## Metadata - Author: [[Alys Fowler]] - Full Title: Peatlands - Category: #books ## Highlights - I thought I needed hope in the light of climate change, but instead I needed wonder. Peatlands offer complexity: the further you wade into their intricacies the more complex they become, down to the cellular level, where a whole new world races by. What they give me, when I can put aside the desire for hope, is something much more. I revere their complexity. In other words, I’ve found a kind of faith in them. And in my attempts to understand these places, I found something on the other side of knowledge: the vastness is such that all you can do is leap into it with astonishment and amazement. ([Location 152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=152)) - It took many more visits to different bogs for me to learn that you have to temper, as much as your wanderlust, your ability to sit with your mood. There is nothing to run to or, for that matter, to run from. It’s just you, the weather and all that knowledge buried deep beneath your feet. It is not like walking on mountains or up a hill: there’s no better view to prize; you can’t hide in the nook of a rock or the might of a tree if the wind comes looking. If you don’t pay attention you will probably get wet and most likely stuck. If you take your worries to the bog, they will race around its vastness or wobble on its uneven terrain. But if you can sit with these uncertainties and sigh with the breath of the bog, if you can slow your clock-time thoughts until they seem as distant as the edges, the magic of the Lilliputian world will take over, the sparkle of the sundew, the pop of spores in mosses, the creak of the crow’s wing, the song of the toad, the dart of the damsel fly … Before you know it, you can sink into the pace of the place. ([Location 336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=336)) - Peatland depends on peat’s two mothers: the rock beneath it, which shapes its birth, and the sky above, which forms its future. If the peat is wet enough, it keeps on growing. A peat that is growing is known scientifically as a mire. That is a broad term and encompasses the many different ways in which the geology and hydrology of a place come together to form peat. At its simplest there are two categories: fens, which are alkali to neutral, and bogs, which are acidic. Fens are fed by the landform and the sky, by rivers, streams and underground water courses. Bogs get their water only from the sky: they are cloud dependent. Because of this, they lack the flush of minerals from their parent rock or accumulated surface waters, so they are thin places of poor nutrients, which means that only a handful of plants can make a bog their home. Driven by these stark conditions, the main plants that grow here, mosses, are fiercely protective of their home and maintain these wet-acid conditions to keep down competition. That they are some of the smallest, oldest plants in the world should come as no surprise: these small plants are quite the chemists. They build the bog, and store a third of the world’s carbon in their millimetre-long leaves ([Location 407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=407)) - Rain-fed bogs are ombrogenous, meaning they are born of clouds. The word is taken from the Latin, ombro meaning cloud, and from the Greek, genous meaning born. There are also ombrotrophic, again, from ombro but this time with the Greek, trophos meaning nutrition, meaning that their minerals come from the clouds too. meaning that their minerals come from the clouds too. Lucky for bogs: etymology is poetic and romantic. Fens don’t fare so well with their language: they are minerotrophic, rich in minerals that the surface water has collected. They are also soligenous, meaning created by water born of the land, the inflow of surface water, as well as what falls from the sky. They are fed by these waters too, making those that live in them rheotophilous, nourished by that flow. In short, fens have more riches as the minerals mean there is a greater diversity of plant life, insects and birds. But that doesn’t make bogs the poor cousin: instead it makes for a rich marriage because there is no such thing as a bog or a fen sitting alone in the landscape. At some point, fens may become bogs as they lay down their layers of peat, which impedes their water flow. Many bogs find themselves with fen flushes, moments at which the underlying geology ripples or rises and will flush minerals through the acidity. In fact, the best way to talk about this landscape is not as bogs, fens, swamps, marshes or moors, but as mire landscape complexes. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=416)) - Peatlands occur only in wet conditions; they are married to water. Their wetness slows the rate of decomposition, which in turn allows the peat to accumulate. It is essential for peat growth, but also plant growth, and peatland plants have found many ingenious ways to adapt to being constantly wet. ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=447)) - In the northern hemisphere, it takes a year to grow a millimetre of peat, ten years to grow a centimetre and somewhere around a thousand years to grow a metre. A lot of our peat is very old, but it isn’t stuck in the past. If it’s healthy, it can continue to grow. A healthy peat bog is doing just that, slowly but surely increasing year on year, swelling with the wash of its water, thickening and spreading as it lays down peat. The peat we see in our soils is pretty modern in geological terms. An even more ancient version is millions of years old, under layers of geology and rock, compressed by time and weight: coal. If peat is allowed to age for its entire geological lifetime in its natural environment, it would turn first to lignite, then charcoal, anthracite (a high-rank type of coal) and eventually graphite. But if you dig up any of this, whether it is peat to be used as compost or fuel, or you drain it for agriculture or you extract it as coal, it goes back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That some of the fossil fuels we are burning, hurtling us into an uncertain future, were once bogs and peatlands is not irony but a lesson. The earth was burying all this dead organic material for a reason: to reduce atmospheric carbon and make life habitable here. Peatlands weren’t born by accident: they were formed by the earth’s complex systems to keep the living world cool. ([Location 464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=464)) - Peat is half land and half water, and held in the land is a great, ancient store of carbon, about 600 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide worldwide. That’s double the carbon stored in all the world’s forests and about 44 per cent of all soil carbon. ([Location 488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=488)) - It turns out that all of our carbon originally came from outer space, which has oodles of the stuff, locked up in the stars and hanging between them. Long before the earth was as we know it, when it was a lump with an iron-rich core hurtling madly about, it ran into another lump, a baby planet with a carbon-rich crust. It consumed the planetary embryo, with all of its carbon. ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=504)) - Even though peat forms only a tiny proportion of the land mass, just 3 per cent, it is currently thought that nearly half of the world’s carbon stored in soil is held in peat. That’s more than half of the current atmospheric stock of carbon dioxide – a lot banked. Right now, 80 per cent of peatlands in the UK no longer hold onto their carbon. They are broken. This damage is repeated more or less around the globe. The living layer has been either lost or is deeply degraded: the waters that keep the peat safe are draining away. And with this, the deep layers of stored carbon are rapidly oxidising, returning their stores to the atmosphere, no longer acting as a sink or a store. ([Location 529](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DF6JX65R&location=529))