Enter if you dare: A bog scientist explains Earth's spookiest ecosystem

Happy Halloween Eve!

Today on the Science Fiction, we’re celebrating the spookiest of all ecosystems, a place where Earth’s memory stretches deep into the past, where death forms the springboard from which new life emerges, and where lost human souls have been laid to rest since time immemorial. And did I mention all of the gnarly, flesh-eating plants?

Read on…if you dare.

— Maddie

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Halloween has become so commercialized that it’s easy to forget it has its roots in pagan beliefs about dead spirits roaming the earth. And yet the most iconic feature of the treat-and-Elsa-costume-filled holiday, Jack-O-Lanterns, connect us to a place where death and life are utterly intertwined. 

The carved orange gourds that light up today’s trick-or-treating festivities pay homage to will-o-the-wisp, flickering lights sometimes seen at night in marshes and boglands. There may be a simple scientific explanation for will-o-the-wisp. But today, the lights remain a numinous mystery—a reminder that there are still wild places on the Earth that defy our understanding, causing the line between natural and supernatural to blur.

Nowhere is that more true than in bogs, a living, breathing, stinking embodiment of contradiction and duality, according to the new book Bogland. Written by muck doctor and professional bogwalker Merritt Turetsky, Bogland is an enchanting exploration of bogs that unravels some of their sodden mysteries while revealing that, in many ways, peatlands remain terra incognita. But Turetsky’s hope is that we will all come to appreciate the unruly beauty of these misunderstood ecosystems—and the urgent need to protect them.

Treacherous and uninviting as they can seem, throughout human history bogs have served as a refuge for the marginalized, a portal between the worlds of the living and the dead, and a wellspring of inspiration for artists and storytellers. They also hold the carbon keys to our climate future. As Turetsky makes clear, whether bogs will help stave off climate disaster or become a greenhouse bomb depends on the choices we make today.

The Science of Fiction spoke with Turetsky about how she became fascinated with peat—those thick mats of dead organic matter that give bogs their springy surface—why so many stories about bogs revolve around death and danger, and how we can recast these ecological underdogs as the amazing places they are. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Maddie Stone: What made you decide to write a book about bogs? 

Merritt Turetsky: My goal was to get people to stop and be aware of these ecosystems. They fly under the radar and yet they're such important ecosystems, not only in terms of hosting unique biodiversity and shaping the world's climate system, but they've been shaping humanity since the beginning. That appears in art, in literature, in film. And yet, we just walk right by them today. And most of the descriptions that modern society uses are very unpleasant. Wastelands. Muck. Useless. Empty, stagnant. Those are the kinds of descriptors I often hear. They're all really negative. And so I wrote a book to try to change that. 

Maddie:  When I was in college, I took a plant biodiversity course that went down to Tierra del Fuego. We went out to a bog, very close to Ushuaia [in Argentina], and it was incredible. I definitely remember feeling a sense of wonder [walking across the bog’s springy surface].

Merritt: Yeah, the sense of wonder and also the uncanny, like, what is this? That springy soil? That's a living ecosystem. Those peat layers are a whole fabric of death that’s turned into this springboard of life and it breathes, right? And it can buck you around like a water bed. It's not terra firma like we're used to.

Maddie: I loved how you organized the book around the idea that bogs are liminal spaces. Have you always seen them that way?

Merritt: It's something that came to the forefront of my mind as I was writing the book. I'm like, 27 years into researching these places. I did not want to write a treatise on everything Merritt has learned working in bogs. I really wanted to be a learner as I was writing. And so I turned this thing inside out a few times and what I realized is, I am so fascinated by these places because they challenge our notions. I will be walking through a bog and I am miserable, but ecstatic at the same time. I can be like, ‘wow, this place is so funky-weird, but I find it utterly otherworldly and beautiful.’ It's that tension of in-betweens—that's why I keep going back. 

Maddie: What do you think that our stories about bogs get right? What do they get wrong?

Merritt: I think the way that bog language has developed—don't get bogged down, don't stuck in the mire, don't be unmoored—I think that language sort of gets it right.  I mean, you can get stuck in a bog, right? A bog will trap you. They don't give a shit. Meadows and mountain tops are like, ‘ooh, come look at me and walk amongst the trees, traipse amongst my butterflies.’ A bog is like, 'enter if you dare.’ That's the persona most bogs give, as this kind of standoffish testament to the ultimate resilience. 

To some extent, though, I wish we could flip it into a more positive vein. There's a colonial vibe to that language as well, and to our modern notions of how we view bogs. Our ancestors thrived because they lived in and near wetlands and bog lands.  With the rise of modern agriculture, just in the past few hundred years, the concept of wetlands as wastelands really started to become part of our thinking. And that's what we've gotten wrong about bogs: that we need to drain them, convert them into something else to fill them with life. And that just couldn't be further from the truth. 

Maddie: It does seem when we write stories about bogs, they're places that test our limits. I'm thinking of the Fire Swamp in the Princess Bride; the bog world that Yoda lives on. The Dead Marshes in the Lord of the Rings. 

Merritt: And I think through that adventure or testing of humanity and our strength in the face of something very timeless and large, usually that thread has a sublayer of tension between life and death or maybe even conflict and peace. I’m thinking about Tolkein’s writing. That marsh—these were people submerged from past warfare, but they were so well preserved that they basically were calling the contemporary characters in. I think of the Bog of Eternal Stench: Once you got touched by the burping gook of the bog, that stench never leaves you. And to me, that is playing at this tension between past and present. That is what makes a bog a bog.

Maddie: Let’s talk about bog bodies. Did you know a lot about them coming into this book?

Merritt: I probably knew as much as any other bog researcher. But it was through researching the book that I feel I gained this deep appreciation for the fact that a bog body…is a story that we learn from. We're learning these intimate details, like how the bog preserves stubble on the chin of a man that died 2400 years ago. We learn about their last meal. But we also learn about how society functions. We learn how their food was being processed at the time. We learn something about health and sanitation at the time because a lot of bog bodies had parasites that were preserved alongside the body. So it's this tension between learning these very, very intimate and personal details and yet also getting this glimpse into what society was like.

Maddie: Another part of the book I really loved was getting into the biology of the weird bog plants. I've always been fascinated with carnivorous plants but I had no idea there were carnivorous plants that eat salamanders. I was curious if you had a favorite bog organism?

Merritt: The inner child in me would have to say sundews. They make me squeal every single time, and then I will get my camera out and I will spend hours photographing a single sundew plan. They're so tiny yet powerful and wondrous. But the scientist in me—I mean, sphagnum moss is this incredible embodiment of wacky botany. It shows that life can develop solutions to environmental challenges in so many different ways. 

Maddie: What about a favorite bog monster?  I’ve been thinking about how some of these quintessential bog creatures pop up in science fiction. I mean, we see giant carnivorous plants in fiction going back to at least the 1950s.

Merritt: Yea, and they usually have personalities. I don't know that I can pick a fictional character. I do think a lot of the characters that emerge from bogs are misunderstood. Like Shrek. Misunderstood, but you love them at the end. There's goodness there, even though they're a little embattled by the bog. 

Maddie:  I didn't know that there are new bogs forming in Greenland. I thought that was fascinating. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a science fiction story a few hundred years in the future where there are Greenlandic farmers taking care of these carbon-sucking bogs. What kinds of stories would you like to see? 

Merritt: I do think bogs could be this symbol of hope moving forward. I never want people to feel like, okay, well, let's just put all our eggs in the basket of new bogs. I mean, that's a drop in the bucket in terms of saving our climate, but we can take all the hope we can get right now. I also think people love to root for the underdog. So casting bogs as the under dog that can actually save the day once they're more greatly appreciated. But I also just really want people to stop and understand, no matter where you live, there is a bog near you that is a very special place to visit. And you will find the most unusual beauty and it will change your life.

Maddie is a prolific science journalist. She is the former science editor of Gizmodo, founding editor of Earther, and runs The Science of Fiction blog, which explores the real world science behind your favorite fictional monsters, alien planets, galaxies far far away, and more.

@themadstone | maddiestonewriting.com

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