The Wetlands We Lost — and Why It Still Matters

Once, a third of the Earth’s surface was wet. Not underwater, but wet in a different way—spongy with peat, carpeted in moss, rich with the slow decomposition of plant life. Wetlands, bogs, fens, swamps, and marshes stretched across continents. They were not wastelands, as many believed. They were engines of biodiversity, vast water filters, fire breaks, and above all: carbon sinks. In a warming world, they might have been one of our greatest allies.

But over centuries, humans drained these wetlands—by the millions of acres—to make way for agriculture, development, and industry. In her quietly urgent essay “Swamped,” Annie Proulx tells the story of these lost landscapes with elegy and precision. She does not just chronicle what we did. She invites us to think about what we lost—and why that loss echoes so powerfully in today’s environmental crisis.

Rewriting the Map with Drainage Ditches Proulx’s essay is not about one place or one time. It’s about a pattern—a global phenomenon where humans drained wetlands because we misunderstood them. In England and Holland, peatlands were cleared for grazing. In Canada and the northern U.S., tamarack swamps were stripped for timber and replaced with crops. In Louisiana and Florida, coastal wetlands were drained to build cities and manage rivers.

Wetlands were seen as unproductive. We called them swamps—a word that came to mean something dark, stagnant, useless. And so we filled them in. We cut ditches and built levees. We reshaped ecosystems that had taken millennia to form.

The irony, Proulx notes, is that in doing so we disrupted systems we barely understood. These wetlands stored carbon in their peat-rich soils. They absorbed floodwaters, filtered pollutants, and provided homes for countless species. They were dynamic, living infrastructures—and we replaced them with parking lots and soybean fields.

Time, Slowed Down and Ignored A recurring theme in Swamped—and in Proulx’s work more broadly—is the scale of time. Wetlands operate on geological time: peat accumulates at a rate of roughly one millimeter per year. A meter of peat is a thousand-year investment. When we drain it, the carbon oxidizes and vanishes into the atmosphere in a matter of decades—or even faster.

This imbalance between slow systems and fast decisions lies at the core of the environmental crisis. It’s also a key concept at Humboldt’s Home: when we fail to understand the temporal interconnectedness of things, we make decisions that seem reasonable in the short term but prove devastating in the long term.

The wetlands remind us that the rhythm of the planet—the long, slow breath of photosynthesis, accumulation, and decay—is out of sync with the tempo of human ambition.

Carbon, Water, and the Memory of the Land Today, we speak of carbon cycles and climate targets, but wetlands have been sequestering carbon long before humans measured it. Proulx reminds us that peatlands contain nearly a third of the world’s soil carbon—despite occupying only 3 percent of the land surface. That makes them not just important, but irreplaceable.

Restoring a wetland is not as simple as refilling a lake. It requires rehydrating soils, rebuilding plant communities, and—in many cases—allowing nature to do what it knows how to do. That means learning to stop managing, to resist control, and to listen to the slow voice of the land.

And in many places, restoration is happening. In the U.K., bogs are being re-wetted. In the U.S., wetland protections are being reinstated after decades of rollback. But much of this comes too late. Proulx leaves us with the sense that what we lost may never return in full.

The Vocabulary of Dismissal Why did we drain these places so casually? One reason, Proulx suggests, is that we never saw their value. Our language—swamp, boggy, mired—has long carried negative connotations. These were not “productive” landscapes in the capitalist sense. They were not easily cleared or farmed. So we labeled them as marginal.

But this points to a deeper problem: how we assign value to the natural world. At Humboldt’s Home, we often ask how value systems shape our decisions, even when we don’t realize it. If something can’t be farmed, developed, or marketed, does it matter less? If its rhythms are too slow for an economic quarter, do we forget it?

The wetlands remind us that what matters most is often hidden, slow, and hard to monetize. It takes vision to recognize that a landscape that looks “empty” may be doing some of the most essential work on Earth.

What Would a Different Future Look Like? Proulx’s essay doesn’t scold, and it doesn’t end with a miracle. It ends with humility—and a call to attention.

For students and readers of Humboldt’s Home, it offers a profound lesson in interconnectedness: between soil and sky, between past and present, between what we see and what we fail to notice. Wetlands are not just habitats. They are memories written into the land, carbon ledgers from the deep past, and warnings for the future.

If we are to face the climate crisis honestly, we must learn not only from what we build—but from what we destroyed.

Sidebar: For Further Thought • Temporal Thinking Prompt: What are other examples of systems that develop slowly but can be destroyed quickly? • Value Reassessment Question: How does language shape the way we treat landscapes like wetlands, deserts, or tundra? • Carbon and Ecology Link: Why are wetlands such effective carbon sinks? What happens when they’re drained? • Restoration Inquiry: Should we focus more on preserving intact ecosystems or restoring the ones we’ve lost?

Classroom Discussion Prompts • Why do you think wetlands were seen as “waste” for so long? • What does this essay teach us about the connection between ecology and language? • What are the trade-offs involved in restoring a drained wetland? • How might we build an economy that values slow, ecological processes? • What would it mean to “listen to the land” instead of managing it?

Appendix: Global Wetland Loss — Selected Statistics

Figure: Estimated decline in global wetland area from the pre-industrial era to 2020. Source estimates compiled from the Ramsar Convention, UNEP, and historical environmental assessments.

Sources

• Annie Proulx, “Swamped,” The New Yorker (July 4, 2022) — An elegiac account of global wetland loss and its cultural, ecological, and historical dimensions.
• Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (2021 Report) — Quantitative data on the extent, rates, and consequences of global wetland degradation.
• UNEP Global Peatlands Assessment (2020) — Scientific background on peat formation, carbon sequestration, and restoration strategies.
• Mitsch & Gosselink, Wetlands, 6th ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 2021) — Authoritative textbook outlining wetland ecology and the long-term effects of drainage.
• Davidson, N. C. (2014). “How Much Wetland Has the World Lost?” Marine and Freshwater Research, 65(10): 934–941 — Comprehensive historical analysis of global wetland area change.

© 2025 Michael A. Pink