens the park system. Rising sea levels caused by global warming are another threat to the future of the park. The battle to save the swamp’s biodiversity continues, and Everglades Park stands at the center of ongoing restoration efforts.

How to Make A Wetland tells the story of two Turkish coastal areas, both shaped by ecological change and political uncertainty. On the Black Sea coast and the shores of the Aegean, farmers, scientists, fishermen, and families grapple with livelihoods in transition, as their environment is bound up in national and international conservation projects. Bridges and drainage canals, apartment buildings and highways—as well as the birds, water buffalo, and various animals of the regions—all inform a moral ecology in the making. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in wetlands and deltas, Caterina Scaramelli offers an anthropological understanding of sweeping environmental and infrastructural change, and the moral claims made on livability and materiality in Turkey, and beyond. Beginning from a moral ecological position, she takes into account the notion that politics is not simply projected onto animals, plants, soil, water, sediments, rocks, and other non-human beings and materials. Rather, people make politics through them. With this book, she highlights the aspirations, moral relations, and care practices in constant play in contestations and alliances over environmental change.

In a world filled with breathtaking beauty, we have often overlooked the elusive magic of certain landscapes. A cloudy river flows into an Arctic wetland where sandhill cranes and muskoxen dwell. Further south, cypress branches hang low over dismal swamps. Places like these-collectively known as swamplands or peatlands-often go unnoticed for their ecological splendor. They are as globally significant as rainforests, yet, because of their reputation as wastelands, they are being systematically drained and degraded. Swamplands celebrates these wild places, as journalist Edward Struzik highlights the unappreciated struggle 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 inspires us to see the beauty and importance in these least likely of places­. Our planet's survival might depend on it.

In the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world’s wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor water quality, and the erosion of cultural sites, and only in the past few decades have wetlands been widely recognized as worth preserving. Emily O’Gorman asks, What has counted as a wetland, for whom, and with what consequences? Using the Murray-Darling Basin—a massive river system in eastern Australia that includes over 30,000 wetland areas—as a case study and drawing on archival research and original interviews, O’Gorman examines how people and animals have shaped wetlands from the late nineteenth century to today. She illuminates deeper dynamics by relating how Aboriginal peoples acted then and now as custodians of the landscape, despite the policies of the Australian government; how the movements of water birds affected farmers; and how mosquitoes have defied efforts to fully understand, let alone control, them. Situating the region’s history within global environmental humanities conversations, O’Gorman argues that we need to understand wetlands as socioecological landscapes in order to create new kinds of relationships with and futures for these places.

A comprehensive and fascinating guide to the wetlands of the world that covers important wetland wildlife in detail, with a special focus on birds. The ecology of marshes, estuaries, floodplains, lagoons, swamps and bogs supports an exceptionally rich diversity of species. Many wetlands around the world are now open to the public as nature reserves that generate millions of visitors including birdwatchers and amateur ecologists. Guide to Wetlands covers the many aspects of the study of wetlands in a single, portable volume. Using spectacular color photographs and clear explanatory illustrations alongside the author's concise text, it discusses: What are wetlands Wetland diversity How wetlands work The need for wetlands Adapting to life in wetlands Plant adaptation Animal adaptation People and wetlands Loss of wetlands Rural development and agriculture Wetland conservation Wetland wildlife. The book includes a wetland atlas with maps identifying wetland environments around the world and describing topography and important features. Birdwatchers will find this book of particular interest. Guide to Wetlands is an essential reference on a crucial aspect of the global environment that will appeal to naturalists, birdwatchers, ecologists and travelers.

This text provides a synthesis of the existing field of wetland ecology using a few central themes, including key environmental factors that produce wetland community types and some unifying problems such as assembly rules, restoration and conservation.

*Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Literary Hub!* *A 2022 NBCC Awards Nonfiction Finalist and a 2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist* From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, this riveting deep dive into the history of our wetlands and what their systematic destruction means for the planet “is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action” (Esquire). “I learned something new—and found something amazing—on every page.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit. In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever. A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is “an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present, fixed on a subject that could not be more important” (Bill McKibben). “A stark but beautifully written Silent Spring–style warning from one of our greatest novelists.” —The Christian Science Monitor