Swamps may be considered spooky, but is there more than meets the eye?

Swamps are spooky. This is the prevailing notion from the depiction of wetlands – the saturated lands of swamps, bogs, and fens – in the media. From the folktales of Will-o’-the-Wisps guiding travellers astray to the many, many swamp monsters of Scooby Doo, the sign is clear: a scrawled “stay away from here” thrust deep in the mud, writ by centuries of storytellers. As a reputation it’s not great.

It might seem obvious why wetlands have such a legacy: they’re treacherous lands, clogged with hazards like sinking mud and animal attack, which frustrate both travellers and land developers alike. Even the language of the wetlands is used to evoke a negative response. Feelings of being “mired” or “bogged down”, of being “swamped with work”, or removing corruption by “draining the swamp.”

When was the last time you told someone you were feeling bogged in joy, wading in the morass of happiness, or indulging in the marshy mud bath of love? (Maybe you should start.) Somewhat inevitably, these emotive associations slip into naming conventions: in the 1700s, Europeans colonising the Americas referred to swamps as “dismals”. Modern media continues this tradition, with fictional wetlands frequently assigned emotive titles such as “Misery Mire” (The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, 1991), or “the Swamp of No Hope” (Everquest, 1999). So common is this negative connection, TV Tropes has an entire webpage documenting it: “Swamps Are Evil“. Occasionally this depressive association becomes literal, marrying the emotive association with the hazardous reputation, trapping the protagonist’s in a nightmarish merger of landscape and psychology (“The Doldrums”, The Phantom Tollbooth, 1961; “The Swamp of Sadness”, The Never-ending Story, 1979).

Wetland scientists, however, offer a more positive perspective: wetlands are far from being domains of death, being some of the most productive ecosystems on Earth and home to some 40% of the planet’s wildlife. They absorb carbon dioxide and filter pollution; if rainforests are the planet’s lungs then wetlands are its kidneys. Science seemingly tells a story of life. Why does one story prevail over the other?

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