Drain the Swamp(s)

               NOTICE: This post is NOT about politics (well, a tiny bit)...    

      It's a popular phrase, or at least it was for one of the political parties here in the U.S., even if the result was more of a filling of "the swamp."  Indeed, of some 540 Republican candidates running for office in these midterm elections (just days away), close to 200 of them not only continue to deny that Joe Biden is President, but many have announced that they will question the voting results if they lose (but not if they win)...in my day, we would call such folk "sore" losers, and indeed just as with a sore, this political divide has now festered and become infected to the point of making its way into our country's body and could threaten its health overall.  BUT, talking politics is about as interesting as talking about the good time you had on a vacation, or about how much money you won while in Vegas.  Instead, this post will be about...actual swamps!  WAIT: before you quickly move onward, you may be surprised to learn that we are only now learning about swamps, that our mental images of those murky, bug-ridden, creepy and soggy lands are now being found to suck up more carbon that all of our forests combined (yes, even more than the Amazon)...and unfortunately we are continuing to drain them.

      Author Edward Struzik, in his book Swamplands, described one such draining when Central Park was being built: Once the people were evicted, the Atlantic white cedars were felled.  What little was left of the mosses, Labrador tea, blueberry, and thorny shrubs was pulled up or plowed over, and the draining of the peaty wetlands followed to make way for the park that Frederick Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux had designed.  In all, ten million cartloads of clay, rocks, peat, brush, and tree stumps were removed or shifted to other parts of the park area to mould gentling rolling hills or to fill in depressions left behind when the wetlands were drained.  Other states were already doing much the same, albeit more for the creation of farmland or for drying the peat to burn for fuel (at the time, peat was a major energy source): New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and even Ohio which drained or dug up 90% of its peatlands.  Even with that, Ohio was behind California where, wrote Stuzik: Parts of the Sacramento-San Juaquin Delta now lie 26 feet below sea level because so much peat was dug up, dried out, plowed over, and compressed by heavy farm machinery)...By another estimate, there were more miles of drainage ditches than of highways by the middle of the twentieth century...Sun-baked Israel and Greece had enormous peatlands in the Hula Valley and the intermontane Drama basin before they were systematically drained.  

     So what exactly IS peat?  Wrote Sutrzik, peat: ...is partly decomposed plant material that builds up over decades, centuries, and millennia in oxygen-starved, waterlogged conditions where decay can't keep up with growth...Fens, bogs, mangroves, and to a lesser extent, marshes and swamps that accumulate peat, cover only a small fraction of the Earth's surface: 3-4 percent is the estimate...Peat is the filter that separates microbes and contaminants from the water that hundreds of millions of people drink; "the kidneys of the landscape" is how botanist William Niering described them in the 1980s...Peat is the giant sponge that absorbs moisture when rivers flood and when coastal storm surges extend their reach inland.  When wet and healthy, a fen or bog can slow or stop a wildfire in its tracks...The Amazon and other rain forests get well-deserved attention for the amount of carbon they store and for the exotic plants that are harvested and sometimes pillaged for their medicinal properties.  But peatlands sequester 0.37 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year -- storing more carbon that all other vegetation types in the world combined.  Impressed?  Or are your beliefs similar to what a 1994 piece in National Geographic wrote: Maybe this land --rattlesnakes and all-- is not so lovable: while our heads say ecosystem and biodiversity, our hearts still say swamp.  Indeed, author Struzik tells of encountering biting horseflies twice the size of his thumbnail in a few of the swamps he visited.  Such mosquito-ridden lands have been credited with stopping both the Roman Army and the Persians from advancing, all vividly described in Mosquito by author Timothy C. Winegard.  Yet we continue to drain them; Struzik writes that 96% of our peatlands are gone.*  The first female chief justice in California's Supreme Court, Rose Bird, once said: We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it. chopped down its forests, leveled its hills, muddled its waters, and dirtied its air.  That does not fit my definition of a good tenant.  If we were here on a month-to-month basic, we would have been evicted long ago.

      Today, we appear to still look for escape, much as slaves and animals did when heading into the swamps, places few would follow; indeed, swamps, bogs, and marshlands now house many endangered or threatened species such as the red wolf.  They're also where you'd find cranberries and blueberries, wild rice and water chestnuts.  But there are also swamps inside us, murky and mysterious places hiding a cluster of emotions and feelings many of us don't care to venture into or to explore.  Today's political environment and tightening economy may be bringing out a bit of this, peeling away layers we thought we had carefully fenced off.  And I couldn't help but wonder if some of what is now being openly displayed may have a deeper background emerging from our own "drained" swamps.  A quick peek around shows that threats against members of Congress have jumped 10-fold since He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named left office.  But beyond politics is there even more?  Wrote David Brooks in the NY Times about the declining sort of masculine "control": The gap starts early: At age 5, girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be "school ready" than boys, and women make up nearly 60 percent of students on college campuses...Women's earnings account for nearly all of the income gains of middle-class families in the past 50 years.  Demoralized, disconnected, and lonely, men are far more prone to substance abuse and suicide.  Added Michelle Goldberg of the same paper: ...for many boys and men, life is much harder than it should be.  So picture this: you leave a bad marriage and take your asthmatic son, work as a gold miner to put food on the table, and eventually convince an editor that what you're writing is worth reading.  You title your columns "Listen, World" and soon gain a readership of 20 million.  The person who did just that wasn't a man but was Elsie Robinson, the most widely-read woman from 1924 to 1936.     

     Author Lynn Steger Strong told Book Page: I'd been thinking about broken systems, too, not just the social safety net, our broken politics, but also the way I felt constantly, embarrassingly, like I was looking around for someone to tell me how to be, what to do to make things better, but there was no one there, no rituals or practices or authority figures that I believed in anymore.  In this same vein, I'd been thinking about art and what it was worth, how often I was late for pickup or missed a work email because i was standing there, transfixed by a piece of art, for reasons I could never quite explain.  How broke artists (and i) always were.  And indeed sometimes the search for ourselves is as tangled and as murky as a swamp, or a mycelial highway.  Wrote editor William Falk on what we may be missing by working at home and not with others: ...what is the "whole self" that we are supposed to bring to the office?  I'll venture a guess, and it's not exactly the private self that we used to value.  It's the online self, the Twitter self, the Facebook self: the brash and too-loud self that we have learned to construct in 280-character posts and glossy Instagram images.  That self is increasingly both puffed-up and diminished...Under pressure to reveal ourselves immediately and relentlessly, the natural human impulse will always be to fake it, and cut out exactly those connections that make up a full life.  

Photo: Elle UK

      I bring up mushrooms and fungi because, like swamps, they are everywhere and are more important to life than we imagine.  Often termed a tangled network, "mushrooms' filamentlike root network...spreads beneath the forest floor or under the bark of trees," wrote Bloomberg Businessweek: These fine mycelial treads are as tough as, well, leather: Their cell walls contain chetin, a rigid polymer also found in shrimp shells.  As they grow --branching apart, fusing, and intertwining-- they form the basis for a material that's remarkably strong.  Gavin McIntyre, co-founder and chief commercial officer of "mycelium technology company" Ecovative Design LLC, in New York, says the mycelium that anchors a polypore --one of those woody shell-like mushrooms that grow on tree trunks-- can support his entire body weight, about 200 pounds.  His company estimates that it will be able to grow nearly 3 million square feet of its "leather" on a single acre of land (the company already has contracts with Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger), but adds: ...animal hide leather is something like 31 billion square feet a year -- an absurd amount thrown off from our meat-eating habit.  

     Mushrooms not only have the potential to affect the leather industry but also food production, one example being a fungus discovered in one of Yellowstone's volcanic hot springs, Fy.  Said a related piece in the same magazine: The protein is grown quickly in cafeteria-size trays through fermentation-based technology -- think of Fy as an overachieving sourdough starter.  In less than four days, a tray of microbes develops into the protein equivalent of 20 to 25 chickens...A key aspect of the protein's allure is its tofu-like adaptability.  It can be manipulated into a range of meat-free, dairy-free, and gluten-free foods, whether nuggets or noodles or yogurt.  It can be dried into flour or blended into shakes.  "Fy" products have been used in a 3-star Michelin restaurant and gone to the Space Station (many ice creams, cheeses, and other meatless products are available in stores nationwide under the brand Nature's Fynd).  The more mushrooms are studied, the more uses we seem to find for them, as if it's magic...which is where the money really is.

      Mushrooms have been known for their medicinal properties throughout history with recent studies validating the much older Eastern thought that reishi, cordyceps, turkey tail, maitake and other mushrooms can help the immune system, memory, stress and energy, as told by another article in the series; sales have followed the studies: Spins, a wellness-focused data technology company, reported mushroom sales in the natural retail space grew by 16.1% to $420 million.  In 2021, Allied Market Research reported that the global functional mushroom market generated $7.98 billion in 2020 and expects it to swell to $19.33 billion in 2030.  The mushroom category at nutrition chain the Vitamin Shoppe Inc. grew 25% from 2019 to 2020...But it is the "magic" mushroom category capturing the attention of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson; of the 180 strains discovered so far to contain psilocybin (the main hallucinogenic compound), many have been shown to have long term beneficial effects (as in months, vs. hours) on depression, anxiety, migraines, eating disorder, even drug & alcohol addiction; the FDA has classified psilocybin as a "breakthrough therapy" (even the conservative former governor of Texas, Rick Perry, champions their effects).  To date, some 50 publicly traded psychedelic companies are listed on US exchanges (more are listed in other parts of the world).**  

      Said yet another piece in the series: Over time, scientists have begun to build a better understanding of the biological mechanism of psychedelic chemicals.  Studies have shown similarities in how the brain responds to drugs including psilocybin, LSD, DMT (the active ingredient in ayahuasca), and mescaline, a compound derived from the peyote cactus.  They all bind with receptors for serotonin, a neurotransmitter that affects mood.  This is how traditional antidepressants work, too.  But unlike those drugs, a single dose of psychedelics, in combination with therapy, can seemingly reduce the symptoms of mental illness for months...The writer Patrick Leigh Fermor once compared the mind to a wax writing tablet -- soft and imprintable in childhood, it hardens over time.  Psychedelics may soften the wax back up and allow a person to write on it anew. 

     Seemingly searching and separating what is real or imagined was the thought expressed in the strange but uniquely entertaining film, "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once."  Even record producer and neuroscientist Susan Rogers opened her book on music (a fascinating read on "what the music you love says about you") by recommending that you first seek authenticity in what you hear.  Digging through the muck and the tangled web of swamps, mushrooms, and psychedelics may be a chance to explore our own murky and complicated lives, from beginning to end.  The award-winning but rather long (3 hours) film, Drive My Car, has one of the lead characters commenting: The proposition that we can look into another person's heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool's game.  I don't care how well we think we should understand them or how much we can love them...Examining your own heart, however, is another matter.  This thought was echoed by author Rogers who wrote: For many listeners, lyrics are the most resonant dimension of a record...Without the vivid imagery evoked by the words of the song, a record may earn such listeners' admiration but fail to arouse their passion.

     Ah yes, passion.  That Indiana Jones-like path to our hearts that sometimes is never explored or discovered.  As I grow older, and recognize just how fortunate I am to even still be around and yet still caught in the web of trying to "figure it out," I thought of both of those observations as I read the lyrics of the LeGrande/Bergman song, Pieces of Dreams: When will you find what's on the tip of your mind; why are you blind to all you ever were.  Never were.  Really are...nearly are.  Life starts, life ends...but life continues.  Looking at all that is happening in the world and how our fears and worries are causing many of us to divert our attention outward instead of inward, I find myself agreeing with the first film above when it asked, can we just stop fighting...can we just be kind?  Tangled Up in Blue, wrote Bob Dylan: All the people we used to know they're an illusion to me now.  Some are mathematicians, some are carpenter's wives, don't know how it all got started, I don't what they do with their lives.  But me, I'm still on the road heading for another joint.  We always did feel the same.  We just saw it from a different point of view...As you head to that polling place of your heart and mind, I wish you happy exploring; there is good even in the places we may fear to tread...

*On the other hand, new peatlands are being discovered, the most recent being in the Congo, discovered in 2017.

**Newer research is seeking to preserve the beneficial effects of many psychedelics without the hallucinogenic effects.  Commercial sales of psychedelics are still illegal, although shops in cities such as Oakland, CA. and Portland, OR. (where psychedelics for personal use has been decriminalized) are known to exist (Oregon will widely legalize licensed psychedelic shops in 2023).  The only legal prescription drug is ketamine which is popular both as a party drug and a legal anesthetic; STAT reported that the prescribing market is growing more and more lax, especially newer online prescribers.  Ketamine is addictive.  Psychedelics are not.  To read more on psychedelic research, head to a piece in National Geographic.  As to mushrooms, a rather amazing time-lapse of their growth appeared in Smithsonian...