The Other Fossil Fuel
Protecting and restoring peatlands means changes at home and in the garden.
A peat bog was nothing like I’d imagined. To my mind, “bog” suggested something small and bounded, while as you can see from these photos, a peat bog can be a vast and varied expanse, a mottled purple and gold landscape stretching to the horizon. This bog, in Argyll, Scotland is the first one I ever saw, on a trip intended to mend a broken heart by dancing New Year’s Scottish reels. I am certain that this landscape, in the wild and historic heart of Scotland,1 did as much to restore me as the dancing did.
Of course it was the friends who welcomed me, Isabel Hilton and Neal Ascherson, who were the real tonic. A Scottish New Year - Hogmanay - meant a night of dancing at a castle followed by a whole string of parties interspersed with country walks, rain or shine. One afternoon we tromped through a woods above the bog, and then stopped for a whiskey at a pub by the canal path. And I heard for the first time about projects to protect and restore this historic landscape.
Just over a year later, in the spring of 2020, I enjoyed an extensive correspondence with ecologist Paul Adams in Australia, an expert on wetlands and peatlands, and read various articles about how they were being protected. He explained that peat in geological time is the parent of coal, and that in addition to releasing carbon dioxide it increases emissions of methane and nitrogen oxides, also potent greenhouse gases. While European lowland peatlands are best known, there are permafrost peatlands as well as highland and tropical peatlands.
An important element in most peatlands is sphagnum moss. The extensive horticultural use of sphagnum, especially for orchids, may be limiting new peatland deposits and restoration. Peat itself is used in mushroom cultivation (obvious now, when I look at commercial mushrooms).
In one email, Paul Adams wrote:
One feature of peat is its ability to bind substances. One curious consequence of this was discovered after the Chernobyl incident. The radioactive cloud drifted west and was rained out over NW England, North Wales, Southern Scotland and Northern Ireland - all areas with blanket peat. The radioactive nucleides were expected to rapidly leach out and be washed into the sea. However the radioactive components were bound to the peat and were taken up into vegetation. A little publicized order requires that livestock which has grazed on vegetation in specified areas cannot be sold for slaughter without an intervening period on a distant part of the UK where the vegetation isn't radioactive. The operation of these orders was recently extended, even though it well over 30 years after the event. Ukraine near Chernobyl has extensive peat deposits which are being heavily mined for horticultural peat - I don't know what sort of checks are carried out - but I have seen Ukrainian peat in Australian garden centres!
Thirty odd years ago there was a movement to ban peat in horticulture - there are appropriate substitutes, including coir, a byproduct of coconut harvesting. In the UK the campaign was led by Prince Charles, supported by many conservation NGOs. Several local government areas instituted local bans , and the UK government closed a few major operations - including at Thorne Waste in Yorkshire (Thorne Waste was once, surprisingly, the subject of a major article in the New Yorker). In Australia in 2000 we ran the world's first peat-free Olympics, in that the contracts to nurseries for landscaping plant material all specified than none of the plants supplied had been grown in peat. I had a hand in that decision being made.
Several other European countries - notably the Netherlands and Germany - stopped peat mining. The unfortunate outcome was a great increase in mining in Eastern Europe to satisfy gardeners in the west.
All the way back in 1989, I wrote in the first Home Ecology that we should not use peat moss. I thought that everyone knew, gardening writers and environmentalists anyway, that peat is a fossil fuel and should be left alone.
But I should have read Paul Adams’s emails more carefully. I was astonished this summer when my brother Jim (thanks, Jim!) sent photos from Ireland of peat cutting. It’s a traditional practice so I guess it’s not surprising that they would show tourists how it’s done.
But this photo of the peat “harvest” looks like serious work, not just a play for the visiting Americans.
I’ve now learned that while Ireland has been weaning people away from using peat as a fuel, but the energy crisis of the past year has made a lot of people turn back to peat, and to wood.2
And it all depends: “clean” electric heat may come from dirty burning somewhere else. I live in New England where wood is a rational heating source, in a modern efficient stove. But peat, unlike wood, is not renewable.
Then I found, as I leafed through a newish book about small-scale vegetable growing, that the author was urging the use of peat moss. The following statement baffled me:
The second key ingredient in Mel's Mix growing medium is peat moss. Peat moss is another completely natural material, the result of mass quantities of vegetative matter decomposing for millions of years. The greatest supplies of peat moss come from vast prehistoric bogs where huge amounts of living mosses were buried and very gradually dried out in preserved form. . . . Peat moss is one of the most common soil amendments used in gardening and agriculture because it makes soil lighter and more friable and improves its ability to retain water.
But the use of peat moss has become somewhat controversial in recent years because it is a nonrenewable resource whose global supplies are gradually diminishing. . . . It is critical to use it responsibly, and the Square Foot Gardening method is arguably one of the most efficient uses of peat moss there is. Square Foot Gardening uses only about 20 percent of the space used by traditional row gardens for a comparable yield, and this means you are using only 20 percent as much peat moss than you would be if you were amending a traditional garden. In addition, Mel's Mix uses this quantity of peat moss only once - after making the initial mixture, all you'll need to add is compost, which is entirely renewable.
I winced at the authoritarian and cultish sound of Square Foot Gardening, and the insistence that one gardening system will work for everyone. More important, it’s irresponsible to ignore the fact that removing peat from bogs is a significant contributor to climate change, and that restoring peatlands is an important way to mitigate climate change.3 It’s not as though we can’t come up with other sources. The obvious source in this part of the world is leaves, which we have in abundance, and which have one important quality in common with peat: no weed seeds. I use masses of leaves as a soil improver and mulch, thanks to a neighbor’s garden clean-up man, who has for years now brought me several loads of partially chopped oak leaves. (He is from the Czech Republic and we see eye to eye on not wasting such a fine resource.) By now, the end of summer, last year’s leaves are beautiful, dark, and loose, and ready spread.
The upshot: don’t buy peat moss for your garden!
PS: Paul Adams alerted me to this story, “Anne and Emily Brontë and The Crow Hill Explosion,” about how a “bog burst,” a kind of avalanche, almost claimed the lives of Anne and Emily when they were small children, walking along with their brother Branwell and two servants. The Leeds Mercury newspaper reported how the tsunami of mud had reached seven feet high, and revealed how lucky Anne Brontë and her companions were: “Somebody gave alarm, and thereby saved the lives of some children who would otherwise have been swept away.
Finally, here’s something just for fun, about a very different kind of wetlands!4
Moine Mhòr National Nature Reserve, Kilmartin, Lochgilphead, Argyll. More here and here about this wonderful place on earth.