Why cranberry country is turning into wetlands

Massachusetts farmers began draining wetlands to make cranberry bogs more than two centuries ago. Now there’s a race to restore them.

As the sun set on a November afternoon, Brendan Annett walked through a wetland preserve, greeting everyone who passed him by with the enthusiasm of a mayor at a ribbon cutting.

Which he kind of was. Annett, who oversees conservation projects for the nonprofit Buzzards Bay Coalition, had recently finished work on the site known as Mattapoisett Bogs that, for more than a century, had been a working cranberry farm. As the industry waned here, the family who owned the land had sold it to the conservation group, which had set about transforming it back to the wetland it once was. Walking trails had just reopened to the public. But as ducks paddled in placid water and late-afternoon light turned the reeds and rushes to gold, it was easy to imagine it had been this way forever.

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