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In Georgia's lower Coastal Plain, the wild hog has reached one of North America's great wetlands: the Okefenokee, a vast rain-fed peat swamp, and the blackwater rivers around it. This synthesis follows the hog onto the swamp's tree islands, into its alligator nests, and down the bottomland corridors: what rooting does to the peat, the alligators, and the swamp's rare wildlife, and why a federal Wilderness is such hard ground to defend.

The American alligator is famous for being large and dangerous. Its ecological significance has almost nothing to do with its teeth. It has to do with its feet, its tail, and its habit of excavating depressions in the wetland substrate — depressions that hold water when everything else dries out, concentrate entire food webs during the dry season, and sustain the southeastern Coastal Plain ecosystem from the Texas Sabine to the North Carolina Outer Banks.

The southeastern United States is one of the most biologically rich temperate regions on Earth -- holding roughly 550 freshwater fish species, the highest salamander diversity of any region in the world, and a convergence of ecoregions that has no parallel in the Northern Hemisphere.