Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43.4 (2000) 584-597

Aesthetics In The Swamps

Holmes Rolston III *

Next began the muskegs, which almost entirely stood under water; these we had to cross for miles; think with what misery, every step up to our knees. . . . The whole of this land of the Lapps was mostly muskeg, here called stygx. A priest could never so describe hell, because it is no more horrible. Never have poets been able to picture the Styx so foul, since that is no fouler.--CAROLUS LINNAEUS (1732) [1, vol. 1, pp. 141-42]

When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter the swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.--HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1862) [2, p. 228]

The Most Misunderstood Landscape

Even the father of modern biology hated muskegs, confirming how wetlands are the most misunderstood of the landscapes. Typically, we do not dislike land; we do not dislike water. But we dislike land-water, the muddy, mucky places where the land and the water mingle. Mountains and valleys, sky and clouds, sea and shore, rivers and canyons, forests and prairies, steppes and even deserts--none of these images have "ugliness" built in to them. But swamp, bog, and mire do. A "beautiful bog" or a "pleasant mire" are almost a contradiction in terms. Mountains are sublime; swamps are slimy.

There is nothing picturesque in a dismal swamp. Sometimes there are wide horizons, as in the Everglades, on the tundra, or on moors--but how monotonous! The only thing that might be of interest there are birds: waterfowl are the redeeming feature of wetlands. Otherwise, there is ooze and scum. Those who look for genetic dispositions that we inherit from [End Page 584] our evolutionary past sometimes argue that humans naturally tend to enjoy savannah-type landscapes, open forests and grasslands, with running water, or lakes. This is the kind of environment we once evolved in, and feel secure in. They call this feeling biophilia. They also say humans have a biophobia for snakes and spiders. Maybe we have a biophobia for swamps.

Still, it is worth noticing that, contrary to the widespread dislike of swamps and mires, there have been occasional peoples who depended on wetlands and cherished them, such as the Cajuns in the bayous of Louisiana, or the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq, who live in the marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Cities were often built on rivers, at first on the upland sites. There were often wetlands nearby, impeding the city's growth. These were regularly filled in the name of civilization and progress (though often remaining liable to flooding). Or the city grew around them as wastelands and sewage dumps, scars on the city scene. Hanging around the lowland cities, swamps are often a nearer, more daily encountered symbol of nature than wilderness, which may be a day's, or a week's, drive away.

There is some truth to these worries about swamps. Miasma, from a Greek word for "pollution," was poisonous air rising from the rotting bogs. Stagnant water is bad water; good water flows. Malaria means "bad air," and the disease was more often caught by those who lived near wetlands, breathing this bad air. That the disease was carried by a protist in mosquitoes, breeding in stagnant or slow moving waters, was unknown until the 1890s.

Swamps are damp, marshy, overgrown, rank, dismal, gloomy. They are uninviting places where you have to contend with insects while trying to keep from falling into the treacherous mud. Wetlands are wastelands. So, in the name of progress, people have been prompted to do something about them: put a road through them, or a railway; ditch them; drain them; if there was peat, dig it--put these lands to some higher and drier use. As a result, the world has lost half its wetlands since 1900, and wetlands may be the most threatened of all landscape types [3, p...