We Need to Talk About Peat
In his poems about strange bodies buried in the bogs of Northern Europe, the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes peatlands filled with “drowned-mouse fibres dried up and the whole limp, soggy cluster … Of weed leaf and turf mould.” Such is the kit in those vast breathing heaps filled with gasses, acids, and mire, along with human and other history. You think of Tollund Man who died in around 300 B.C., at the age of 40 or so, and was unburied in Denmark by two peat cutters in 1950.
His head was perfectly preserved, still with a sheepskin cap, hair closely cropped, mouth and eyes closed, as though on a summer’s nap but with a sad, wearied expression. He was found six feet down, naked, unable to decompose in the oxygenless, methaned mush of the Jutland peninsula. A noose around his neck suggests he may have been a sacrifice.
Peatlands have been a repository for eons and a source of hearth fuel for thousands of years. They’ve been known as a carbon sink for about a century, certainly since the 1890s when carbon dioxide was understood to be a greenhouse gas. Peatlands cover just 3 percent than forests.
