please don’t drink the swamp water.

You’re not the boss of me.

Who put those contaminants there though?

Swamp creatures didn’t, the swamp didn’t, we did.

True I don’t mean to insinuate there aren’t dangerous creatures in swamps, they are the cities of nature, you find everything there.

Like human cities though, there is a safety in the crowd, in the wild variety of different forms and tendencies. It means that no particular process or force is likely to swing wildly out of control, no animal is going to overrun the swamp. If the swamp becomes full of some icky animal, let’s say cockroaches (or imagine locusts in a landscape of monoculture agriculture), then the swamp will soon become full of bullfrogs and other predators and only somewhat full of cockroaches lol. Things are smoothed out in a very complex way that makes swamps a much “safer” environment than you might expect because the constant ecological conversation between everything in the swamp keeps things in check.

What happens when that system breaks down is like what you see with ticks in the eastern US. The general hardwood landscapes of the east have had their ecological engine thrown so far out of whack (doesn’t help that the two most titular, climax species of eastern US hardwoods, Elms and Chestnuts are functionally extinct in the wild from diseases introduced by Europeans) that tick populations are skyrocketing along with tick borne diseases. The forests are not functioning like a swamp where an element going too far out of whack is inevitably mediated by another element. If you live in a place like I grew up in SE New England it has gotten so bad you can’t really go for a walk in the woods without becoming covered in ticks. This was NOT something my parents generation had to worry about, ticks were like leeches, something awful you very infrequently encountered in the wild. Not a daily risk on your health.

It is no coincidence that so many freshwater wetlands were erased wholesale from the landscape of America, filled in, polluted beyond function or destroyed. It is tragically poetic that North America’s most impressive city, Mexico City, was built around an ancient and complex interweaving of humans with a wetland, the Spanish Conquistadors were too primitive to understand complex technology though and drained most of it (well, many of them probably did and the violence to the landscape was a feature not a bug). The nutrient efficiency and sophistication of aqua-cultural techniques developed in concert with a surrounding lake/wetland must have been incredibly impressive (look into chinampas ), remember we are talking about the same people who somehow bred basic-ass meadow grass into corn, which the more you look into the breeding and development of the more bewildered you get.

I think the unsettling thing is that the whole biome is crawling or buzzing. Feeling like inhaling will choke you on a gnat cloud, every surface has some grouchy venomous thing that’ll stick ya

Without the cities of the forest, without healthy freshwater wetlands, the ecological web between animals, plants, nutrients and resources has become fragile to stresses like climate change. The landscape of SE New England has become absolutely covered in ticks in exactly the same creepy way that thinking about being covered in bugs in a swamp makes you feel, and it is because we destroyed the swamps.

That is what I mean when I say swamps are the cleanest places in nature.