Bogs are our absolute favourite places to be. They’re not only tremendously important ecosystems, rich in exquisite biodiversity and massive stores of carbon, they’re also uniquely beautiful. These serene, colourful spaces jumble land and water into something at once both alien and familiar.

In this episode, we explore the wonders and the mysteries of peatlands, through the story of one very special (and threatened) bog just outside of the city of Vancouver. We meet the scientists who fought for its protection, and some of the folks who are studying it and working on restoring it to this day.

Plus, we answer a tricky question: should we still be extracting peat to help grow plants?

— — —

Visit futureecologies.net/listen/fe-6-8-for-peats-sake for photos from some of our boggy adventures, full credits, citations, and a transcript of this episode

🪼💖 This episode is sponsored by our amazing community of supporting listeners. If you appreciate it, you can become one yourself! Get the scoop at futureecologies.net/support

You are listening to Season Six of

Future Ecologies.

Test, test one, two, Bumblebee, tuna, rabble,

rabble, rhubarb, rhubarb, good to see ya. Okay, hi everybody! I

am Mendel.

and I'm Adam

and today we're joined in the studio by... a red

legged frog!

...potentially more than one red legged frog.

a chorus of randy red legged frogs, recorded with

a hydrophone during their breeding season in February — in

a half frozen wetland that I helped to restore a couple of

years back.

Recorded with a hydrophone, because this species

only vocalizes underwater.

Yeah, otherwise, they are pretty darn quiet.

They're adorable!

And they make this sound all night long, like up to

14 hours, pretty chatty for a creature few people ever get to

hear

Yeah, for reasons, not just that so few of

us are underwater in February, but because the red legged frog

has been in steep decline for many years, due largely to the

loss of wetlands throughout their range.

Which is one of the reasons why Mendel, you and

I share a hobby in addition to making this show.

Yeah.

Which is that we both work to restore wetlands.

Well, that's charitable. You work to restore

wetlands. I dabble in restoring wetland. That is, one little

urban wetland in my neighborhood in Vancouver.

Yeah, it's a cute wetland, though.

I love it.

And to do that, we have both had the opportunity to

work with the same remarkable woman.

What are we going to talk about?

Well, the very first thing to do is to

introduce yourself. Who are you?

My name is Robin Ann's child, and I design

and build wetland and stream restoration projects.

On any given day, you're likely to encounter

Robin up to her ankles in mud, sporting a hardhat and a

high-viz vest, orchestrating the actions of up to a half dozen

heavy machine operators — all working together to answer one

important question.

what is it that we need to do in that watershed

to restore a healthy relationship between the soil

and the water?

And the reason that this question is so

important is that we humans, of the colonial variety, have

seriously disrupted that relationship basically

everywhere that we have settled. Across North America, over 50%

of all wetlands have been lost since the 1700s and that loss

has actually accelerated in recent years, despite no net

loss policies and mitigation efforts. It's even worse in some

areas, like where I'm from, in California, where over 90% of

wetlands have been lost. In British Columbia, that number is

closer to 70%

And when you say lost, you mean...

Drained and converted for other uses.

We have significant cultural amnesia

about how we've changed these landscapes where we live. In

Europe, where certainly my ancestors came from, there had

already been centuries, if not millennia, of a really

systematic and highly sophisticated wetland drainage.

Because wetland is usually flat, flat land is

good for building things.

Wetland is also rich. Rich land is good for

harvesting timber and growing crops

Industrializing societies all over the world

tend to take places that are wet, woody, rich and wild, and

reduce them to a blank slate for all kinds of development.

Creating those uniform conditions across

floodplains is kind of the bread and butter of our way of living

on the landscape, simplifying streams so that instead of being

broad and flat and flooding the floodplain, perhaps on an annual

basis, they are now in deep ditches that flow down a

straight line, you know, on the edge of the field. It never

occurred to me that the very ditches that I played in as a

child, I thought that those ditches had streams in them,

really, they were ditches draining wetlands, and that

water that I played in in those ditches was water being drained

out of wetlands.

I also have fond memories of playing in ditches

as a kid on ag land that had once been in the flood plain of

the San Joaquin River. The landscape changes that Robin is

describing are ubiquitous.

Everything that we have done when logging, road,

building, mining, converting wetlands and floodplains to

agriculture, has been about hastening the passage of the

water through the watershed. And now what we're looking at is,

well, now wait a minute, what if we wanted to invite that water

to take a more leisurely path?

Many of our ancestors were trying to get the

water off the land as fast as possible, and now here we are

thinking the exact opposite. How do we keep the water on the land

for as long as possible?

Wetlands, by their very nature, are dynamic

ecosystems. One of the things that I find so exciting about

wetland and stream restoration is that through a single action,

we're achieving multiple benefits.

Like making habitat for endangered frogs,

as discussed, and also to recharge aquifers

sequester carbon, create fire breaks and mitigate the

destructive power of floods.

Wetlands absorb water. Imagine if you're running

a bath, and you pull the plug. And of course, you know it takes

whatever time it takes for the bath to drain, but it drains

pretty quickly. Now, if you were to fill your bathtub with

towels, put the plug in, fill it up, then remove the plug, it's

going to take a lot longer for that bathtub to drain. So when

you have a high rainfall event, instead of all that rain hitting

the soil, the ground, the surfaces of your watershed and

running out quite quickly, the wetland is like that towel in

your bathtub that's absorbing all that water and it's

releasing it more slowly. The cheapest way to prevent flooding

is one to protect the wetlands that exist in your watershed,

and two, to restore drained wetlands in the watershed. So if

anything, we need more wetlands. We need more capacity to absorb

and regulate flow of water and clean surface water and inject

water into the ground.

At this point, for me, this is gospel, but once

Robin and the big yellow machines finish building the

wetlands and they leave for greener pastures, then I'm left

with the daunting task of getting native plants

established again on these highly disturbed sites.

Thankfully, my organization grows the plants that we need to

do this, but there's been this thing nagging at me. In order to

grow those plants as part of the soil mix, we typically use a

product that most folks are probably familiar with. It's

called peat.

You know, peat. Fluffy, porous, great for

growing blueberries, tasty in scotch, and famously, comes from

bogs,

Bogs, which are, as a matter of fact, wetlands.

Is that a bit circular? That's a bit circular.

It's not ideal. And so my colleagues and I have

been asking ourselves this pesky question — whould we really

still be using peat to grow our plants for restoration wetland

restoration?

Seems like a simple question. How hard could

it be to answer?

How hard indeed, well, on today's episode, For

Peat's Sake, we tell the story of peatlands in North America

through one remarkable wetland and attempt to answer a

seemingly simple question. But you know what happens to simple

questions around here, right?

This sounds like it would be just an interesting

sort of ecological exercise, right? But it became a very,

very big political issue.

Come on in, the water's fine

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design, and sound.

To get to know peat, you have to get to know

bogs. And so we're going to get all up in the business of the

most charismatic bog that I know. If you were to visit

Vancouver, nestled between the snow capped mountains of the

coast ranges and the Salish Sea. First, you should say hi to

Mendel.

I live here!

And then you should head south across the

north and south arms of the Fraser River through the suburb

of Richmond, and you will see heavy industry highways,

subdivisions, farmland, until you hit the largest undeveloped

urban land mass in North America.

And you're thinking undeveloped... urban...

land mass, what does that mean?

It's a good question. It basically means, I

think, that it's a massive wild land in a major urban center,

but that it's not a park. There is no public access here.

This undeveloped urban land mass is actually an

enormous, raised bog.

A big, beautiful bog by the name of Burns. Burns

Bog. And since it's nearly impossible to access for most

people living here, Burns Bog is actually kind of a big black

box. A big black box that every so often bursts into flames.

News Announcer 1: Fire crews launched a rapid attack from the

air and ground today in the hopes of knocking down a fast

growing brush fire that sparked in Burns Bog along a stretch of

Highway 17 in Delta.

News Announcer 2: With an ecological treasure at risk,

fire crews in Delta, BC, threw everything they had today at the

flames in Burns Bog

News Announcer 3: but it is a difficult fire to fight, and

officials say that it could continue to burn for days.

Man on the Street: Remember the big fire they had in 2005 in the

bog, just hope it doesn't get as big.

So what's going on here? Well, we've got our bog,

and now what we need is our bog whisperer.

Sometimes with some stories, we have no idea

who to talk to first. But for this one, all roads lead back to

one man.

My name is Richard Hebda, and I am the

curator emeritus at the Royal British Columbia Museum and an

adjunct faculty at the University of Victoria,

historically, in the biology department the School of Earth

and Ocean Sciences and School of Environmental Studies. With

respect to Burns Bog, I was the government scientific expert on

the ecosystem review for Burns Bog, 25 years ago.

And I will say, just from my experience, it's

hard to throw a rock around here without hitting one of your

students or one of the students of one of your students.

We hope people don't throw rocks at them,

unless it's because they're doing very good things and that

people are scurrilous rogues.

Don't throw rocks at Richard's students,

Adam.

I would never! But long before, Richard had an

impressive retinue of students, je was just a graduate student

himself looking for a project.

I had a background in Earth history and

in botany. So when I came here, my supervisor of the day, Dr

Glenn Rouse said, you know, there's this bog out there in

the Fraser lowland. We don't know very much about it.

And when a young scientist learns that we don't

know much about a thing, it becomes almost irresistible.

This was a particularly interesting,

different sort of creature, as it turns out, because Burns Bog

is a raised bog, and essentially raised bogs make their own

environment and essentially create circumstances by which

plants that are critical in peat accumulation can thrive and

continue. So the whole idea was, well, when and where did it come

from? How did it arise and sort of, how does it work?

These were the questions Richard said about

answering in his PhD.

How did it get here? It's kind of simple in one

way, the Fraser River brings in mud, and it filled in the

shallow waters, and in doing so, those lands emerge, like the

back of a whale out of the water, and in the process, as

they emerge slowly, first being intertidal, seawater influence,

freshwater influence. They go through a process of succession

of change from lower intertidal plant communities through middle

to upper intertidal freshwater marshes, as you see in the

Fraser today, and then the organic matter accumulated as

peat.

Peat, which is plants, all sorts of plants in a

state of arrested decomposition, because the wet conditions of

this bog in progress don't allow dead plants to fully break down

into soil.

Which changes the surface chemistry, and that in

turn, changes the plant communities that can grow there.

First herbaceous plants and then later woody plants.

So willows, red osier dogwoods, Pacific

crabapple. And then those plant communities accumulate more

peat, but now it's woody, and woody peat is much more acidic.

And as things become increasingly acidic, the

plant community changes again. With Labrador tea, bog

cranberry, bog rosemary, cloudberry, and the star of the

show — a whole retinue of colorful sphagnum mosses.

Ta da! That's the birth of a bog.

And once the sphagnum mosses begin to

establish, they have all sorts of amazing tricks of organic

matter chemistry, of water regulation, of being able to

grow in situations where there's very low nutrients because the

peat's accumulating above the water table. And then they

essentially convert this wetland into their own home, in which

peat mosses thrive and dominate. And once you get into that, they

just keep adding more peat and more peat, as their bodies don't

break down, but as they die and only partially decompose and

more sphagnum mosses grow.

And over the course of about 4000 years,

those remarkable non vascular plants, the sphagnum peat

mosses, have essentially constructed a dome out of their

own dead bodies, with a shallow living fringe on the surface.

And because it's higher in the middle than at the

edges, like a dome, it becomes... get ready for this,

ombrotrophic.

Ombrotrophic.

Ombrotrophic basically means rain fed. The

nutrients that enter the bog that support the growth of all

the plants and all the decomposers, and then all the

animals that depend on them come from the sky, and that's because

the bog itself is actually above the water table, so no water

flows into it, because it's higher than everything else, and

it drains radially outward from the center of the bog or —

sometimes they have ridges outward — from the ridges to the

margin. So the only source of water and the only source of

nutrients is rainwater.

But that's okay, because the sphagnum peat likes

low nutrient conditions. And the other plants that grow there,

they have unique adaptations to live in this environment. For

example, they learn to hunt insects.

Carnivorous plants are just amazing, because

they're essentially an inside out stomach, they have the

digestive juices on the outside, in the case of Sundews, on these

little glands with little glistening drops of fluid on the

ends of the glands, and those are your digestive juices. So

imagine the stomach is outside dissolves insects that fall on

it.

I love Sundews. What the hell... pitcher plants!

I know we could have made the entire episode

about them, but we're not going to do that.

So that's how these plants get their nitrogen

and the other nutrients that they need, because they don't

get them out of the ground very much, because there aren't very

much in an ombrotrophic bog.

And these unusual plants support an abundance of

wildlife.

In my days, you know, almost 50 years ago, there

were bears and deer and all kinds of other wildlife, much of

which is no longer there —

to see a Sandhill Crane just, you know, 15 feet away from you

in a ditch, just all of a sudden erupt. A bunch of them erupt! —

Like, oh my god, there's a black bear sitting in there, you know,

10 feet away from eating berries. It doesn't even know

I'm there —

Then you see these majestic cranes, taking off as they do —

because you don't make any noise when you walk on sphagnum. It's

cushioned.

It's being like, returned to the bosom of the bog. You are part

of it, encased in part in it, cushioned by it, and you

appreciate it in a way that's just exceptional. Because you

hear the insects. You smell the smell of the bark, Labrador tea.

You hear the birds like the Sandhill cranes, or the

bumblebees flying around pollinating the cranberry

flowers, these gorgeous, little pinkish cranberry flowers. You

feel it, you smell it, you hear it, it's all there, and you feel

as if you're part of it.

These are all reasons why, for Richard, bogs

are more than just ecosystems.

The biosphere converts part of the Earth into

essentially a superorganism. As we in our own bodies have

systems that work together and feed each other and support each

other, this macro organism, raised bog does exactly that

same thing, the multitude of species and multitude of

processes on a huge landscape, that's why I like bogs.

And Burns Bog is just one very southerly

representative of the bogosphere, if you will, a

patchwork that blankets the northern parts of the entire

world.

Burns Bog is also representative of many bogs for

another reason entirely. It has a long and complicated history

of people trying to drain, farm, and fill it, because when

European settlers arrived, they simply weren't content to let

sleeping bogs lie.

Settler history goes back to basically people

trying to farm the land. They dug these ditches going into the

bog, and they were visible when I was there, or that were

invisible sometimes and you would just fall up to your waist

in peat and water

Kilometers and kilometers of ditches, just like

those that we discussed with Robin earlier. Speaking of

which, Mendel, you want to know how you can get a bog named

after you?

Ooh, how?

Try, mostly unsuccessfully, to get rid of

it. Burns Bog is named after one Dominic Burns, a rancher who did

his damnedest to drain it.

And that sort of went on for a while, until the

Second World War.

The Second World War, of course, interrupted all

sorts of settler agricultural activity and also created whole

new economies, including the use of peat moss for military first

aid.

Antiseptic and absorbent.

There was quite a bit of extraction at that time

for basically military purposes, but eventually that became

converted to the extraction of peat moss for horticultural

purposes. And when that came around, then there was this huge

extraction of peat from the middle of the bog. It's organic

material. The peat, predominantly sphagnum peat, was

removed so the heart of the bog was taken out. But like my bald

head, there was active living peat communities all around the

edges, and they essentially sustained the bog, even though

the middle had been taken out, and maintained the water

chemistry in the middle, so that the sphagnum mosses came back,

essentially in a giant pool, or a giant reticulate network with

ridges of peat that remained in open pools.

So I guess you can actually teach an old bog

new tricks.

Yes. But meanwhile, more mischief was

At the same time as the inside of the bog was

afoot.

being exploited, dug out, people were nibbling on the edges,

converting — conversion irreversible.

All around the bog, chunks of the edges were

being developed.

There was the railroad construction, and then

the road road construction,

A highway went through it, the one that the

Alex Fraser Bridge, which, my opinion, never should have been

allowed to be built the way it was, and the environmental

assessment for it was utterly inadequate.

And then there are the cranberry farms.

Some of it was converted to cranberry fields

because cranberry fields have turned out to be very lucrative.

and we'd be remiss not to mention the gigantic

landfill for the City of Vancouver.

One of my study sites is now under the dump.

Meanwhile, peat extraction technology was

advancing.

Later on, when they got very sophisticated,

they would just cut the trees off, and scrape it off and then

suck the peat through giant vacuum cleaners.

Incidentally, cranberries are also harvested

by giant vacuum tubes. I have seen it myself.

More sucking. There's a lot of sucking

involved,

And all of this draining and scraping and

dumping and sucking kept eating away at the edges of the bog,

but no one seemed to put it much of a fuss. Parts of it would

periodically burst into flames. But like so what?

It's just a bog. Who cares? Bog, three letter

word for bad things. Because, of course, everybody thinks they're

horrible places. They don't value them and they don't even

understand them. They just throw more garbage on top of them.

And some major industrial development proposals

were floated for the bog.

At that time, which was, I think, in the mid

80s. The idea was they would dig the bog out and fill it with

sand from dredging of the Fraser River, and then build a huge

megaport.

That didn't pan out. And so then a 2500 acre

industrial development was proposed, and then a horse

racing track, and then the Pacific National Exhibition, an

amusement park, basically.

But by the 90s, some folks were beginning to

recognize the value of the bog and just how threatened the

remainder was.

There was a very strong community group with very

skilled and capable people and knowledge who could make the

case that this place shouldn't be filled and turned and burned

and whatever else.

Finally, following years of public pressure and

failed development proposals, the province of BC agreed to

undertake an ecosystem review of Burns Bog, and they asked

Richard to lead it, which initially he was hesitant to do.

But the bog had spoken to me a long time before,

and I thought, okay, well, I owe it to this, these creatures,

this amazing place, which gave me my future, which gave me my

job, and has sustained me, has supported my curiosity. I am at

one with the bog, and therefore, if I am at one with the bog,

then I must be the bog. That's the way I looked at it. So I

said, I'll do it.

And to make a long story short, he and a

handful of other scientists did it! In just eight months.

You know, I pulled it off. I did it exactly

as it should be done in open public forum, with the

scientists reporting — people like Ian McTaggart Cowan, who

was just unbelievably powerful when he came. Now, Ian McTaggart

was the zoologist of British Columbia, a tall man with a

powerful voice, and he just said that red mouse — the red back

vole — that red mouse, the last time it was seen in British

Columbia was in the UBC endowment lands. And I and my

wife saw it in the late 1940s.

When the report was finally published, the

conclusion was stunning. It stated that the vast majority of

the remaining bog area, over 2000 hectares, would be required

to preserve its viability and sustain its processes. And when

it came down to it, Richard was called upon once again, this

time by the lawyers, to actually delineate the area that would

ultimately be protected, which was a real crisis for him as a

scientist.

At that point, I truly understood that you cannot

be an objective, dispassionate scientist. You cannot be one.

Just as we face the future of climate change, we have to make

the choices and the decisions and not leave for the government

to make or for an industry to make. We have to work to make

the best decisions that are possible, and so I did it. So I

drew the lines.

And from those lines would eventually emerge

the Burns Bog Ecological Conservancy Area, managed by

Metro Vancouver and the City of Delta to maintain it in

perturity. The bog had been drained and sucked, battered and

bruised, but now it had a fighting chance at life.

You know, why would you fill it and kill it?

Why would you not think of it as one of the most biologically

spiritual creations on the Planet Earth.

The fate of one of the most biologically spiritual

creations on Planet Earth, and I promise eventually an answer to

our question about peat. That's after the break. Now, if you

excuse me, I have to go see a man about a bog.

Hey, if you're enjoying the show, check out

futureecologies.net/support — thanks!

Driving down this old gravel road. On my left,

Burns Bog. On the right, cranberry farm, actively

harvesting... group of men out in waders, water up to their

waists, with a giant vacuum hose sucking the cranberries that are

floating off of the water surface and into a giant bin.

Wild. And another gate. I think this is the third gate. Gates

everywhere.

Wait, I didn't get to go along for this ride. I

feel so left out. I thought you said members of the public

couldn't actually get in to Burns Bog.

I mean, they generally can't, except for a

tiny piece called The Delta Nature Reserve, which is nice to

visit if you can. But I am no ordinary member of the general

public, Mendel. I have special clearance — from a friend who

got me inside.

I don't think I have ever eaten a fresh cranberry right off a

bush.

Not a cultivar.

This is native?

Yeah.

that is delicious

Tart though, huh?

Oh, but I love things that are sour. Oh my god.

That's good.

I love sour things.

Ah, yes. You were there to see your good

friend... the cranberry.

Of course, and my colleague, Drew Elves.

I teach at University of Victoria in the

Restoration of Natural Systems program and in the School of

Environmental Studies. I am ecohydrologist by training, a

peatland ecohydrologist with a focus on sphagnum mosses.

So I'm standing out there in the bog with Drew,

bobbing up and down on this thick mat of peat in the sun.

No, I'm not jealous. Thanks for asking.

And we're looking at this wild variety of colors

all around us.

Like, we're looking at this field right now, and

there's a cornucopia of color, right? There are so many greens,

so many reds, so many buffs.

And these colors we're seeing, they tend to

correspond to different species of sphagnum moss.

There are 12 documented species

Growing in slightly different parts of the

mossy landscape, the hummocks and the hollows.

The ones that make the hummocks, they are slow

growing and they're recalcitrant, meaning they don't

readily decompose. These recalcitrant hummock species are

really resilient. They can take up water and stay moist much

further into the drought period than hollow forming species. The

Hollow forming species, though, they'll grow really fast, but

then they don't have the specific phenolics, meaning they

don't have those chemicals that impede breaking down. They're

not robust in that way. They decay.

Tag yourself. I'm the not-so-resilient fast

grower.

I'm recalcitrant, slow and stubborn all the way.

So it's two very different traits. One's a hare,

one's a tortoise. The hare are the hollow growing species.

They'll grow really fast during a time when moisture conditions

are right and temperature conditions are right, and

they'll grow really quickly. So because of that, they are

lateral growers. Whereas these hummocks, they slowly build up.

They have this like apical bud, meaning a topmost layer where

they keep growing from. And so they just keep growing higher

and higher.

So it's a beautiful, diverse bog scene.

But at the same time, this is a part of the bog that was

harvested and prepared to be a cranberry farm before it was

abandoned. It's still recovering from that disturbance.

The hydrology has been brought back to within

historical bounds, and that means that peat forming

processes have been reinitiated

and Drew is there studying that recovery.

How is he doing that?

With light and a very, very nice camera pointed

directly at the ground.

We can take the properties of light. The sun

comes in, and it encodes a lot of information, especially for

plants and photosynthetic organisms, right? What they use,

what they take. Meaning, what part of the sun's light that

they use at different times of year, and then what they reflect

back can tell us a lot about what's happening underneath.

And just as a very basic example, when sphagnum

moss gets dry, it tends to turn white, and that increases the

albedo of the bog, helping reflect sunlight and cool things

down a bit. That's something that we can see with just our

eyeballs, but Drew is looking at what we can learn with better

equipment than what nature gave any of us.

The affordances we have in terms of our vision,

they're not entirely objective, right? I often tell students,

you know, remember that dress?

You know the dress, right Mendel?

Ah the dress, of course I do. It's obviously

black and blue.

Oh no, it's clearly white and gold.

What color was the dress?

I don't answer that question, because I think as a

lot of people who have a significant other, it may be led

to a bit of acrimony, and so I'm not going to say what color the

dress was.

So instead of relying on his merely human

vision, Drew is using the NDVI.

The what?

The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. So

that's where it goes from being the dress and being subjective,

to being something that's standardized and reproducible

and decipherable.

And I brought us here just to say that this is a

lot of what goes on in the black box of Burns Bog. It's basic

science — developing techniques to better understand all bogs,

by studying the recovery of this bog.

That's so cool. And you know, how are things

going?

Well, we did mention that the bog

occasionally erupts into flames, right?

We did.

And that's because those kilometers and kilometers

of ditches and roads crisscrossing the bog, many of

them are still actively draining it, drying it out. And a big

pile of dead dry peat is a magnet for wildfire. This is the

primary reason why the public isn't allowed in the bog.

Sure that makes sense.

But in addition to researchers, there are also

folks in here looking after the bog, and so I caught up with a

couple of them on a group field trip on a freezing cold, rainy

day. You're actually going to hear the raindrops hitting the

microphone, and I just want you to know that every single one of

them felt like frostbite on my hand.

Thank you for your service.

It is also on the flight path of the Vancouver

International Airport, and so there was so much plane noise.

I'm Markus Merkens. I'm a Regional Parks

Biologist, and I've been working in the bog for the past 15 and a

half years, trying to take care of the bog the best I can. I'm

gonna pass over to Sarah here.

Sarah Howie, Climate Action and Environment

Manager with the City of Delta. I've been working in the bog

since the year 2000, and Markus and I co-manage the bog.

And without much further ado, they ushered us

into the bog.

If you see what looks like a mud puddle, don't

step there, because it's basically a sinkhole and you

will fall in. That would be a fun experience for you, but we'd

rather you not have to deal with that, so you can just step on

the vegetation instead. It'll keep you afloat.

Bogs are incredibly complex ecosystems,

and to quote a professor of mine at UBC, bog ecology isn't rocket

science, it's way more complicated than that.

Markus told us that the peat in Burns Bog is

five to eight meters thick, and to demonstrate, he pulled out a

Russian peat auger.

So I've just taken a core sample of the bog.

This peat is about a meter and a half below ground. This was

sequestered at a time when the Vikings were exploring the

eastern coast of North America. That's how long ago this was

laid down.

Bog tour participant: Welcome back to the sunlight.

So Mendel, as you know, normally, bogs are too wet

for anything but a few stunted trees to grow. But where we were

walking, there were hundreds of dead burnt out tree trunks, and

beneath them, thousands of stout little pine saplings.

If you look around us, you can see these

burnt out trees. These are the trees that release the cones and

seeds post fire. And if you look behind me, you can see the

lodgepole pine stand very dense. If you have six trees in a

square meter or square yard, you have 60,000 stems per hectare.

So that's, that's a huge number of trees.

Oh, my God. What is it with us and this season

and cataloging the density of stands of trees?

I have no idea. Honestly, it is a through line.

There were a lot of pines there.

Yeah, what's up with that?

Well, when you start draining a bog, you make

it a lot easier for trees to grow, because it was the water

level that was keeping them out. And when trees start growing,

they start transpiring water. Lots and lots of that water.

Trees are hydrological pumps. Pine is a

weaker pump than other species, but in the aggregate, 60,000

stems per hectare push a lot of water out of the bog.

They suck water out of the ground.

More sucking

And then things get even drier still, and then

they catch fire and burn. And then the seed cones open, and

1000s more trees start to grow, and the vicious cycle continues.

So what are they doing about it?

We physically remove by hand trees, now over a

19 hectare, or almost 50 acre section of the burn that

happened, which was 37 hectares within the conservancy area. So

very labor intensive.

They rip up and pile the trees. I pulled a few

myself just to be helpful. You know?

Oh, that is delicious.

...Are you eating cranberries again?

Possibly, but more to the point, the trees are only

one part of the problem. Those old settler drainage ditches are

still doing their thing.

Ouch.

And as the bog is drying out, especially at the

edges, the peat is subsiding away as it's being oxidized,

with all of that carbon going back up into the atmosphere.

Whoa. It's kind of like the bog is still

burning, only on a slower time scale.

Yeah, you could definitely look at it that way.

And this edge of the bog, also known as the lagg, is where

organic peat meets the surrounding mineral soils. As

Richard told me, it's really important.

You can't have a bog without a lagg. Essentially,

the lagg is kind of like that transitional skin on your body.

If you don't have that, if you just cut into the tissue and

expose the raw flesh, you die, you scar right. The more cuts,

the more it's bleeding, the less chance it has to survive. And so

we need to stop the loss of water, in this case, the life

blood of the bog.

Fortunately, Sarah Howie is an expert on laggs and

how to revive them.

So Markus has been talking about his big tree

seedling removal project. My project that I've been working

on for 20 years is restoring the water table in the bog. So

there's about 100 kilometers of drainage ditches that were put

into the bog during the peat harvesting days. So we're trying

to reverse that and stop those ditches from draining. So we've

got these dams, about 479 dams, and almost all of them were

built by hand, by people carrying materials and shovels

into the bog, digging borrow pits of peat, filling the dams

with peat, and actually using Coroplast boards like these

ones, recycled election signs.

Election signs?

Yes, even bog restoration is political,

Mendel.

After we would have a local election, they were really

just going to dispose of them anyway, and so, yeah, they're

buried. They're basically like sheet piling, and we use them to

block the flow of water in the ditches and then cover it with

peat so that the plastic is not exposed. It's buried basically

forever in the peat.

Sarah says this works so well because the signs

are really light and pretty tough, you can carry them into

the bog on your back and create permanent ditch blocks.

And because we have to, you know, walk for

kilometers sometimes to get to the places where we're working,

that's the best material. And we actually ran this by our

scientific advisory panel before deciding to put this plastic in

the bog and and they said, because it's going to be buried

essentially forever in the bog, it's inert. It's not

contributing chemicals or nutrients. I mean, I don't love

the idea of putting plastic out there, but it's buried, and it's

not damaging the bog in any way.

I guess sometimes practicality comes

before romance. Are they also using, like, big heavy machinery

excavators, like Robin?

At times, yeah.

It's actually the same excavator operator that was

working for the peat harvesting folks, and now he's helping us

with restoration.

Sarah told me that they've basically blocked off

most of the ditches in the center of the bog, and so she's

turned her attention to the lagg.

The next goal is to restore the edge, and that's

probably going to take me to the end of my career.

But that's all right, because, as Richard told

us, they have a 100 year restoration plan in place for

the bog, and we're just a quarter of the way into it.

I think that in the 25 years that we've been

doing this work and gathering more knowledge, it's as well and

better than I had hoped for.

You can see that, especially in the middle of the

bog.

The water levels are generally where they're

supposed to be, within about half a meter of the surface,

But we are not out of the woods yet, not by a long

shot.

The other issue that we're dealing with is

climate change. So we've re-wetted the bog, we've raised

the water table, and now we're getting drier summers, and so

it's much hotter, and the water table is dropping.

And so Sarah will continue blocking ditches, and

Markus will keep removing trees, and Drew and other researchers

will continue to study the system, and hopefully, in the

meantime, the bog doesn't go up in smoke.

So it's great to hear that some level of recovery

is possible, right? At least on a 100 year time scale. But it's

clear that harvesting the peat from this bog, along with other

disturbances, has had a pretty profoundly negative impact.

Which brings us back to the question that we

started with. Can we justify harvesting peat from bogs so

that we can use it to grow plants, say, native plants for

restoration?

To answer that question, we needed to talk to

one more person.

My name is Line Rochefort, Professor in

Restoration Ecology, holding a chair in Ecosystem Restoration,

and also I'm the North American national expert at the RAMSAR

Convention.

Line is widely recognized as Canada's leading

expert on peatland restoration

Canada, in terms of managing, caring for

peatlands has a world responsibility, because we have

a lot of carbon stock in our peatland, 34% of all the

peatlands in the world are in Canada.

followed by 33% in Russia. So between our two

circumboreal nations, there are two thirds of the world's

peatland, which is a lot of carbon. Now Lynn is quick to

point out that peatland destruction is a serious issue

at a global and a regional level, especially in the more

developed parts of southern Canada.

Like the Fraser Valley, where Burns Bog is

located.

But overall, she says of Canada's total 128

million hectares of peatland, only a tiny fraction have been

directly impacted, estimated at less than 2%

These and the numbers that follow are from the

2022 UN Global Peatlands Assessment, by the way.

So in Canada, if we go by order of impacts

through time, we have drained for agriculture, 1.3 million

hectares of peatland.

About and after agriculture, the next biggest

impact to Canadian peatlands is actually the fossil fuel

industry.

Second in line is the oil and gas and we don't

have national statistics about all our impacts, but we do know

that it's about 400,000 hectare. So, it's an order of magnitude

less than what happened with agriculture.

And after fossil energy, next comes hydro

electricity.

Hydro dams. So a lot of flooding in peatland rich

area, be it in Quebec, Newfoundland, Manitoba,

And then it's good old fashioned drainage.

Some drainage for forestry, for urban

expansion, road development.

And finally, we have the subject of our inquiry,

peat extraction for peat extraction's sake.

One of the least is using it for peat. Since

1931, about 38,000 hectare.

In other words, the area of peatland that has

been impacted by harvesting for horticultural uses is absolutely

dwarfed by the area impacted by agriculture, oil and gas and

other forms of development, all of which has only impacted a

small portion of the bogs in Canada. But even so, when you go

to the store and buy a bag of peat, chances are good that it's

coming from right here in Canada.

Canada is one of the biggest peat producer in the

world. The use of peat in Canada is really in horticulture. 85%

is sold in the United States. It's for the professional grower

in greenhouses, cucumber, green pepper, tomatoes and the

mushroom industry.

So for Canada, peat is largely an export

industry. Historically, some of that peat was harvested from

bogs in Western Canada, like Burns Bog, especially after the

Second World War. But for the most part today, that peat is

coming from the vast boreal peatlands of central and eastern

Canada. And before we continue, it's important to mention that

much of Line's research has been funded and undertaken in

partnership with the horticultural peat industry —

something that she is proud of.

What I would say is that it's an industry that

really care about managing the resource, because it's really

their living and usually they are family based, type of

companies also the been investing since the end of the

80s to develop peatland restoration measure or to manage

better. I have always been a big believer that it's good that

more biologists, environmentalists and on that

should work with industry to find solutions.

So Line is sympathetic to her industry

partners. And to be fair, they've come a long way

together.

Before I started, nobody knew how to

manipulate masses on a large scale with machines without

killing everything.

To address this, Line and her colleagues in the

Peatland Ecology Research Group eventually developed what has

become known internationally as the Moss Layer Transfer

Technique. To make a long story short.

Uh... it's very technical, but in peatlands, we

have two hydrological layer one is called the acrotelm, the

other one the catatelm.

The catatelm is the thick mass of dead peat

that's typically below the water table and storing most of the

carbon.

And the acrotelm is the thinner layer composed

largely of living peat on the surface, kind of like your skin.

No wait, kind of the opposite of your skin. Kind of like a tree.

Wait, no, kind of the opposite of a tree. It's pretty

different.

Yeah. So it's the first 10 or so centimeters of

the acrotelm

Where there's all the propagules — spores,

seeds.

Everything you need to catalyze the recovery of

a bog that's been harvested.

Once you have a peatland that's been drained for

maybe 20 years, we need, usually to reprofile to a fresh peat,

because we really need to have a good contact by capillary rise

of the water.

And so the top 10 centimeters of acrotelm is

collected from a donor site, usually the next site to be

harvested, and then is spread on top of the restoration site.

So once we spread all our material, then we

need to protect it with a straw mulch. Usually that we use, it's

to create a microclimate, because the mosses have no

roots.

And in addition to straw mulch, they add

phosphorus.

Because phosphorus is good. It's not

necessarily there to help the sphagnum, but it's another moss

that we need a nursing plan. We call it polytrichum.

Go into any bog, and amidst all that fluffy

sphagnum, you're likely to see other mosses, including the

pointier polytrichum, looking like a miniature palm tree. Or

as Line calls them, little aloes.

Or pineapple, because they have all these

spikes along the edge.

I found this aspect particularly fascinating.

Line and her colleagues have discovered that a little bit of

phosphorus really helps polytrichum to establish in the

transplanted sphagnum. And this polytrichum is much taller than

the sphagnum

So that's why, if you get this polytrichum,

nice carpet to establish, then it binds the peat and also

creates a nice microclimate.

And that miniature forest of polytrichum protects

the sphagnum moss from destruction through frost

heaving, which otherwise can be really damaging in northern

climates.

The sphagnum survive there, like, you know,

in the shadow, but they take over because they are a

co-engineer type of organism.

That's so cool.

Yep. And then the last step, you re-wet the bog.

You have to re wet. You have to block the

ditches.

And that's about it. Presto. There's a functional

bog, once again.

Yes, we do get the bog at the end of it, we

have a rate of 75% success.

Based on Line's monitoring work. It takes about

nine to 12 years for the bog to once again become a carbon sink,

and about 20 years to fully offset the carbon cost of the

restoration.

The biodiversity in terms of vascular plants, we

know that after five years, we're getting 82% back. What

does not come back easily is like orchids, but you know, they

have a complicated reproductive cycle.

So it's pretty good, but not perfect.

Restoration just never is. But as far as Line is

concerned,

in Canada, sphagnum-dominated peatland

restoration is close to a solved problem.

She's now turned her attention to the restoration

of fens, which are a different kind of peatland, and to

mitigating the impacts of wildfire on peatlands, which is

an emerging and very pressing issue.

Yes, so to return to our question, what

does Line think about using peat for restoration and for

horticulture?

Well, I see peat. It's a bit hard to replace

for now, I think we should not stop ourselves from finding

solution of other growing substrate.

But she argues, all of the alternatives

currently on the market have their own issues. Wood chips,

for example, are not a great replacement.

Productivity when you're using just wood

chips goes down quickly, when you don't have at least mix with

some sphagnum.

and rock wool, also used in home insulation,

takes a lot of energy to produce and isn't biodegradable.

Piles of things that goes in the dump, do not decompose.

Coconut coir, while it is a byproduct of palm

plantations in India and Sri Lanka, has serious labor land

use, water use and transportation issues to consider.

Coconut fiber, it is a good growing substrate,

but it's it's ecological footprint. You really have to

look at your whole life cycle analysis,

Plus something we weren't even thinking about,

perlite, which is often used in soil mixes, is a mineral which

itself is extracted and processed in a very energy

intensive way.

Make sure you don't do mixes with perlite,

because the perlite, if ever it goes in the environment, it

floats and then amphibian can choke on that.

Line pointed us to the only peer-reviewed study

that we could find specifically on our question, which performed

a life cycle analysis of the environmental impacts of peat

extracted in Latvia compared to imported rock wool and coconut

coir. Latvia, incidentally, also exports about 85% of its peat,

just like Canada. The researchers found that the full

life cycle impact of coconut coir was seven times higher than

that of peat. Rockwool, significantly better than coir,

but still higher impact than peat.

To our knowledge, there is yet to be a

similar study on Canadian peat, but it's likely that the results

would be pretty similar. So it would appear that all of the

commercial alternatives to peat for horticultural use are at

best, flawed and at worst, worse.

Still, does that mean that we should be using it?

We asked some of the other folks that we spoke to. This is Drew again.

I bought peat for the first time in my life this

past spring, and it was because we were planting bog Labrador

Tea in this small pocket bog, this engineered bog in a Place

of Medicine at UVic. How did it feel? Really complicated.

And Richard is an interesting case, because in

addition to being a bog restorationist, he's also a

serious horticulturalist. Besides Burns Bog, his other big

project is studying the productivity of potatoes under

climate change. And he strikes a cautious note on the subject of peat.

I think for certain kinds of horticultural

uses, sphagnum peat is the best choice, and that would be things

like rhododendrons, things that require acidic environments.

As for the alternatives, he acknowledged

that there are lifecycle issues, but he turned the question on

its head a bit.

What's renewable on a short time scale? Coconut

husks, not sphagnum moss on peatlands.

And while he recognized the work of Line and

others in this area

Dr Rochefort has shown, yes, you can recover

small scale excavations of peat and bring back peat species, but

you have very strong constraints on what you can do.

He also argues that what is lost is more than

just carbon dioxide.

the consequences on large areas of feed land

being harvested for peat takes away millennia of organic matter

accumulation and disturbs that PEAT ecosystem. And on the basis

of what we need to use peat as just as an organic matter in

soil, I think it's not appropriate, not for large

scale. This is where we need to be growing all kinds of organic

matter and returning it to the ground and into our ecosystems

Like compost, he says. Lots of compost. It's not

a perfect peat substitute for some uses, but for others, it

definitely gets the job done.

Yeah, I think we can all get behind that. So to

finally summarize the answer to our question, synthesized from

all of these conversations, in the style of Michael Pollan, use

peat, not too much, and whenever possible, use compost instead.

And if you do use some peat, always keep in mind

that what you're using is part of a super organism.

The bog is a quintessential embodiment and

example of what goes on all over the natural ecosystems of our

Earth. So the hydrosphere, the water table, the atmosphere, the

source of the rain and the oxygen that they need, the

carbon dioxide that they need, the Geosphere, the physical

substrate upon which the conditions are such that the

sediments, the peat, can accumulate to support all the

living creatures, the living creatures of the raised bog,

which you can draw a circle around. It's a porous boundary,

but there is a boundary, and you can see it and understand it as

a physical structure living in equilibrium, a dynamic

equilibrium, that it's shaping for itself with the hydrosphere,

the atmosphere and the Geosphere. And now we face the

greatest challenge of all — where the social sphere is now

of a scale equal to the other four spheres in terms of shaping

the land, but not in equilibrium. And what's the

fundamental lesson from those other four spheres? They will

bring us back into equilibrium. And we all have to take

responsibility to speak for them. To listen to them and

speak for them.

In this episode, you heard the voices of Robin

Annschild, Richard Hebda, Drew Elves, Markus Merkens, Sarah

Howie, and Line Rochefort. Music by yours truly, Thumbug, and

Sunfish Moon Light.

Special thanks to the Wetland Project, Brady Marks and Mark

Timmings for letting us use a clip from their incredible 24

hour recording of a marsh on ṮEḴTEḴSEN Saturna island, on

unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory. And to the organizers of the 2024

SER North American Conference, Tony Ballard specifically, thanks.

If you like what we do here, you can help us do more. Check out

futureecologies.net/support to find out how. Thanks to all of

our patrons who keep us independent and ad free, we just

could not do it without you. This episode was produced by

Adam Huggins, and me, Mendel Skulski, with help from Eden

Zinchik. And as always, you can find a transcript and citations

on our website, futureecologies.net. That's it

for this one. We'll see you soon.