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In her new book Bogland, �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder ecologist Merritt Turetsky explores the hidden worlds of one of Earth’s most extraordinary—and often misunderstood—ecosystems

You might get a little wet and a little dirty, but in pursuit of wonder, prostrate yourself on the spongy surface of a bog. There, eye level with the moss canopy, “an entire fairy forest opens up, with moss mountains and tall trees of lichen,” says Merritt Turetsky.

These are worlds at a scale of 5 or 6 centimeters, full of magic we rarely see because we’re generally treading on it or avoiding it altogether. Even the word itself—bog—can inspire a certain dread, yoked to dismal (and often inaccurate) connotations of bad smells and lifelessness and lurking quagmires that can swallow a human in a single gulp.

Merritt Turetsky is a �鶹��Ѱ�����Boulder professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and author of the newly released book .

But in bogs, “that slowing down and paying attention to detail has made me a more patient, more observant person,” Turetsky says. “I hope we can all stop and think about and thank bogs. They definitely have made me a better person.”

In her newly released book, , Turetsky, a �鶹��Ѱ����� professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute fellow, details not only her decades of research in some of Earth’s most unloved—but not unlovable—places but tells the stories of her experiences in these essential environments.

Take, for example, her first morning in a tropical peat swamp forest in northern Borneo. Much of her previous research was in boreal and subarctic bogs, so to be in a place so hot and humid that she couldn’t wear sunglasses because they instantly fogged was an uncommon experience. It was also a full-circle moment because some of her first bog research was in pursuit of the northern pitcher plant in Nova Scotia.

“So, I’m standing in this tropical peat swamp forest, and there are pitcher plants hanging from the tops of the canopies, blanketing the floor, coming out of the nooks and crannies, all over the place, almost like a hanging, living wall of pitcher plants,” Turetsky recalls. “I didn’t even know that could happen. I just completely freaked out and turned into this exhilarated 6-year-old with this team of local women who let me have my pitcher plant freak out. I was just in heaven.”

Between land and water

And yes, she gets the disbelieving, bemused question a lot: “Bogs??”

“There has been no other place that has pushed me, tested my limits, pushed my intellectual bounds like bogs,” Turetsky says. “What we learn in them really flips lot of intellectual notions on their heads. I mean, meat-eating plants is the food chain flipped upside down, and they live in bogs. I’ve made a lot of wonderful discoveries because boglands are so harsh and so unique.

“There’ve been times I have wanted to just sit down and stop and not really keep going because when you’re trudging through an endless bog in waist-deep mucky peat with a heavy pack on your back, you start to question your life’s choices. But then I remember how much these ecosystems need us and how much we need them, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to visit these strangely weird but fascinating places all over the world.”

In Bogland, Turetsky describes these ecosystems as the space between forest and river, refusing “to be defined as either land or water. Neither liquid nor solid, the soft peat layers formed in bogs and fens set them apart from all other ecosystems.”

Turetsky discovered the wonder of bogs after changing her major “about 20 times” as a Villanova undergraduate, drawn to science but carrying the misconception that it was boring and focused on memorization.

She happened into a research project in a local wetland that was pursuing solutions to invasive purple loosestrife, “and the process of research made me realize how much creativity was in science,” Turetsky explains. “The scientific method is a process of discovery, so that was a lightbulb moment for me—that in science I could find the intersection between all the bits and pieces of my personality that I wanted to pursue. So, I was off to the races.”

Drawn to research that was grounded in local action but scaled to larger policy issues, Turetsky joined a research group that was discovering the first signs of permafrost thaw in North America. It was like being shaken by the shoulders and told, “This is what you’re meant to do,” she says.

She left Pennsylvania and moved to Edmonton, Alberta, for graduate school—her family was petrified, thinking she would freeze to death in the far-northern climes—and was properly introduced “to boglands, fenlands, peatlands—the definitions are technical, and I don’t even think science holds them up very well, so I avoid reducing these wonderous landscapes into categories," she says.

“They’re ecosystems with very thick layers of peat, and environments that preserve bog bodies, amber, fascinating artifacts, but also carbon. These wonderful history keepers are so important in governing our climate as we move forward.”

Boglands, Turetsky writes in her book, refuse easy labels and span “so many thresholds—between land and water, life and death, past and present, safety and danger—bogs can be both beautiful and petrifying because of their transitional nature. But these magical, convention-defying places are also one of our greatest allies in the fight against climate change. Not only do boglands manipulate water as it flows from mountains to sea, protecting neighboring forests with moisture even during intense drought; for thousands of years, they have cooled our global climate by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.”

Thank a bog

Despite their ecological importance, boglands have long lacked champions. They have a bad reputation even among ecologists, Turetsky says, and most people will go far out of their way to avoid them—deeming them too wet, too buggy, too difficult.

But then there’s the wonder of stepping onto a peat surface, she says, unsure if it will hold your weight, forcing you to go slow and pay attention.

“It really wasn’t until I stepped into the distant and massive peatlands of northern Canda, where the horizon of peatlands is endless, and you can’t tell where land meets sky—where you could probably walk across it for days and never reach the end, where our feet are probably the first feet to have ever stepped foot in this place, or at least the first for hundreds of years—that I began to understand that sense of wonder and discovery.”

In writing the book, Turetsky says she didn’t want to draft “a textbook of everything Merritt knows about bogs.” Rather, she wanted to learn as she wrote, telling stories of traversing mangrove peat swamps in southern Vietnam in a traditional sampan, having giant bats pointed out to her by the sampan’s elderly female pilot; of seeing the damage that peat farming has wrought on Scotland’s Isle of Skye; of visiting the treeless boglands where Irish Republican Army fighters managed to hide from police search parties.

“Part of why I find them so fascinating is they’re so full of contradictions,” Turetsky says. “They’re not land and they’re not water. It’s that in-between nature—that tension between resilience and fragility—that I find fascinating. These ecosystems, if we left them alone and if they were in a healthy climate and a healthy, soggy hydrology state, these places are the cockroaches of ecosystems. They are self-sustaining, because peat begets more peat.”

Bogs, in their role as giant filters, are also history preservers and tellers. A peat core can detail the history of when leaded gasoline was phased in and then phased out, for example, and bogs can preserve details down to the final meal of the “bog bodies” buried in them.

“I am in awe, shock and wonder at the ecology of bogs,” Turetsky says. “We have learned more about ourselves from bogs than from any other place on the planet. I think we can’t love and protect places we don’t know, so my deep hope is to raise awareness and allow people to love a bog, thank a bog, maybe even visit a bog. That understanding and appreciation is what they need, but perhaps it’s what we need, too.”

(Video courtesy Merritt Turetsky)

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