Four prominent American nature writers, Henry David Thoreau, Sidney Lanier, Aldo Leopold, and John Muir, celebrated swamps and marshes. Thoreau, the patron saint of swamps, upset the conventional view that privileged cities over swamps and the standard swamp-speak that denigrated swamps, and because he found sacrosanct holiness in “the darkest and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp.” Thoreau developed a conservation counter-aesthetic of swamps, a counter-Christian religion and theology of swamps, and a psychopolitical wetland ecology of the country. He is regarded as the founder of American conservation. Lanier regarded marshes as feminine spaces of fertility and procreation of new life, as well as of death, what he called ‘menstruum,’ a substance that dissolves a solid. Marshes desublimate solid earth into liquid water. John Muir was converted to conservation in a Canadian marsh and to a biocentric ethic in a Florida swamp. He later forgot about these experiences and became the patron saint of national parks with mountains and forests. He is regarded as the founder of the American conservation movement. Aldo Leopold, “the patron saint of American wildlife conservation,” is also the patron saint of marshes. Marshes and swamps were the womb and birthplace of American conservation.