Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge

The Okefenokee Swamp spans southeastern Georgia and northeastern Florida in the United States, and UNESCO describes it as the largest lowland freshwater peatland in the subtropical zone. Its name is often translated as land of trembling earth, but it is likely derived from a Hitchiti phrase meaning bubbling water. Native Americans lived there as early as 2500 BCE, and the Seminoles were the last to seek sanctuary in it. Troops led by General Charles Rinaldo Floyd in the Second Seminole War of 1838–1842 ended that era.

In 1891 the Suwannee Canal Company bought 238,120 acres of the swamp from the State of Georgia to drain it for rice, sugar cane and cotton plantations, and failed. After the company went bankrupt, Charles Hebard bought the land in 1901, and more than 431 million board feet of timber were removed between 1909 and 1927. The Okefenokee Preservation Society, formed in 1918, promoted nationwide interest in the swamp.

In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the refuge by Executive Order 7593. Its interior was designated a wilderness area in 1974, and in 1986 it became a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention. After repeated proposals for titanium mining nearby, the World Heritage Committee meeting in Busan, South Korea, inscribed it in July 2026, making it Georgia's first World Heritage site.