Bringing Back Bogs
“BE CAREFUL, THIS REALLY is ankle-breaking stuff,” James Banks says as he steps off the path into a soggy expanse of moss, his boots sinking deep into the green morass. A toppled tree has caught his eye, its root plate a wall of near-black soil rising up from the forest floor. Extending an orange fiberglass probe, Banks pokes at the exposed earth. “That’s peat,” he declares, handing me a lump of sticky soil.
It’s what we’ve come to find on a drizzly November day at Cairnsmore of Fleet, a remote nature reserve in southwestern Scotland where woodland borders a wide expanse of windswept hills that are home to sprawling peat bogs, one of Earth’s greatest climate assets. The bog doesn’t look like much — it’s a muted landscape of brown grasses, dotted with small pools and patches of exposed mud. But there’s more to it than meets the eye: Northern peatlands, found across Europe, Asia, and North America, store more carbon than all the world’s plants combined.
The problem is that many of them are severely degraded, having been drained to make way for forests, pastures, and other land uses. Upsetting the delicate hydrology of a bog can have disastrous consequences, however, as it typically releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. That’s why, instead of acting as a natural carbon sink, Scottish peatland now accounts for 15 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, researchers have determined that over a fifth of all wetlands, a category that includes peat bogs, have been lost during the last three centuries.
Scotland hopes to reverse that decline and has emerged as something of a global leader in wetlands restoration. The Scottish government has pledged more than 250 million pounds ($312 million) towards restoring 250,000 hectares of peatland by the end of this decade, part of its strategy to reach net-zero emissions by 2045. Banks, a 53-year-old Englishman with cropped white hair and a salt-and-pepper goatee, has found himself with a major role in that effort.
Journalist Yannic Rack writes about one man’s personal quest to save Scotland’s bogs, the fascinating ecology of peat, and how government policies are now attempting to salvage what’s left in this Summer 2023 print feature.
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