Struzik, a canadian science journalist, is extremely readable, informative, and delightful. Evocative nature writing that makes me want to visit every place he writes about.

Island Press, 2021.

British writer Robert Macfarlane collects words—rich traditional vocabularies describing the details of the land and humans' lives with it. He tells the story of an island community in Scotland that came together to protect its local bog from destruction because they had a relationship with their place. He shares a glossary of words from Gaelic, English, and Welsh relating to bogs. These words are indigenous to their places, emerging from culture-on-land, reminding us yet again that nature and culture do not need to be considered two poles at odds from one another, as they are in modernity.

Penguin Random House UK, 2015.

Bruno Latour's lifelong project was to interrogate and disrupt the nature/culture divide that is the foundation of modernity. The depth of this conceptual divide is important for grasping the extractive and descructive orientation western civilization has toward the web of life. Latour's work has been fundamental to my thinking about this divide, and also because of his understanding of the importance of art-making for serious intellectual inquiry. See also his book We Were Never Modern and Reassembling the Social.

Translation by Catherine Porter, Polity Press, 2017.

This is a very cute and helpful intro to peatlands and how they store carbon! A great place to start.

My only comment is that they mention only the bog's wetness to explain why things can't decompose in it, but the particularly anaerobic and acidic qualities of the wetness, which the sphagnum creates, are important factors.

February 2022 by Sabrina Imbler and Eden Weingart

nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/05/headway/scotland-peatlands-climate-change.html

By David Segal
Photography by Catherine Hyland

If you haven't read Kimmerer, stop what you're doing and go find a copy. Her work integrating scientific and traditional ways of knowing is beloved for good reason.

I particularly love the audiobook version, narrated by Kimmerer herself. Her poetic attention and love for her subject matter, her patience and enthusiasm as a teacher, and her soft, motherly voice is a balm and an inspiration.

Oregon State University Press, 2003.

Mann describes the powerful role that ditching and dyking wetlands (obstructing the natural movement of water in order to make the land arable) had in the increase in malaria in SE England because of the enclosures in the 1600s, which provided new motivation to make wetlands productive and profitable.

In the very same period the early British colonists not only brought malaria with them to America, they created ideal conditions for it to replicate with the way they engineered the landscape for tobacco growing. There's much more here of course, but these accounts helped me to connect the dots of the "bad air" that bogs were widely considered to have and the way wetlands became hotbeds of malaria due to western landscape engineering for crop production. "Malaria" is Italian for "bad air," and both in England and english-speaking America bogs became deeply identified with sickness.

Vintage Books, 2012.

The indispensable field guide.

Lone Pine Publishing, 1994. 2014.

Seattle Audobon Society, 1997.

Out of print, extremely helpful. I accessed a copy at the University of Washington library.

peatlands.org

Check out their "Strategy for Responsible Peatland Management" and online journal "Mires and Peat."

Harvesting peat is still big business.

Scribner, 2022.

Stanford University Press, 2021.