Redeeming swamps from their wasteland reputation

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters, the show where Canada's top comedic minds go head to head on topics that might not be top of mind yet. This week we famously ask a pretty rich question. Is it better to be rich or famous? Get ready for a wealth of wit from two of our country's most well-known, if not most well-paid, jokers. Listen to this week's episode of The Debaters wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Today a celebration and a defense of the much maligned swamp. A town is saved not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

The words of writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, written in eighteen sixty two. If it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide it for the swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of nature. Our planet's very survival depends on the existence of swamps, more specifically, wetlands.

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