Fen, Bog & Swamp by Annie Proulx review – where have all our wetlands gone?
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 in India, Jonathan Safran Foer’s heartbreaking description of pregnant pigs in concrete pens in , or Bruce Chatwin’s lyrical passages about the Australian outback in : each does more to broaden our eco-consciousness than a thousand turgid – but well-meaning – thinktank research papers.
