Jo's Reviews > Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

If I had to choose one book to keep among those I read in 2010, this would be it. In Chapter One, 'Marginalia', she explores edges: "Whether bog or swamp, all wetlands have edges, rich strips where two hands clasp. On the edge, vegetation is always more varied, a mix of mature trees and grassland, or bog mat and shrubs, waterlilies and spruce saplings. Browsing creatures and wind-carried seed cross over from one biotic community to another. The young are often raised along these edge zones where, for example, the forest on one side offers shelter and the open fields on the other offer food. These margins are places of transition and diversity and abundance, one of the most highly trafficked places in the natural world." Humans, on the other hand, don't tend to be edge-species, feeling in some ways vulnerable in such transitional terrain, apparently preferring in or out, yes or no. I'm ok with the in-between, and find creativity there in the muck, and a certain delight in the questions that arise in a dynamic openness to change.

Barbara Hurd is writing in the very best tradition of nature-philosophers-- a keen observer of the world around and within, and that place where we humans are at one with nature in her many moods. Sublime!