In Shetland, the rolling hills are covered in what’s known as blanket bog, built up over hundreds, even thousands, of years. The climate on the Scottish archipelago is wet, and when the sphagnum mosses that cover the hills die, they decompose slowly, transforming into peat.
Under a smooth blanket of fresh new growth, the soggy peat accumulates, growing yards deep in some places. Sue White spends quite a bit of her time out on bogs like this, planning how to fix them.Part of White’s job, as the Peatland Restoration Project Officer of the Shetland Amenity Trust, is to find places where that blanket of moss has been torn. Damaged bogs can dry out into black strips of bare peat. A small crack can turn into a gully, which will form other gullies, until the peatland is exposed, dry and dying. In one worst-case scenario, heavy rains can pour through the cracks and puddle, like a blister, deep below. “It builds up and builds up and builds up until eventually it just wrenches the whole hillside away,” she says. “When the peat starts moving, it’s like gravy. It’s that kind of consistency. It just flows and flows and flows.” White is there to help save damaged bogs before this can happen.
Environments such as Shetland’s, along with peatlands around the world, have been overlooked for years. They are not necessarily easy to love: low and mucky and often bare of trees. To walk across a peatland, you’d better bring a good pair of boots.
But across the world conservation efforts such as Shetland’s are putting new effort into saving these unloved but important lands. Earlier this year, for instance, the Scottish government announced it will put £8 million per year into peatland restoration, more than ever before. In Indonesia, fires have destroyed tropical peatlands (which unlike more northern peatlands, can be covered in trees), and in 2016 the government there created a special peatland restoration agency. And at last year’s international climate change conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, world leaders announced a Global Peatlands Initiative.
This attention to peatlands is being driven, in part, by the growing awareness that these scrubby-looking areas are among of the world’s most important carbon sinks. They cover only 3 percent of the planet’s land surface, but store 30 percent of its carbon—more than twice as much as the world’s forests. And when peatlands are damaged or drained, they leak massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
With climate change’s impact increasing by the day, conserving these environments is starting to seem like critical work. In the 1990s, environmentalism often focused on biodiversity, and rain forest was the ecosystem that concerned people rallied around. In the 2010s,…
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