In 2015, journalist Edward Struzik accompanied a team of scientists to the Brintnell-Bologna Icefield, straddling the Continental Divide along the border of the Yukon and the Northwest Territories in Northern Canada. The scientists were there to look at the glacier, to measure how far it had receded due to climate change. Struzik’s attention, however, fixed on what was next to the glacier, the landscape left in its wake. In the flooded, cold conditions, he saw aquatic sedges, bog birch, Arctic willow, and mosses. This post-glacial landscape, he writes, “represents the kind of conditions in which most of the world’s peat began to form.”

As defined by the International Peatland Society, peat is the layer of soil comprised of partially decomposed vegetation matter, like sphagnum moss or shrubs, that breaks down over thousands of years in waterlogged terrain. Surrounding the Brintnell-Bologna Icefield, nearly a quarter of Western Canada is covered in peat, marked by peat-loving plants and trees like wild cranberries, black spruce, tamarack, and aspen. In winter, this boreal landscape is an icebox. In summer, its water glistens in the sun from beneath trees, sedges, and moss.

But peat spans much more of the globe than Western Canada, where Struzik begins his narrative in Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat. From the wet and buggy boreal forest, he takes readers across the map, from the pocosins of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, to an “oasis of peat” in the Mojave Desert, to the tropical swamps of Hawai’i, the fens of the Rocky Mountains, and back north to the layers of peat spread across the Arctic permafrost.

The result of his fascination is a much-needed, informative yet entertaining profile of peat and the people who have committed their careers and lives to the partially decomposed, fibrous material.

Swamplands is science heavy. To understand peat, Struzik, a veteran science journalist, turns to a roster of sources that includes bryologists, hydrologists, paleontologists, entomologists, botanists, and so on. Some look at peatlands in the big picture, for their enormous carbon-storage potential. Others study the rare orchids, birds, mammals, or insects that depend on them — like the finches, warblers, and waterfowl that nest in peatlands, the polar bears south of Hudson Bay who build their dens in peat banks, or the billions of birds that fly to the boreal peatlands each spring and return to wetlands in the south each fall. One particularly compelling narrative follows Kyle Johnson, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin, who drives 900 miles across Michigan and Saskatchewan and spends 123 nights ankle-deep in wet, buggy peatlands looking for a rare moth thought to be extinct.

But Struzik explores peat as a cultural artifact as well: the whisky in Scotland that’s imbued with aromatic smoke from peat fires, the peat creams that the Finns slather themselves with in birch-heated saunas, the peatlands the Welsh celebrate through international bog snorkeling events, the muskeg that provides First Nations with wild cranberries in the fall. Struzik makes the point that peat plays a big role in our cultural history. The Irish, for example, have been cutting peat, known as turf, for fuel as far back as the fourteenth century. In the Antebellum South, escaped slaves took refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp, where plantation owners seldom traveled.

But this cultural history of peat is also a story of our dual perceptions of bogs and swamplands as places rich in resources as well as unpleasant lands fraught with danger. A foul mire, for example, blocks the path of grace in John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory Pilgrim’s Progress. Two hundred years later, with a similar ethos, the US Congress passed legislation incentivizing the draining of peatlands to make way for agriculture. However, around the same time, an “impermeable and unfathomable bog” was a “jewel which dazzled” Henry David Thoreau.

Bogs should dazzle all of us, Struzik writes, though he knows that peatlands “were and still are under appreciated.” Estimates say that almost 200,000 square miles of Earth’s peatlands, an area larger than California, have been drained and degraded. Climate change is threatening what has been left intact. “The world is losing peat just as fast as the Arctic is losing sea ice,” Struzik writes. Now is the time, he argues, to appreciate the wet, buggy, swampy landscapes of the world, before we lose them altogether.