And for peat's sake.
Whilst I'm at it, I thought I'd rant a bit about peat. After going to a conference a few weeks ago, where many peat enthusiasts met to discuss peatland management and tell of their stories of hope for maintaining this important ecosystem for our children and our children's children's grandchildren, and beyond, I feel I need to advocate for peat conservation a bit.
The conference crew was mostly made up of temperate peat ecologists, biochemists, geochemists, archaeologists, drainage experts, etc., all of which were putting vast amounts of money and energy into trying to better manage the peatlands in the Northern Hemisphere. It was inspiring to hear of stories from scientists who were spending months in the snow moving peat and gravel and straw around one patch of degraded peat, left after a tar sands mine was created in the outback of Canada, in order to attempt to restore a few hundred metres.
Perhaps about 5% of the crew were people working on tropical peat swamp forests, like me, and there were no stories of success really. And there's also very little money available that could be used to try to protect this vital ecosystem, or people interested. And any money or enthusiasm there is from people who could make a difference on the ground/peat, are more enthusiastic about planting oil palm. Who can blame them really when it's so lucrative. As with many conservation issues, the Northern Hemisphere/developed country situation is quite different to that in the lesser-developed countries, for all sorts of understandable reasons.
Unfortunately, unless someone knows someone who might be able to stop anyone planting oil palm on peatlands, the wonderful Professor Of-all-Peat that I met in Bangor, confirmed my fears: all of the tropical peat will be gone within about 20 years.
I'm not sure this will all be alright in the end, actually. But then, it isn't the end yet. A few years ago there wasn't even a peat conference to speak of.
Onwards, always.
The conference crew was mostly made up of temperate peat ecologists, biochemists, geochemists, archaeologists, drainage experts, etc., all of which were putting vast amounts of money and energy into trying to better manage the peatlands in the Northern Hemisphere. It was inspiring to hear of stories from scientists who were spending months in the snow moving peat and gravel and straw around one patch of degraded peat, left after a tar sands mine was created in the outback of Canada, in order to attempt to restore a few hundred metres.
Perhaps about 5% of the crew were people working on tropical peat swamp forests, like me, and there were no stories of success really. And there's also very little money available that could be used to try to protect this vital ecosystem, or people interested. And any money or enthusiasm there is from people who could make a difference on the ground/peat, are more enthusiastic about planting oil palm. Who can blame them really when it's so lucrative. As with many conservation issues, the Northern Hemisphere/developed country situation is quite different to that in the lesser-developed countries, for all sorts of understandable reasons.
Unfortunately, unless someone knows someone who might be able to stop anyone planting oil palm on peatlands, the wonderful Professor Of-all-Peat that I met in Bangor, confirmed my fears: all of the tropical peat will be gone within about 20 years.
I'm not sure this will all be alright in the end, actually. But then, it isn't the end yet. A few years ago there wasn't even a peat conference to speak of.
Onwards, always.
posted by Lydia Cole at
15:10
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