Hunter S Thompson once said that to get at the truth, especially about something terrible, you had to “get subjective”. He was talking about his sworn enemy Richard Nixon, but it applies just the same to the appalling damage we’re doing to our planet. Newspaper articles, charity reports and activist speeches abound – all earnest and arguably objective, but they somehow fail to capture the true meaning of what’s being lost in the natural world.
Perhaps that’s why novelists writing about ecological issues is such a compelling subgenre – they can’t help but let the subjective seep into their nonfiction. Arundhati Roy on the ghastly impact of mega-dam projects in India, Jonathan Safran Foer’s heartbreaking description of pregnant pigs in concrete pens in Eating Animals, or Bruce Chatwin’s lyrical passages about the Australian outback in The Songlines: each does more to broaden our eco-consciousness than a thousand turgid – but well-meaning – thinktank research papers.
The latest novelist to write about nature is Annie Proulx, who in Fen, Bog & Swamp draws our attention to the largely unloved wetlands that are being destroyed around the world. The Harvard biologist EO Wilson wrote that chopping down the rainforest to make money is like burning a priceless Renaissance painting to cook a meal. Proulx wants us to see the loss of wetlands in the same way – and to appreciate the beauty in these swampy and often stinking places. Boy, does she succeed. The prose is just magnificent, bringing to life hitherto overlooked habitats such as “the primordial intensity of the bog’s unmoving tannin-dark water and massed sphagnum”, where “black arms of drowned forests protrude from the water”.
Proulx has an especially tight affinity with the people who live – or used to live – in the marshy hinterlands between land and sea and who possessed a “bone-deep identification” with the plants and animals around them. Born in rural Connecticut in 1935, she has a sense of what it was like to have that kind of intense attachment to one’s environment: “I am anchored in that childhood time when to recognise a sassafras bush from its mitten-shaped leaves was the sense of finding a friend in the woodland fringe.” Sadly in our urbanised age, very few children get that kind of prolonged contact with nature. She is particularly adept at describing the ebb and flow of estuarine waters that define these shifting and unpredictable places, shaped by “the constant and deep currents of endless change”.
Of course, Proulx has previous form when it comes to writing about water. Her wonderful Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Shipping News is largely set on the coast of Newfoundland and the oceanic flows are almost a character unto themselves, “urging growth, change, coupling”. And in her memoir of sorts, Bird Cloud, it is river waters that wash away the “big, fluffy white carcasses” of pelicans shot by ignorant fishermen – another symbol of our broken relationship with nature.
Perhaps the most moving section of Fen, Bog & Swamp is the portrait of the English Fens, largely destroyed from the 16th century onwards. Proulx conjures up the lost landscape, teeming as it was with eels and sturgeon, beavers and water voles, ospreys and cranes and populated by an unmourned fen people who “poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummelled the land edge in storms”. But for all her sadness at the destruction of our wetlands and what she calls “the awfulness of the present”, perhaps what’s most interesting about the book is her refusal to engage in the usual left versus rightpolitical debate.
Instead, Proulx makes a more difficult and unsettling argument: that we are all, in our own way, complicit in the environmental despoliation happening around us. She doesn’t blame Donald Trump or Joe Biden – her beef is with the Judeo-Christian belief that creation is made for humans, meaning we can use the world as we wish: “The attitude of looking at nature solely as something to be exploited – without cooperative thanks or appeasing sacrifices – is ingrained in western cultures.” It’s this instrumentalist view of nature that means wetlands are happily drained to make land for farming, releasing monumental amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. (Proulx revels in the irony that destroying our historic wetlands may be precipitating global warming, which in turn is causing waters to rise, so creating more wetlands.)
Perhaps most radically of all, the book takes aim at the modern notion of “progress” and “the hubristic idea that ‘now’, the time in which we live, is superior to all previous times”. Proulx argues for a radical humbleness in the face of complex ecosystems that we cannot begin to understand, let alone replicate. Her view, one that would be shared by philosophers such as Karl Popper and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is that the web of life in which we’re enmeshed is far too vast and complicated for us to technocratically “manage”.
Will we pay heed? Sadly, I’m not confident and neither, it would seem, is Proulx: “The waters tremble at our chutzpah and it seems we will not change.”
• Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx is published by Fourth Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
