This week I handed my newsletter to the one and only Queen of Peat, ecologist Merritt Turetsky. Her big idea? Stop treating wet land as a problem to drain. Start seeing it as something to work with instead!

🌿 Good news: A new approach called paludiculture flips the script: instead of draining peatlands to farm them, it keeps them wet and grows what actually thrives there: cattails for insulation, sago for food, and much more.

🔥 Not-so-good news: When a peatland is drained, it turns from a carbon vault to carbon source. A single drained bog the size of Manhattan can release as much CO₂ as burning a few hundred thousand pounds of coal a day.

🐸 What you can do: Become a bog champion: visit a local wetland and learn what lives there, ask your garden store to drop peat-based compost, and back the groups working to protect peatlands! For more, check out Merritt's new book, Bogland.

This week, plan a visit to a wetland near you. We can’t protect what we don’t know and appreciate, and action begins the moment we start to care 💚

https://www.talkingclimate.ca/p/whats-hiding-beneath-the-bog