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.

Harlan Ford was the first person to pour plaster castings of tracks and report a sighting to the media of an unknown creature known worldwide as the legendary Honey Island Swamp Monster. Harlan Ford was my grandfather. While recently moving everything from the Ford home after it was sold, we came across a letter that Harlan Ford wrote in the 1970's about his encounter with the Honey Island Swamp Monster. After Harlan Ford passed away in 1980, his story of the Honey Island Swamp Monster has been told and retold by many people. As we all know when things are retold so many times, certain details change, get exaggerated, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose. But luckily Ford's encounters were documented in his own words in the letter. I have inserted Harlan Ford's actual letter in this book for you to read. There are also recent eye-witness encounters that are documented in this book.

After building his own canoe, 14-year-old Jack Hawkins goes to try it out in his beloved Okefenokee Swamp, where an accident tests his survival skills and leads him to a shocking discovery.

When jake finds the old canoe filled with rocks and hidden in sand near the river, he and Ben are thrilled! But someone wants to bury it. Why? The trouble begins when they clean it up, discover a treasure map, and set out in their new boat in search of adventure.What they find instead is terror: alligators swarming around them, trapping them on the tiny island in the middle of the eerie Swamp. But there is an even more fearsome enemy: a shadowy figure who is waiting to kill them if they survive the alligators and the quicksand that lies beyond...

Throughout history, swamps have been idealized and demonized, purged and protected. Today, they are simultaneously considered metaphorical places of evil, pestilence, and death, and treasured as diverse biological ecosystems teeming with life. Covering not only swamps and bogs but also marshes and wetlands, Swamp ventures into the cultural and ecological histories of these mysterious, mythologized, and misunderstood landscapes. Anthony Wilson takes readers into swamps across the globe, from the freshwater marshes of Botswana’s tremendous Okavango delta, to the notable swamps between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to the peat bogs in Russia, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, which have been used as energy sources for centuries. It explores ideas and representations of wetlands across centuries, cultures, and continents, considering legend and folklore, mythology, literature, film, and natural and cultural history. As it plumbs the murky depths of swamps from the distant past to an uncertain future, Swamps provides an engaging, accessible, informative, and lavishly illustrated journey into these fascinating landscapes.