Merritt R. Turetsky is a university professor and ecologist whose work on climate change and the planet’s wildest, least-loved landscapes has taken her from Time Magazine to CNN, PBS NewsHour, and the BBC. At the Salt Lake Book Festival, she brings Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life, a debut work of nature writing that asks readers to look twice at ground most of us are taught to avoid. Bogs, she argues, aren’t wastelands. They’re wild, eerie places that hold the history of humanity, safeguard centuries-old “bog bodies,” and quietly regulate the planet’s climate, storing nearly a third of the world’s soil carbon in just three percent of its surface.

Turetsky has spent her career studying these overlooked landscapes up close, from the boreal forests of Canada to the jungles of Borneo, from Greece’s oldest bog to some of Greenland’s newest. That fieldwork shapes Bogland’s argument: these strange, undervalued places haven’t just shaped our past, they’ll shape whether we have a livable future, and they deserve defending on their own terms rather than in spite of their strangeness.

She lives in Boulder, Colorado. Join her on the Kiln Stage for a conversation on the wild power of the ground beneath our feet, and what we still have time to save.