Late last year, under cover of Christmas, the Scottish government continued its push to locate 103 large wind turbines on precious peatlands in Shetland. No climate scientist in the world would advocate the opening up of peatland for any purpose at all – peat bogs sequester four times as much carbon as forests – but with a small environmental group, Sustainable Shetland, pitted against a large development company and its own government, many fear that this project could go ahead.
Windfarms are regarded by many – especially deep ecologists – as a dubious source of energy (being intermittent, they must be backed up by fossil fuels, which suits the energy companies very well). We have known for decades that the destruction of peatland leads not only to habitat loss, but also to the release of vast quantities of greenhouse gases. In Britain, this is a huge problem: 94 per cent of our raised peat bogs have been destroyed over the past few centuries, first for agricultural and forestry “improvements”, then to supply the garden trade – even though good alternatives are easily available.
As the researchers William J Sutherland and John D Reynolds noted in 1997, “If developed countries are unable to protect such an important habitat from such a trivial threat, then one wonders how we can solve more pressing problems of exploitation elsewhere.”
Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.
All this might be forgivable if we did not, like gardeners, have viable alternatives to the destruction. From a climate viewpoint, we know that any further disturbance of peatlands must be avoided: an estimated two billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions is reported annually. So why do we continue to locate windfarms on wild peatland – and why did the Royal Horticultural Society have to repeat its warning, just months ago, that gardeners were still piling up significant amounts of peat in their potting sheds?
One reason, clearly, is that our politicians simply do not have the will to act, because their electoral campaigns and post-government executive careers are underwritten by some of the worst polluters and resource pirates on the planet. Some of our NGOs are in the same boat; infiltrated by moneymen and lobbyists playing to entrenched ideological positions, many have lost sight of their original purpose. All of which goes to underline what many of us already suspect: that it is up to us citizens to intervene – not as voters, but as consumers.
The very designation we resist most is the key to our power. Besides boycotts of environmentally destructive products (eating less meat and processed foods would slow forest and peatland destruction), we can learn to love the dark and switch off the superfluous lighting that surrounds us, returning (as Jun’ichiro Tanizaki outlines in his celebrated essay “In Praise of Shadows”), to the special pleasures of a less glaring world.
If we could learn to enjoy a less floodlit, less air-conditioned, less overheated world, we could prevent the further loss of peatlands to the highly suspect fossil-fuel/wind-turbine paradigm, and a few improvements to our diet would slow the losses to industrial agriculture. Meanwhile, we could do even more good as we cultivate our (organic, bee-friendly) gardens, by withdrawing consumer support from those corporations that, in spite of the warnings of the past 20 years, continue to supply peat products that degrade the thing gardeners are supposed to love most: the natural world.
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