Hurd, B. (2001) Stirring the Mud; On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Discussing 'edge species', Hurd suggest that 'Humans don't seem to be this kind of edge species, and mostly we're not comfortable here. This margin is, after all, not the continental margin as we know it on summer beaches, where lans and sea, in decent intervals, take turns on a tidal edge. Here there is only a constant and languid saturation. It looks as if someone has snapped a photo of a shallow lake and then another of a shrubby, welted, plant-tangled valley and forgotten to advance the film between shots. What you get is a double exposures. You stare at it, trying to separate one photo from the other, assigning this pool of water to the first photo, that clump of grass to the second. Everything is a tad blurry, including yourself as you crawl through both pictures at once.'pp5
She goes on to discuss bogs and margins as difficult for humans to read, 'having no focus and little coherence. This uneasiness is partly about lack of definition.'pp5. The combination of materials, earth and water, no solidity, the inability to enter easily, to see what lies beneath or to move quickly across this kind of terrain are all difficult for us.
What exists on the margins is often forced there as a means of survival, due to some those aspects I've listed. Being adaptive and able to move with ease where others cannot go, or are fearful of going, offers some opportunity to exist out of a search light of persecution.
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