A Marsh Writer in Canada and the Future of Wetland Cultures

The Canadian nature writer Harry Thurston writes a word for wetlands of the marshes and their native animals in his home provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. For more than thirty years Thurston has written and published nature poetry and prose, most recently in 2022 when he teamed up with photographer Thaddeus Holownia to memorialize the lives and mourn the death of tens of thousands of migratory songbirds incinerated in the flame of a hundred-foot-high flare at Canaport’s Liquefied Natural Gas Plant in New Brunswick in Canada in 2013. Migratory shorebirds and wader birds also traverse the various flyways of the world linking the feeding and breeding sites of marshes, mudflats and other wetlands. Wetlands are waterbird habitat. Environmental conservation is not just a matter of conserving birds, their habitats and flyways, but also a matter of halting and abolishing the fossil-fuel industry that directly destroy lives (such as in the Canaport case) and indirectly destroys lives, livelihoods and habitats through rising temperatures exacerbating fires and floods, and raising sea levels as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental conservation is also a matter of developing affirmative wetland cultures with Thurston as one guide for doing so.