James pointed to these stories about letting rivers be rivers. I've just got to this point in Annie Proulx's Fen, Bog and Swamp; about letting a bog be a bog.
(Also Flow Country is the best name)
"Scotland’s Flow Country claims to be the largest still-extant blanket bog in the world. A 4,000-square-kilometer section may become the world’s first bog National Heritage site. The Flow Country is the major nesting habitat for most of Europe’s migratory breeding birds including 66 percent of greenshanks, 17 percent of golden plovers, 35 percent of dunlins, divers (known as loons in North America) and all those that depend on camouflage to raise their young without predator dangers...But in the 1980s the seemingly empty and windswept region tempted the timber-needy British into planting trees. The government granted money to drain and plow the Flow Country bogs and eventually 190,000 hectares (470,000 acres) of wetlands were mutilated into a ridge-and-furrow landscape, the ridges planted with non-native trees.
It all happened so quickly that one of the conservationists trying to record the diversity of the bogs had the planters right at his heels. “We were literally running along right in front of the ploughs.” They would plot and photograph all one day and the next day the machines would rip through their still-visible footprints. The tree farmers were counting their future board feet as they set out hundreds of thousands of Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine. They were disappointed when the transplants did not do well in the high-acid low-nutrient bog soils where the fierce winds common in all flat country oppressed the struggling survivors.
As the years passed the conifer plantations grew into entangling wind-bent thickets. Predators—pine martens, red foxes, hooded crows—arrived. The migratory birds, habituated to nesting safety in the Flow Country, had no experience of these enemies in this place. Angry opposition to the plantations came from conservationists and environmentalists in what has been called “one of the fiercest environmental battles in British history.”
By the 1990s the government subsidies evaporated in a cloud of disappointment for the would-be timbermen. A series of complex laws, EU Habitats Directives and greater knowledge of wetlands values opened a way to bog restoration. Workers cut down the languishing trees and plugged the water collector drains. The water table began to rise and bog plants of heather and bog cotton appeared on the ridges and sphagnum mosses settled into the wet furrows. This was not ideal. The University of the Highlands and Islands scientist Roxane Andersen, who was overseeing the project, did not want a corrugated landscape but a homogenous wetland. Workers began to flatten the ridges and block the ends of the furrows to hold in leveling water to wet the entire site.
After sixteen years the leveled bog has stopped emitting CO2 and the more deadly methane and begun holding them in. But the arguments are not over and there are problems in every part of the tree-planting project from “flawed” planning to inaccurate surveys."
