FE6.8 - For Peat's Sake - Future Ecologies

Episode Transcript
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Introduction Voiceover (00:01):
You are listening to Season Six of
Future Ecologies.

Mendel Skulski (00:05):
Test, test one, two, Bumblebee, tuna, rabble,
rabble, rhubarb, rhubarb, goodto see ya. Okay, hi everybody! I
am Mendel.

Adam Huggins (00:15):
and I'm Adam

and today we're joined in the studio by... a red
legged frog!
...potentially more than one redlegged frog.

a chorus of randy red legged frogs, recorded with
a hydrophone during theirbreeding season in February — in
a half frozen wetland that Ihelped 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 acreature 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 formany years, due largely to the
loss of wetlands throughouttheir range.

Which is one of the reasons why Mendel, you and
I share a hobby in addition tomaking this show.

Yeah.

Which is that we both work to restore wetlands.

Well, that's charitable. You work to restore
wetlands. I dabble in restoringwetland. That is, one little
urban wetland in my neighborhoodin 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 remarkablewoman.

Robin Annschild (01:47):
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 streamrestoration 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 theactions of up to a half dozen
heavy machine operators — allworking together to answer one
important question.

what is it that we need to do in that watershed
to restore a healthyrelationship between the soil
and the water?

And the reason that this question is so
important is that we humans, ofthe colonial variety, have
seriously disrupted thatrelationship basically
everywhere that we have settled.Across North America, over 50%
of all wetlands have been lostsince the 1700s and that loss
has actually accelerated inrecent years, despite no net

(02:50):
loss policies and mitigationefforts. It's even worse in some
areas, like where I'm from, inCalifornia, where over 90% of
wetlands have been lost. InBritish 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 theselandscapes where we live. In
Europe, where certainly myancestors came from, there had
already been centuries, if notmillennia, of a really
systematic and highlysophisticated 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 growingcrops

Industrializing societies all over the world
tend to take places that arewet, woody, rich and wild, and
reduce them to a blank slate forall kinds of development.

Creating those uniform conditions across
floodplains is kind of the breadand butter of our way of living
on the landscape, simplifyingstreams so that instead of being
broad and flat and flooding thefloodplain, perhaps on an annual
basis, they are now in deepditches that flow down a
straight line, you know, on theedge of the field. It never

(04:12):
occurred to me that the veryditches that I played in as a
child, I thought that thoseditches had streams in them,
really, they were ditchesdraining wetlands, and that
water that I played in in thoseditches was water being drained
out of wetlands.

I also have fond memories of playing in ditches
as a kid on ag land that hadonce been in the flood plain of
the San Joaquin River. Thelandscape changes that Robin is
describing are ubiquitous.

Everything that we have done when logging, road,
building, mining, convertingwetlands and floodplains to
agriculture, has been abouthastening the passage of the
water through the watershed. Andnow what we're looking at is,

(05:03):
well, now wait a minute, what ifwe 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 aspossible, and now here we are
thinking the exact opposite. Howdo we keep the water on the land
for as long as possible?

Wetlands, by their very nature, are dynamic
ecosystems. One of the thingsthat I find so exciting about
wetland and stream restorationis that through a single action,
we're achieving multiplebenefits.

Like making habitat for endangered frogs,

as discussed, and also to recharge aquifers
sequester carbon, create firebreaks 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 thebath to drain, but it drains
pretty quickly. Now, if you wereto fill your bathtub with
towels, put the plug in, fill itup, then remove the plug, it's
going to take a lot longer forthat bathtub to drain. So when

(06:17):
you have a high rainfall event,instead of all that rain hitting
the soil, the ground, thesurfaces of your watershed and
running out quite quickly, thewetland is like that towel in
your bathtub that's absorbingall that water and it's
releasing it more slowly. Thecheapest way to prevent flooding

(06:38):
is one to protect the wetlandsthat exist in your watershed,
and two, to restore drainedwetlands in the watershed. So if
anything, we need more wetlands.We need more capacity to absorb
and regulate flow of water andclean surface water and inject
water into the ground.

At this point, for me, this is gospel, but once
Robin and the big yellowmachines finish building the
wetlands and they leave forgreener pastures, then I'm left
with the daunting task ofgetting native plants
established again on thesehighly disturbed sites.
Thankfully, my organizationgrows the plants that we need to
do this, but there's been thisthing nagging at me. In order to

(07:21):
grow those plants as part of thesoil mix, we typically use a
product that most folks areprobably familiar with. It's
called peat.

You know, peat. Fluffy, porous, great for
growing blueberries, tasty inscotch, 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 peskyquestion — whould we really
still be using peat to grow ourplants 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 storyof peatlands in North America
through one remarkable wetlandand attempt to answer a
seemingly simple question. Butyou know what happens to simple
questions around here, right?

Richard Hebda (08:27):
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

Introduction Voiceover (08:47):
Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and
asserted territories of theMusqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh, this is FutureEcologies – 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 getall up in the business of the
most charismatic bog that Iknow. If you were to visit
Vancouver, nestled between thesnow 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 theFraser River through the suburb
of Richmond, and you will seeheavy industry highways,
subdivisions, farmland, untilyou hit the largest undeveloped
urban land mass in NorthAmerica.

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 wildland in a major urban center,
but that it's not a park. Thereis 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 nearlyimpossible to access for most
people living here, Burns Bog isactually kind of a big black
box. A big black box that everyso often bursts into flames.

News Announcer 1 (10:55):
Fire crews launched a rapid attack from the
air and ground today in thehopes of knocking down a fast
growing brush fire that sparkedin Burns Bog along a stretch of
Highway 17 in Delta.

With an ecological treasure at risk,
fire crews in Delta, BC, threweverything they had today at the
flames in Burns Bog

but it is a difficult fire to fight, and
officials say that it couldcontinue to burn for days.

Man on the Street (11:18):
Remember the big fire they had in 2005 in the
bog, just hope it doesn't get asbig.

So what's going on here? Well, we've got our bog,
and now what we need is our bogwhisperer.

Sometimes with some stories, we have no idea
who to talk to first. But forthis one, all roads lead back to
one man.

My name is Richard Hebda, and I am the
curator emeritus at the RoyalBritish Columbia Museum and an
adjunct faculty at theUniversity of Victoria,
historically, in the biologydepartment the School of Earth
and Ocean Sciences and School ofEnvironmental Studies. With

(12:04):
respect to Burns Bog, I was thegovernment scientific expert on
the ecosystem review for BurnsBog, 25 years ago.

And I will say, just from my experience, it's
hard to throw a rock around herewithout hitting one of your
students or one of the studentsof one of your students.

We hope people don't throw rocks at them,
unless it's because they'redoing 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'tknow very much about it.

And when a young scientist learns that we don't
know much about a thing, itbecomes almost irresistible.

This was a particularly interesting,
different sort of creature, asit turns out, because Burns Bog
is a raised bog, and essentiallyraised bogs make their own
environment and essentiallycreate circumstances by which
plants that are critical in peataccumulation can thrive and
continue. So the whole idea was,well, when and where did it come

(13:31):
from? How did it arise and sortof, 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 inmud, and it filled in the
shallow waters, and in doing so,those lands emerge, like the
back of a whale out of thewater, and in the process, as
they emerge slowly, first beingintertidal, seawater influence,

(14:02):
freshwater influence. They gothrough a process of succession
of change from lower intertidalplant communities through middle
to upper intertidal freshwatermarshes, as you see in the
Fraser today, and then theorganic 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 allowdead plants to fully break down
into soil.

Which changes the surface chemistry, and that in
turn, changes the plantcommunities that can grow there.
First herbaceous plants and thenlater woody plants.

So willows, red osier dogwoods, Pacific
crabapple. And then those plantcommunities accumulate more
peat, but now it's woody, andwoody 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 ofcolorful sphagnum mosses.

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

And once the sphagnum mosses begin to
establish, they have all sortsof amazing tricks of organic
matter chemistry, of waterregulation, of being able to
grow in situations where there'svery low nutrients because the
peat's accumulating above thewater table. And then they
essentially convert this wetlandinto their own home, in which

(15:39):
peat mosses thrive and dominate.And once you get into that, they
just keep adding more peat andmore peat, as their bodies don't
break down, but as they die andonly partially decompose and
more sphagnum mosses grow.

And over the course of about 4000 years,
those remarkable non vascularplants, the sphagnum peat
mosses, have essentiallyconstructed a dome out of their
own dead bodies, with a shallowliving fringe on the surface.

And because it's higher in the middle than at the
edges, like a dome, itbecomes... get ready for this,
ombrotrophic.

Ombrotrophic.

Ombrotrophic basically means rain fed. The
nutrients that enter the bogthat support the growth of all
the plants and all thedecomposers, and then all the
animals that depend on them comefrom the sky, and that's because
the bog itself is actually abovethe water table, so no water

(16:43):
flows into it, because it'shigher than everything else, and
it drains radially outward fromthe center of the bog or —
sometimes they have ridgesoutward — from the ridges to the
margin. So the only source ofwater and the only source of
nutrients is rainwater.

But that's okay, because the sphagnum peat likes
low nutrient conditions. And theother plants that grow there,
they have unique adaptations tolive in this environment. For
example, they learn to huntinsects.

Carnivorous plants are just amazing, because
they're essentially an insideout stomach, they have the
digestive juices on the outside,in the case of Sundews, on these
little glands with littleglistening drops of fluid on the
ends of the glands, and thoseare your digestive juices. So
imagine the stomach is outsidedissolves insects that fall on

(17:40):
it.

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

I know we could have made the entire episode
about them, but we're not goingto do that.

So that's how these plants get their nitrogen
and the other nutrients thatthey need, because they don't
get them out of the ground verymuch, 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 allkinds 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 suddenerupt. A bunch of them erupt! —
Like, oh my god, there's a blackbear sitting in there, you know,
10 feet away from eatingberries. It doesn't even know

(18:25):
I'm there —
Then you see these majesticcranes, taking off as they do —
because you don't make any noisewhen you walk on sphagnum. It's
cushioned.
It's being like, returned to thebosom of the bog. You are part
of it, encased in part in it,cushioned by it, and you

(18:47):
appreciate it in a way that'sjust exceptional. Because you
hear the insects. You smell thesmell of the bark, Labrador tea.
You hear the birds like theSandhill cranes, or the
bumblebees flying aroundpollinating the cranberry

(19:07):
flowers, these gorgeous, littlepinkish cranberry flowers. You
feel it, you smell it, you hearit, 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. Aswe in our own bodies have
systems that work together andfeed each other and support each
other, this macro organism,raised bog does exactly that
same thing, the multitude ofspecies and multitude of

(19:53):
processes on a huge landscape,that's why I like bogs.

And Burns Bog is just one very southerly
representative of thebogosphere, if you will, a
patchwork that blankets thenorthern parts of the entire
world.

Burns Bog is also representative of many bogs for
another reason entirely. It hasa long and complicated history
of people trying to drain, farm,and fill it, because when
European settlers arrived, theysimply weren't content to let
sleeping bogs lie.

Settler history goes back to basically people
trying to farm the land. Theydug these ditches going into the
bog, and they were visible whenI was there, or that were
invisible sometimes and youwould just fall up to your waist
in peat and water

Kilometers and kilometers of ditches, just like
those that we discussed withRobin earlier. Speaking of
which, Mendel, you want to knowhow you can get a bog named
after you?

Ooh, how?

Try, mostly unsuccessfully, to get rid of
it. Burns Bog is named after oneDominic 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 agriculturalactivity and also created whole
new economies, including the useof 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 ofpeat moss for horticultural
purposes. And when that camearound, then there was this huge
extraction of peat from themiddle of the bog. It's organic
material. The peat,predominantly sphagnum peat, was

(21:51):
removed so the heart of the bogwas taken out. But like my bald
head, there was active livingpeat communities all around the
edges, and they essentiallysustained the bog, even though
the middle had been taken out,and maintained the water
chemistry in the middle, so thatthe sphagnum mosses came back,
essentially in a giant pool, ora giant reticulate network with

(22:14):
ridges of peat that remained inopen 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, peoplewere nibbling on the edges,
converting — conversionirreversible.

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, myopinion, never should have been
allowed to be built the way itwas, and the environmental
assessment for it was utterlyinadequate.

And then there are the cranberry farms.

Some of it was converted to cranberry fields
because cranberry fields haveturned out to be very lucrative.

and we'd be remiss not to mention the gigantic
landfill for the City ofVancouver.

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 treesoff, and scrape it off and then
suck the peat through giantvacuum cleaners.

Incidentally, cranberries are also harvested
by giant vacuum tubes. I haveseen it myself.

More sucking. There's a lot of sucking
involved,

And all of this draining and scraping and
dumping and sucking kept eatingaway at the edges of the bog,
but no one seemed to put it muchof 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, ofcourse, everybody thinks they're
horrible places. They don'tvalue them and they don't even
understand them. They just throwmore 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 digthe bog out and fill it with
sand from dredging of the FraserRiver, and then build a huge
megaport.

That didn't pan out. And so then a 2500 acre
industrial development wasproposed, and then a horse
racing track, and then thePacific National Exhibition, an
amusement park, basically.

But by the 90s, some folks were beginning to
recognize the value of the bogand just how threatened the
remainder was.

There was a very strong community group with very
skilled and capable people andknowledge who could make the
case that this place shouldn'tbe 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 ofBurns Bog, and they asked
Richard to lead it, whichinitially he was hesitant to do.

But the bog had spoken to me a long time before,
and I thought, okay, well, I oweit to this, these creatures,
this amazing place, which gaveme my future, which gave me my
job, and has sustained me, hassupported my curiosity. I am at
one with the bog, and therefore,if I am at one with the bog,

(25:36):
then I must be the bog. That'sthe 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 didit! In just eight months.

You know, I pulled it off. I did it exactly
as it should be done in openpublic forum, with the
scientists reporting — peoplelike Ian McTaggart Cowan, who
was just unbelievably powerfulwhen he came. Now, Ian McTaggart
was the zoologist of BritishColumbia, a tall man with a
powerful voice, and he just saidthat red mouse — the red back

(26:18):
vole — that red mouse, the lasttime it was seen in British
Columbia was in the UBCendowment lands. And I and my
wife saw it in the late 1940s.

When the report was finally published, the
conclusion was stunning. Itstated that the vast majority of
the remaining bog area, over2000 hectares, would be required
to preserve its viability andsustain its processes. And when
it came down to it, Richard wascalled upon once again, this
time by the lawyers, to actuallydelineate the area that would

(26:53):
ultimately be protected, whichwas a real crisis for him as a
scientist.

At that point, I truly understood that you cannot
be an objective, dispassionatescientist. You cannot be one.
Just as we face the future ofclimate change, we have to make
the choices and the decisionsand not leave for the government
to make or for an industry tomake. We have to work to make

(27:20):
the best decisions that arepossible, and so I did it. So I
drew the lines.

And from those lines would eventually emerge
the Burns Bog EcologicalConservancy Area, managed by
Metro Vancouver and the City ofDelta to maintain it in
perturity. The bog had beendrained and sucked, battered and
bruised, but now it had afighting chance at life.

You know, why would you fill it and kill it?
Why would you not think of it asone of the most biologically
spiritual creations on thePlanet Earth.

The fate of one of the most biologically spiritual
creations on Planet Earth, and Ipromise eventually an answer to
our question about peat. That'safter the break. Now, if you
excuse me, I have to go see aman 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 outin waders, water up to their
waists, with a giant vacuum hosesucking the cranberries that are
floating off of the watersurface and into a giant bin.

(29:06):
Wild. And another gate. I thinkthis is the third gate. Gates
everywhere.

Wait, I didn't get to go along for this ride. I
feel so left out. I thought yousaid members of the public
couldn't actually get in toBurns Bog.

I mean, they generally can't, except for a
tiny piece called The DeltaNature Reserve, which is nice to
visit if you can. But I am noordinary member of the general
public, Mendel. I have specialclearance — from a friend who
got me inside.
I don't think I have ever eatena fresh cranberry right off a
bush.

Drew Elves (29:41):
Not a cultivar.

This is native?

Drew Elves (29:43):
Yeah.

that is delicious

Drew Elves (29:51):
Tart though, huh?

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

Drew Elves (29:54):
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.

Drew Elves (30:07):
I teach at University of Victoria in the
Restoration of Natural Systemsprogram and in the School of
Environmental Studies. I amecohydrologist by training, a
peatland ecohydrologist with afocus on sphagnum mosses.

So I'm standing out there in the bog with Drew,
bobbing up and down on thisthick 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.

Drew Elves (30:37):
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 speciesof sphagnum moss.

Drew Elves (30:50):
There are 12 documented species

Growing in slightly different parts of the
mossy landscape, the hummocksand the hollows.

Drew Elves (31:00):
The ones that make the hummocks, they are slow
growing and they'rerecalcitrant, meaning they don't
readily decompose. Theserecalcitrant hummock species are
really resilient. They can takeup water and stay moist much
further into the drought periodthan hollow forming species. The
Hollow forming species, though,they'll grow really fast, but

(31:21):
then they don't have thespecific phenolics, meaning they
don't have those chemicals thatimpede breaking down. They're
not robust in that way. Theydecay.

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

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

Drew Elves (31:38):
So it's two very different traits. One's a hare,
one's a tortoise. The hare arethe hollow growing species.
They'll grow really fast duringa time when moisture conditions
are right and temperatureconditions are right, and
they'll grow really quickly. Sobecause of that, they are
lateral growers. Whereas thesehummocks, they slowly build up.
They have this like apical bud,meaning a topmost layer where
they keep growing from. And sothey just keep growing higher

(32:00):
and higher.

So it's a beautiful, diverse bog scene.
But at the same time, this is apart of the bog that was
harvested and prepared to be acranberry farm before it was
abandoned. It's still recoveringfrom that disturbance.

Drew Elves (32:15):
The hydrology has been brought back to within
historical bounds, and thatmeans 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.

Drew Elves (32:35):
We can take the properties of light. The sun
comes in, and it encodes a lotof information, especially for
plants and photosyntheticorganisms, right? What they use,
what they take. Meaning, whatpart of the sun's light that
they use at different times ofyear, and then what they reflect
back can tell us a lot aboutwhat's happening underneath.

And just as a very basic example, when sphagnum
moss gets dry, it tends to turnwhite, and that increases the
albedo of the bog, helpingreflect sunlight and cool things
down a bit. That's somethingthat we can see with just our
eyeballs, but Drew is looking atwhat we can learn with better
equipment than what nature gaveany of us.

Drew Elves (33:17):
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?

Drew Elves (33:40):
I don't answer that question, because I think as a
lot of people who have asignificant other, it may be led
to a bit of acrimony, and so I'mnot going to say what color the
dress was.

So instead of relying on his merely human
vision, Drew is using the NDVI.

The what?

Drew Elves (34:04):
The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. So
that's where it goes from beingthe dress and being subjective,
to being something that'sstandardized and reproducible
and decipherable.

And I brought us here just to say that this is a
lot of what goes on in the blackbox of Burns Bog. It's basic
science — developing techniquesto better understand all bogs,
by studying the recovery of thisbog.

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 roadscrisscrossing the bog, many of
them are still actively drainingit, drying it out. And a big
pile of dead dry peat is amagnet for wildfire. This is the
primary reason why the publicisn't allowed in the bog.

Sure that makes sense.

But in addition to researchers, there are also
folks in here looking after thebog, and so I caught up with a
couple of them on a group fieldtrip on a freezing cold, rainy
day. You're actually going tohear the raindrops hitting the
microphone, and I just want youto know that every single one of
them felt like frostbite on myhand.

Thank you for your service.

It is also on the flight path of the Vancouver
International Airport, and sothere was so much plane noise.

Markus Merkens (35:31):
I'm Markus Merkens. I'm a Regional Parks
Biologist, and I've been workingin the bog for the past 15 and a
half years, trying to take careof the bog the best I can. I'm
gonna pass over to Sarah here.

Sarah Howie (35:44):
Sarah Howie, Climate Action and Environment
Manager with the City of Delta.I've been working in the bog
since the year 2000, and Markusand 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'sbasically a sinkhole and you
will fall in. That would be afun experience for you, but we'd
rather you not have to deal withthat, so you can just step on
the vegetation instead. It'llkeep you afloat.

Bogs are incredibly complex ecosystems,
and to quote a professor of mineat UBC, bog ecology isn't rocket
science, it's way morecomplicated than that.

Markus told us that the peat in Burns Bog is
five to eight meters thick, andto 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 ahalf below ground. This was
sequestered at a time when theVikings were exploring the
eastern coast of North America.That's how long ago this was
laid down.

Bog tour participant (37:16):
Welcome back to the sunlight.

So Mendel, as you know, normally, bogs are too wet
for anything but a few stuntedtrees to grow. But where we were
walking, there were hundreds ofdead burnt out tree trunks, and
beneath them, thousands of stoutlittle pine saplings.

If you look around us, you can see these
burnt out trees. These are thetrees that release the cones and
seeds post fire. And if you lookbehind me, you can see the
lodgepole pine stand very dense.If you have six trees in a
square meter or square yard, youhave 60,000 stems per hectare.

(38:00):
So that's, that's a huge numberof trees.

Oh, my God. What is it with us and this season
and cataloging the density ofstands 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 togrow, 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 ofwater 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. Andthen 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 acresection of the burn that
happened, which was 37 hectareswithin the conservancy area. So
very labor intensive.

They rip up and pile the trees. I pulled a few
myself just to be helpful. Youknow?
Oh, that is delicious.

...Are you eating cranberries again?

Possibly, but more to the point, the trees are only
one part of the problem. Thoseold settler drainage ditches are
still doing their thing.

Ouch.

And as the bog is drying out, especially at the
edges, the peat is subsidingaway as it's being oxidized,
with all of that carbon goingback up into the atmosphere.

Whoa. It's kind of like the bog is still
burning, only on a slower timescale.

Yeah, you could definitely look at it that way.
And this edge of the bog, alsoknown as the lagg, is where
organic peat meets thesurrounding mineral soils. As
Richard told me, it's reallyimportant.

You can't have a bog without a lagg. Essentially,
the lagg is kind of like thattransitional skin on your body.
If you don't have that, if youjust cut into the tissue and
expose the raw flesh, you die,you scar right. The more cuts,
the more it's bleeding, the lesschance it has to survive. And so

(40:40):
we need to stop the loss ofwater, 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. Myproject that I've been working
on for 20 years is restoring thewater table in the bog. So
there's about 100 kilometers ofdrainage ditches that were put
into the bog during the peatharvesting days. So we're trying
to reverse that and stop thoseditches from draining. So we've

(41:16):
got these dams, about 479 dams,and almost all of them were
built by hand, by peoplecarrying materials and shovels
into the bog, digging borrowpits of peat, filling the dams
with peat, and actually usingCoroplast boards like these
ones, recycled election signs.

Election signs?

Yes, even bog restoration is political,
Mendel.

Unknown (41:40):
After we would have a local election, they were really
just going to dispose of themanyway, and so, yeah, they're
buried. They're basically likesheet piling, and we use them to
block the flow of water in theditches and then cover it with
peat so that the plastic is notexposed. It's buried basically
forever in the peat.

Sarah says this works so well because the signs
are really light and prettytough, you can carry them into
the bog on your back and createpermanent ditch blocks.

And because we have to, you know, walk for
kilometers sometimes to get tothe places where we're working,
that's the best material. And weactually ran this by our
scientific advisory panel beforedeciding 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

(42:29):
contributing chemicals ornutrients. I mean, I don't love
the idea of putting plastic outthere, but it's buried, and it's
not damaging the bog in any way.

I guess sometimes practicality comes
before romance. Are they alsousing, like, big heavy machinery
excavators, like Robin?

At times, yeah.

It's actually the same excavator operator that was
working for the peat harvestingfolks, and now he's helping us
with restoration.

Sarah told me that they've basically blocked off
most of the ditches in thecenter of the bog, and so she's
turned her attention to thelagg.

The next goal is to restore the edge, and that's
probably going to take me to theend of my career.

But that's all right, because, as Richard told
us, they have a 100 yearrestoration plan in place for
the bog, and we're just aquarter of the way into it.

I think that in the 25 years that we've been
doing this work and gatheringmore 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 abouthalf 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'vere-wetted the bog, we've raised
the water table, and now we'regetting drier summers, and so
it's much hotter, and the watertable is dropping.

And so Sarah will continue blocking ditches, and
Markus will keep removing trees,and Drew and other researchers
will continue to study thesystem, and hopefully, in the
meantime, the bog doesn't go upin smoke.

So it's great to hear that some level of recovery
is possible, right? At least ona 100 year time scale. But it's
clear that harvesting the peatfrom this bog, along with other
disturbances, has had a prettyprofoundly negative impact.

Which brings us back to the question that we
started with. Can we justifyharvesting peat from bogs so
that we can use it to growplants, say, native plants for
restoration?

To answer that question, we needed to talk to
one more person.

Line Rochefort (44:50):
My name is Line Rochefort, Professor in
Restoration Ecology, holding achair in Ecosystem Restoration,
and also I'm the North Americannational 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 worldresponsibility, because we have
a lot of carbon stock in ourpeatland, 34% of all the
peatlands in the world are inCanada.

followed by 33% in Russia. So between our two
circumboreal nations, there aretwo thirds of the world's
peatland, which is a lot ofcarbon. Now Lynn is quick to
point out that peatlanddestruction is a serious issue
at a global and a regionallevel, especially in the more

(45:48):
developed parts of southernCanada.

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 atless than 2%

These and the numbers that follow are from the
2022 UN Global PeatlandsAssessment, by the way.

So in Canada, if we go by order of impacts
through time, we have drainedfor agriculture, 1.3 million
hectares of peatland.

About and after agriculture, the next biggest
impact to Canadian peatlands isactually the fossil fuel
industry.

Second in line is the oil and gas and we don't
have national statistics aboutall our impacts, but we do know
that it's about 400,000 hectare.So, it's an order of magnitude
less than what happened withagriculture.

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 peatextraction'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 forhorticultural uses is absolutely
dwarfed by the area impacted byagriculture, oil and gas and
other forms of development, allof which has only impacted a
small portion of the bogs inCanada. But even so, when you go

(47:41):
to the store and buy a bag ofpeat, chances are good that it's
coming from right here inCanada.

Canada is one of the biggest peat producer in the
world. The use of peat in Canadais really in horticulture. 85%
is sold in the United States.It's for the professional grower
in greenhouses, cucumber, greenpepper, tomatoes and the
mushroom industry.

So for Canada, peat is largely an export
industry. Historically, some ofthat peat was harvested from
bogs in Western Canada, likeBurns Bog, especially after the
Second World War. But for themost part today, that peat is
coming from the vast borealpeatlands of central and eastern
Canada. And before we continue,it's important to mention that

(48:28):
much of Line's research has beenfunded and undertaken in
partnership with thehorticultural peat industry —
something that she is proud of.

What I would say is that it's an industry that
really care about managing theresource, because it's really
their living and usually theyare family based, type of
companies also the beeninvesting since the end of the
80s to develop peatlandrestoration measure or to manage
better. I have always been a bigbeliever that it's good that

(49:01):
more biologists,environmentalists and on that
should work with industry tofind 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 largescale with machines without
killing everything.

To address this, Line and her colleagues in the
Peatland Ecology Research Groupeventually developed what has
become known internationally asthe Moss Layer Transfer
Technique. To make a long storyshort.

Uh... it's very technical, but in peatlands, we
have two hydrological layer oneis called the acrotelm, the
other one the catatelm.

The catatelm is the thick mass of dead peat
that's typically below the watertable and storing most of the
carbon.

And the acrotelm is the thinner layer composed
largely of living peat on thesurface, kind of like your skin.
No wait, kind of the opposite ofyour skin. Kind of like a tree.
Wait, no, kind of the oppositeof 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, usuallyto reprofile to a fresh peat,
because we really need to have agood 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 ontop of the restoration site.

So once we spread all our material, then we
need to protect it with a strawmulch. 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 thesphagnum, but it's another moss
that we need a nursing plan. Wecall it polytrichum.

Go into any bog, and amidst all that fluffy
sphagnum, you're likely to seeother mosses, including the
pointier polytrichum, lookinglike a miniature palm tree. Or
as Line calls them, littlealoes.

Or pineapple, because they have all these
spikes along the edge.

I found this aspect particularly fascinating.
Line and her colleagues havediscovered that a little bit of
phosphorus really helpspolytrichum to establish in the
transplanted sphagnum. And thispolytrichum is much taller than
the sphagnum

So that's why, if you get this polytrichum,
nice carpet to establish, thenit binds the peat and also
creates a nice microclimate.

And that miniature forest of polytrichum protects
the sphagnum moss fromdestruction through frost
heaving, which otherwise can bereally damaging in northern
climates.

The sphagnum survive there, like, you know,
in the shadow, but they takeover 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 toonce again become a carbon sink,
and about 20 years to fullyoffset 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 islike orchids, but you know, they
have a complicated reproductivecycle.

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 solvedproblem.

She's now turned her attention to the restoration
of fens, which are a differentkind of peatland, and to
mitigating the impacts ofwildfire on peatlands, which is
an emerging and very pressingissue.

Yes, so to return to our question, what
does Line think about using peatfor restoration and for
horticulture?

Well, I see peat. It's a bit hard to replace
for now, I think we should notstop ourselves from finding
solution of other growingsubstrate.

But she argues, all of the alternatives
currently on the market havetheir own issues. Wood chips,
for example, are not a greatreplacement.

Productivity when you're using just wood
chips goes down quickly, whenyou don't have at least mix with
some sphagnum.

and rock wool, also used in home insulation,
takes a lot of energy to produceand 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 SriLanka, has serious labor land
use, water use andtransportation issues to consider.

Coconut fiber, it is a good growing substrate,
but it's it's ecologicalfootprint. You really have to
look at your whole life cycleanalysis,

Plus something we weren't even thinking about,
perlite, which is often used insoil mixes, is a mineral which
itself is extracted andprocessed in a very energy
intensive way.

Make sure you don't do mixes with perlite,
because the perlite, if ever itgoes in the environment, it
floats and then amphibian canchoke on that.

Line pointed us to the only peer-reviewed study
that we could find specificallyon our question, which performed
a life cycle analysis of theenvironmental impacts of peat
extracted in Latvia compared toimported rock wool and coconut
coir. Latvia, incidentally, alsoexports about 85% of its peat,

(55:20):
just like Canada. Theresearchers found that the full
life cycle impact of coconutcoir 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 itwould appear that all of the
commercial alternatives to peatfor 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 folksthat we spoke to. This is Drew again.

Drew Elves (56:04):
I bought peat for the first time in my life this
past spring, and it was becausewe were planting bog Labrador
Tea in this small pocket bog,this engineered bog in a Place
of Medicine at UVic. How did itfeel? Really complicated.

And Richard is an interesting case, because in
addition to being a bogrestorationist, he's also a
serious horticulturalist.Besides Burns Bog, his other big
project is studying theproductivity of potatoes under
climate change. And he strikes acautious note on the subject of peat.

I think for certain kinds of horticultural
uses, sphagnum peat is the bestchoice, and that would be things
like rhododendrons, things thatrequire 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 peatand bring back peat species, but
you have very strong constraintson 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 takesaway millennia of organic matter
accumulation and disturbs thatPEAT ecosystem. And on the basis
of what we need to use peat asjust as an organic matter in
soil, I think it's notappropriate, not for large

(57:57):
scale. This is where we need tobe growing all kinds of organic
matter and returning it to theground and into our ecosystems

Like compost, he says. Lots of compost. It's not
a perfect peat substitute forsome 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 toour question, synthesized from
all of these conversations, inthe style of Michael Pollan, use
peat, not too much, and wheneverpossible, use compost instead.

And if you do use some peat, always keep in mind
that what you're using is partof a super organism.

The bog is a quintessential embodiment and
example of what goes on all overthe natural ecosystems of our
Earth. So the hydrosphere, thewater table, the atmosphere, the
source of the rain and theoxygen that they need, the
carbon dioxide that they need,the Geosphere, the physical

(59:06):
substrate upon which theconditions are such that the
sediments, the peat, canaccumulate to support all the
living creatures, the livingcreatures of the raised bog,
which you can draw a circlearound. It's a porous boundary,
but there is a boundary, and youcan see it and understand it as

(59:27):
a physical structure living inequilibrium, a dynamic
equilibrium, that it's shapingfor itself with the hydrosphere,
the atmosphere and theGeosphere. And now we face the
greatest challenge of all —where the social sphere is now
of a scale equal to the otherfour spheres in terms of shaping

(59:49):
the land, but not inequilibrium. And what's the
fundamental lesson from thoseother four spheres? They will
bring us back into equilibrium.And we all have to take
responsibility to speak forthem. To listen to them and
speak for them.

Mendel Skulski (01:00:25):
In this episode, you heard the voices of Robin
Annschild, Richard Hebda, DrewElves, Markus Merkens, Sarah
Howie, and Line Rochefort. Musicby yours truly, Thumbug, and
Sunfish Moon Light.
Special thanks to the WetlandProject, Brady Marks and Mark

(01:00:47):
Timmings for letting us use aclip from their incredible 24
hour recording of a marsh onṮEḴTEḴSEN Saturna island, on
unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory. Andto the organizers of the 2024
SER North American Conference,Tony Ballard specifically, thanks.

(01:01:07):
If you like what we do here, youcan help us do more. Check out
futureecologies.net/support tofind out how. Thanks to all of
our patrons who keep usindependent and ad free, we just
could not do it without you.This episode was produced by

(01:01:28):
Adam Huggins, and me, MendelSkulski, with help from Eden
Zinchik. And as always, you canfind a transcript and citations
on our website,futureecologies.net. That's it
for this one. We'll see you soon.

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FE6.8 - For Peat's Sake

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