Healing hands on our Peatlands
Peat, the black carbon rich and wet soil needs our healing hands. We have woven it’s boggy mossy story through our programme, ‘How to Bury the Giant’; stitched our love for it into The Mossy Carpet, touched and stroked it while exploring the uplands of Dartmoor. Healing it is another matter, though. So much of the peatlands (about 97%) around the world are unhealthy, losing carbon, no longer absorbing and holding water, their special natural qualities disappearing. It will take more than a quick fix to make them better, it is a complex and long term business.
In September I went up to the IUCN UK (Peatland Programme) conference in Aviemore , during which 450 people shared different approaches to restoration and regeneration of peatland. It was brilliant to hear and feel the energy and commitment.
Up on top of the Cairngorms the mountains gleamed in the sun as far as the eye could see. I had travelled up from Devon, and compared to that, this landscape looked extraordinary, wild and exciting. Then, over the next couple of hours with some experts, I began to realise I was standing on a very poorly mountainside, and that every rocky top that I could spy was losing it’s native blanket bog fast - and soon there could be very little left.
The site we visited had land wounds, massive peat gulleys 30m across and 10m deep and hundreds of meters long down the mountain. There were chronic wasting peat pipes beneath the surface, so that those areas you thought were well on the surface, full of beautiful red and golden sphagnum and lichens, underneath naturally forming holes linked up to form destructive drains, some 1m in diameter. The snowmelt, ice and heavy rains continue to erode this sleeping peaty carbon giant, it’s carbon dioxide unleashed into the atmosphere.
Way up above the local villages and towns, I wondered how many people going about their day to day lives in the valleys were aware of the change going on within their view. I hoped that those locals knew that para-peatmedics are on hand - peatland lovers, the landowners, the Cairngorms National Park rangers, the contractors and project managers, all with a common cause in hand they are working hard to stop the demise of this Scottish peatland landscape. They use machinery to manoeuvre the surface to the land, then in the areas too dangerous for heavy machinery, stone and soil and vegetation is moved by hand.
Massive great woollen bandages were being applied to the bare peat rolled up as bunds packing up the peat to hold the flow of water back, out and flat as coverings to catch revegetation. There were also experimental layers of coir being applied too. These healing woollen blankets are made from fleece and are exactly the same product that we use for our own tiny mossy blankets, they are made in Yorkshire, which hosts one of the few mills that can scour and bind fleece into this product.
Back at home, while creating some tiny mossy blankets with embroidery and sphagnum moss I think about the need to reach all communities who live and work around these peatlands, both in the high reaches of the mountains and near where people go every day. The tiny bandage in a small bare area, or a wooly nest growing sphagnum, may not save tons of carbon from escaping, but they do prevent a little, and they creatively engage people in the healing process, literally and metaphorically.
The peaty carbon giant asleep under the sphagnum moss, though wounded and ill, needs to be healed by us all in whatever way we are able to. Our small and creative restoration is full of hope and care, and is just what we can do with the knowledge and materials we can find. We would love to hear about what you are doing, you can comment below or why not leave a message and Tell the Tardigrade.
Read more from Naomi about the IUCN UK Peatland Programme conference in Aviemore.
