Introduction Voiceover: You are listening to Season Six of
Future Ecologies.
Mendel Skulski: Test, test one, two, Bumblebee, tuna, rabble,
rabble, rhubarb, rhubarb, good to see ya. Okay, hi everybody! I
am Mendel.
Adam Huggins: and I'm Adam
Mendel Skulski: and today we're joined in the studio by... a red
legged frog!
...potentially more than one red legged frog.
Adam Huggins: a chorus of randy red legged frogs, recorded with
a hydrophone during their breeding season in February — in
a half frozen wetland that I helped to restore a couple of
years back.
Mendel Skulski: Recorded with a hydrophone, because this species
only vocalizes underwater.
Adam Huggins: Yeah, otherwise, they are pretty darn quiet.
Mendel Skulski: They're adorable!
Adam Huggins: And they make this sound all night long, like up to
14 hours, pretty chatty for a creature few people ever get to
hear
Mendel Skulski: 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 for many years, due largely to the
loss of wetlands throughout their range.
Adam Huggins: Which is one of the reasons why Mendel, you and
I share a hobby in addition to making this show.
Mendel Skulski: Yeah.
Adam Huggins: Which is that we both work to restore wetlands.
Mendel Skulski: Well, that's charitable. You work to restore
wetlands. I dabble in restoring wetland. That is, one little
urban wetland in my neighborhood in Vancouver.
Adam Huggins: Yeah, it's a cute wetland, though.
Mendel Skulski: I love it.
Adam Huggins: And to do that, we have both had the opportunity to
work with the same remarkable woman.
Robin Annschild: What are we going to talk about?
Adam Huggins: Well, the very first thing to do is to
introduce yourself. Who are you?
Robin Annschild: My name is Robin Ann's child, and I design
and build wetland and stream restoration projects.
Mendel Skulski: 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 the actions of up to a half dozen
heavy machine operators — all working together to answer one
important question.
Robin Annschild: what is it that we need to do in that watershed
to restore a healthy relationship between the soil
and the water?
Adam Huggins: And the reason that this question is so
important is that we humans, of the colonial variety, have
seriously disrupted that relationship basically
everywhere that we have settled. Across North America, over 50%
of all wetlands have been lost since the 1700s and that loss
has actually accelerated in recent years, despite no net
loss policies and mitigation efforts. It's even worse in some
areas, like where I'm from, in California, where over 90% of
wetlands have been lost. In British Columbia, that number is
closer to 70%
Mendel Skulski: And when you say lost, you mean...
Adam Huggins: Drained and converted for other uses.
Robin Annschild: We have significant cultural amnesia
about how we've changed these landscapes where we live. In
Europe, where certainly my ancestors came from, there had
already been centuries, if not millennia, of a really
systematic and highly sophisticated wetland drainage.
Mendel Skulski: Because wetland is usually flat, flat land is
good for building things.
Adam Huggins: Wetland is also rich. Rich land is good for
harvesting timber and growing crops
Mendel Skulski: Industrializing societies all over the world
tend to take places that are wet, woody, rich and wild, and
reduce them to a blank slate for all kinds of development.
Robin Annschild: Creating those uniform conditions across
floodplains is kind of the bread and butter of our way of living
on the landscape, simplifying streams so that instead of being
broad and flat and flooding the floodplain, perhaps on an annual
basis, they are now in deep ditches that flow down a
straight line, you know, on the edge of the field. It never
occurred to me that the very ditches that I played in as a
child, I thought that those ditches had streams in them,
really, they were ditches draining wetlands, and that
water that I played in in those ditches was water being drained
out of wetlands.
Adam Huggins: I also have fond memories of playing in ditches
as a kid on ag land that had once been in the flood plain of
the San Joaquin River. The landscape changes that Robin is
describing are ubiquitous.
Robin Annschild: Everything that we have done when logging, road,
building, mining, converting wetlands and floodplains to
agriculture, has been about hastening the passage of the
water through the watershed. And now what we're looking at is,
well, now wait a minute, what if we wanted to invite that water
to take a more leisurely path?
Mendel Skulski: Many of our ancestors were trying to get the
water off the land as fast as possible, and now here we are
thinking the exact opposite. How do we keep the water on the land
for as long as possible?
Robin Annschild: Wetlands, by their very nature, are dynamic
ecosystems. One of the things that I find so exciting about
wetland and stream restoration is that through a single action,
we're achieving multiple benefits.
Mendel Skulski: Like making habitat for endangered frogs,
Adam Huggins: as discussed, and also to recharge aquifers
sequester carbon, create fire breaks and mitigate the
destructive power of floods.
Robin Annschild: 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 the bath to drain, but it drains
pretty quickly. Now, if you were to fill your bathtub with
towels, put the plug in, fill it up, then remove the plug, it's
going to take a lot longer for that bathtub to drain. So when
you have a high rainfall event, instead of all that rain hitting
the soil, the ground, the surfaces of your watershed and
running out quite quickly, the wetland is like that towel in
your bathtub that's absorbing all that water and it's
releasing it more slowly. The cheapest way to prevent flooding
is one to protect the wetlands that exist in your watershed,
and two, to restore drained wetlands in the watershed. So if
anything, we need more wetlands. We need more capacity to absorb
and regulate flow of water and clean surface water and inject
water into the ground.
Adam Huggins: At this point, for me, this is gospel, but once
Robin and the big yellow machines finish building the
wetlands and they leave for greener pastures, then I'm left
with the daunting task of getting native plants
established again on these highly disturbed sites.
Thankfully, my organization grows the plants that we need to
do this, but there's been this thing nagging at me. In order to
grow those plants as part of the soil mix, we typically use a
product that most folks are probably familiar with. It's
called peat.
Mendel Skulski: You know, peat. Fluffy, porous, great for
growing blueberries, tasty in scotch, and famously, comes from
bogs,
Adam Huggins: Bogs, which are, as a matter of fact, wetlands.
Mendel Skulski: Is that a bit circular? That's a bit circular.
Adam Huggins: It's not ideal. And so my colleagues and I have
been asking ourselves this pesky question — whould we really
still be using peat to grow our plants for restoration wetland
restoration?
Mendel Skulski: Seems like a simple question. How hard could
it be to answer?
Adam Huggins: How hard indeed, well, on today's episode, For
Peat's Sake, we tell the story of peatlands in North America
through one remarkable wetland and attempt to answer a
seemingly simple question. But you know what happens to simple
questions around here, right?
Richard Hebda: This sounds like it would be just an interesting
sort of ecological exercise, right? But it became a very,
very big political issue.
Mendel Skulski: Come on in, the water's fine
Introduction Voiceover: Broadcasting from the unceded, shared and
asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and
Tsleil-Waututh, this is Future Ecologies – exploring the shape
of our world through ecology, design, and sound.
Adam Huggins: To get to know peat, you have to get to know
bogs. And so we're going to get all up in the business of the
most charismatic bog that I know. If you were to visit
Vancouver, nestled between the snow capped mountains of the
coast ranges and the Salish Sea. First, you should say hi to
Mendel.
Mendel Skulski: I live here!
Adam Huggins: And then you should head south across the
north and south arms of the Fraser River through the suburb
of Richmond, and you will see heavy industry highways,
subdivisions, farmland, until you hit the largest undeveloped
urban land mass in North America.
Mendel Skulski: And you're thinking undeveloped... urban...
land mass, what does that mean?
Adam Huggins: It's a good question. It basically means, I
think, that it's a massive wild land in a major urban center,
but that it's not a park. There is no public access here.
Mendel Skulski: This undeveloped urban land mass is actually an
enormous, raised bog.
Adam Huggins: A big, beautiful bog by the name of Burns. Burns
Bog. And since it's nearly impossible to access for most
people living here, Burns Bog is actually kind of a big black
box. A big black box that every so often bursts into flames.
News Announcer 1: Fire crews launched a rapid attack from the
air and ground today in the hopes of knocking down a fast
growing brush fire that sparked in Burns Bog along a stretch of
Highway 17 in Delta.
News Announcer 2: With an ecological treasure at risk,
fire crews in Delta, BC, threw everything they had today at the
flames in Burns Bog
News Announcer 3: but it is a difficult fire to fight, and
officials say that it could continue to burn for days.
Man on the Street: Remember the big fire they had in 2005 in the
bog, just hope it doesn't get as big.
Adam Huggins: So what's going on here? Well, we've got our bog,
and now what we need is our bog whisperer.
Mendel Skulski: Sometimes with some stories, we have no idea
who to talk to first. But for this one, all roads lead back to
one man.
Richard Hebda: My name is Richard Hebda, and I am the
curator emeritus at the Royal British Columbia Museum and an
adjunct faculty at the University of Victoria,
historically, in the biology department the School of Earth
and Ocean Sciences and School of Environmental Studies. With
respect to Burns Bog, I was the government scientific expert on
the ecosystem review for Burns Bog, 25 years ago.
Adam Huggins: And I will say, just from my experience, it's
hard to throw a rock around here without hitting one of your
students or one of the students of one of your students.
Richard Hebda: We hope people don't throw rocks at them,
unless it's because they're doing very good things and that
people are scurrilous rogues.
Mendel Skulski: Don't throw rocks at Richard's students,
Adam.
Adam Huggins: I would never! But long before, Richard had an
impressive retinue of students, je was just a graduate student
himself looking for a project.
Richard Hebda: 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't know very much about it.
Adam Huggins: And when a young scientist learns that we don't
know much about a thing, it becomes almost irresistible.
Richard Hebda: This was a particularly interesting,
different sort of creature, as it turns out, because Burns Bog
is a raised bog, and essentially raised bogs make their own
environment and essentially create circumstances by which
plants that are critical in peat accumulation can thrive and
continue. So the whole idea was, well, when and where did it come
from? How did it arise and sort of, how does it work?
Mendel Skulski: These were the questions Richard said about
answering in his PhD.
Richard Hebda: How did it get here? It's kind of simple in one
way, the Fraser River brings in mud, and it filled in the
shallow waters, and in doing so, those lands emerge, like the
back of a whale out of the water, and in the process, as
they emerge slowly, first being intertidal, seawater influence,
freshwater influence. They go through a process of succession
of change from lower intertidal plant communities through middle
to upper intertidal freshwater marshes, as you see in the
Fraser today, and then the organic matter accumulated as
peat.
Mendel Skulski: 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 allow dead plants to fully break down
into soil.
Adam Huggins: Which changes the surface chemistry, and that in
turn, changes the plant communities that can grow there.
First herbaceous plants and then later woody plants.
Richard Hebda: So willows, red osier dogwoods, Pacific
crabapple. And then those plant communities accumulate more
peat, but now it's woody, and woody peat is much more acidic.
Adam Huggins: 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 of colorful sphagnum mosses.
Mendel Skulski: Ta da! That's the birth of a bog.
Richard Hebda: And once the sphagnum mosses begin to
establish, they have all sorts of amazing tricks of organic
matter chemistry, of water regulation, of being able to
grow in situations where there's very low nutrients because the
peat's accumulating above the water table. And then they
essentially convert this wetland into their own home, in which
peat mosses thrive and dominate. And once you get into that, they
just keep adding more peat and more peat, as their bodies don't
break down, but as they die and only partially decompose and
more sphagnum mosses grow.
Adam Huggins: And over the course of about 4000 years,
those remarkable non vascular plants, the sphagnum peat
mosses, have essentially constructed a dome out of their
own dead bodies, with a shallow living fringe on the surface.
Mendel Skulski: And because it's higher in the middle than at the
edges, like a dome, it becomes... get ready for this,
ombrotrophic.
Adam Huggins: Ombrotrophic.
Richard Hebda: Ombrotrophic basically means rain fed. The
nutrients that enter the bog that support the growth of all
the plants and all the decomposers, and then all the
animals that depend on them come from the sky, and that's because
the bog itself is actually above the water table, so no water
flows into it, because it's higher than everything else, and
it drains radially outward from the center of the bog or —
sometimes they have ridges outward — from the ridges to the
margin. So the only source of water and the only source of
nutrients is rainwater.
Adam Huggins: But that's okay, because the sphagnum peat likes
low nutrient conditions. And the other plants that grow there,
they have unique adaptations to live in this environment. For
example, they learn to hunt insects.
Richard Hebda: Carnivorous plants are just amazing, because
they're essentially an inside out stomach, they have the
digestive juices on the outside, in the case of Sundews, on these
little glands with little glistening drops of fluid on the
ends of the glands, and those are your digestive juices. So
imagine the stomach is outside dissolves insects that fall on
it.
Mendel Skulski: I love Sundews. What the hell... pitcher plants!
Adam Huggins: I know we could have made the entire episode
about them, but we're not going to do that.
Richard Hebda: So that's how these plants get their nitrogen
and the other nutrients that they need, because they don't
get them out of the ground very much, because there aren't very
much in an ombrotrophic bog.
Adam Huggins: And these unusual plants support an abundance of
wildlife.
Richard Hebda: In my days, you know, almost 50 years ago, there
were bears and deer and all kinds 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 sudden erupt. A bunch of them erupt! —
Like, oh my god, there's a black bear sitting in there, you know,
10 feet away from eating berries. It doesn't even know
I'm there —
Then you see these majestic cranes, taking off as they do —
because you don't make any noise when you walk on sphagnum. It's
cushioned.
It's being like, returned to the bosom of the bog. You are part
of it, encased in part in it, cushioned by it, and you
appreciate it in a way that's just exceptional. Because you
hear the insects. You smell the smell of the bark, Labrador tea.
You hear the birds like the Sandhill cranes, or the
bumblebees flying around pollinating the cranberry
flowers, these gorgeous, little pinkish cranberry flowers. You
feel it, you smell it, you hear it, it's all there, and you feel
as if you're part of it.
Mendel Skulski: These are all reasons why, for Richard, bogs
are more than just ecosystems.
Richard Hebda: The biosphere converts part of the Earth into
essentially a superorganism. As we in our own bodies have
systems that work together and feed each other and support each
other, this macro organism, raised bog does exactly that
same thing, the multitude of species and multitude of
processes on a huge landscape, that's why I like bogs.
Mendel Skulski: And Burns Bog is just one very southerly
representative of the bogosphere, if you will, a
patchwork that blankets the northern parts of the entire
world.
Adam Huggins: Burns Bog is also representative of many bogs for
another reason entirely. It has a long and complicated history
of people trying to drain, farm, and fill it, because when
European settlers arrived, they simply weren't content to let
sleeping bogs lie.
Richard Hebda: Settler history goes back to basically people
trying to farm the land. They dug these ditches going into the
bog, and they were visible when I was there, or that were
invisible sometimes and you would just fall up to your waist
in peat and water
Adam Huggins: Kilometers and kilometers of ditches, just like
those that we discussed with Robin earlier. Speaking of
which, Mendel, you want to know how you can get a bog named
after you?
Mendel Skulski: Ooh, how?
Adam Huggins: Try, mostly unsuccessfully, to get rid of
it. Burns Bog is named after one Dominic Burns, a rancher who did
his damnedest to drain it.
Richard Hebda: And that sort of went on for a while, until the
Second World War.
Mendel Skulski: The Second World War, of course, interrupted all
sorts of settler agricultural activity and also created whole
new economies, including the use of peat moss for military first
aid.
Adam Huggins: Antiseptic and absorbent.
Richard Hebda: There was quite a bit of extraction at that time
for basically military purposes, but eventually that became
converted to the extraction of peat moss for horticultural
purposes. And when that came around, then there was this huge
extraction of peat from the middle of the bog. It's organic
material. The peat, predominantly sphagnum peat, was
removed so the heart of the bog was taken out. But like my bald
head, there was active living peat communities all around the
edges, and they essentially sustained the bog, even though
the middle had been taken out, and maintained the water
chemistry in the middle, so that the sphagnum mosses came back,
essentially in a giant pool, or a giant reticulate network with
ridges of peat that remained in open pools.
Mendel Skulski: So I guess you can actually teach an old bog
new tricks.
Adam Huggins: Yes. But meanwhile, more mischief was
Richard Hebda: At the same time as the inside of the bog was
afoot.
being exploited, dug out, people were nibbling on the edges,
converting — conversion irreversible.
Mendel Skulski: All around the bog, chunks of the edges were
being developed.
Adam Huggins: There was the railroad construction, and then
the road road construction,
Richard Hebda: A highway went through it, the one that the
Alex Fraser Bridge, which, my opinion, never should have been
allowed to be built the way it was, and the environmental
assessment for it was utterly inadequate.
Mendel Skulski: And then there are the cranberry farms.
Richard Hebda: Some of it was converted to cranberry fields
because cranberry fields have turned out to be very lucrative.
Adam Huggins: and we'd be remiss not to mention the gigantic
landfill for the City of Vancouver.
Richard Hebda: One of my study sites is now under the dump.
Mendel Skulski: Meanwhile, peat extraction technology was
advancing.
Richard Hebda: Later on, when they got very sophisticated,
they would just cut the trees off, and scrape it off and then
suck the peat through giant vacuum cleaners.
Adam Huggins: Incidentally, cranberries are also harvested
by giant vacuum tubes. I have seen it myself.
Richard Hebda: More sucking. There's a lot of sucking
involved,
Adam Huggins: And all of this draining and scraping and
dumping and sucking kept eating away at the edges of the bog,
but no one seemed to put it much of a fuss. Parts of it would
periodically burst into flames. But like so what?
Richard Hebda: It's just a bog. Who cares? Bog, three letter
word for bad things. Because, of course, everybody thinks they're
horrible places. They don't value them and they don't even
understand them. They just throw more garbage on top of them.
Adam Huggins: And some major industrial development proposals
were floated for the bog.
Richard Hebda: At that time, which was, I think, in the mid
80s. The idea was they would dig the bog out and fill it with
sand from dredging of the Fraser River, and then build a huge
megaport.
Adam Huggins: That didn't pan out. And so then a 2500 acre
industrial development was proposed, and then a horse
racing track, and then the Pacific National Exhibition, an
amusement park, basically.
Mendel Skulski: But by the 90s, some folks were beginning to
recognize the value of the bog and just how threatened the
remainder was.
Richard Hebda: There was a very strong community group with very
skilled and capable people and knowledge who could make the
case that this place shouldn't be filled and turned and burned
and whatever else.
Adam Huggins: Finally, following years of public pressure and
failed development proposals, the province of BC agreed to
undertake an ecosystem review of Burns Bog, and they asked
Richard to lead it, which initially he was hesitant to do.
Richard Hebda: But the bog had spoken to me a long time before,
and I thought, okay, well, I owe it to this, these creatures,
this amazing place, which gave me my future, which gave me my
job, and has sustained me, has supported my curiosity. I am at
one with the bog, and therefore, if I am at one with the bog,
then I must be the bog. That's the way I looked at it. So I
said, I'll do it.
Mendel Skulski: And to make a long story short, he and a
handful of other scientists did it! In just eight months.
Richard Hebda: You know, I pulled it off. I did it exactly
as it should be done in open public forum, with the
scientists reporting — people like Ian McTaggart Cowan, who
was just unbelievably powerful when he came. Now, Ian McTaggart
was the zoologist of British Columbia, a tall man with a
powerful voice, and he just said that red mouse — the red back
vole — that red mouse, the last time it was seen in British
Columbia was in the UBC endowment lands. And I and my
wife saw it in the late 1940s.
Adam Huggins: When the report was finally published, the
conclusion was stunning. It stated that the vast majority of
the remaining bog area, over 2000 hectares, would be required
to preserve its viability and sustain its processes. And when
it came down to it, Richard was called upon once again, this
time by the lawyers, to actually delineate the area that would
ultimately be protected, which was a real crisis for him as a
scientist.
Richard Hebda: At that point, I truly understood that you cannot
be an objective, dispassionate scientist. You cannot be one.
Just as we face the future of climate change, we have to make
the choices and the decisions and not leave for the government
to make or for an industry to make. We have to work to make
the best decisions that are possible, and so I did it. So I
drew the lines.
Mendel Skulski: And from those lines would eventually emerge
the Burns Bog Ecological Conservancy Area, managed by
Metro Vancouver and the City of Delta to maintain it in
perturity. The bog had been drained and sucked, battered and
bruised, but now it had a fighting chance at life.
Richard Hebda: You know, why would you fill it and kill it?
Why would you not think of it as one of the most biologically
spiritual creations on the Planet Earth.
Adam Huggins: The fate of one of the most biologically spiritual
creations on Planet Earth, and I promise eventually an answer to
our question about peat. That's after the break. Now, if you
excuse me, I have to go see a man about a bog.
Mendel Skulski: Hey, if you're enjoying the show, check out
futureecologies.net/support — thanks!
Adam Huggins: Driving down this old gravel road. On my left,
Burns Bog. On the right, cranberry farm, actively
harvesting... group of men out in waders, water up to their
waists, with a giant vacuum hose sucking the cranberries that are
floating off of the water surface and into a giant bin.
Wild. And another gate. I think this is the third gate. Gates
everywhere.
Mendel Skulski: Wait, I didn't get to go along for this ride. I
feel so left out. I thought you said members of the public
couldn't actually get in to Burns Bog.
Adam Huggins: I mean, they generally can't, except for a
tiny piece called The Delta Nature Reserve, which is nice to
visit if you can. But I am no ordinary member of the general
public, Mendel. I have special clearance — from a friend who
got me inside.
I don't think I have ever eaten a fresh cranberry right off a
bush.
Drew Elves: Not a cultivar.
Adam Huggins: This is native?
Drew Elves: Yeah.
Adam Huggins: that is delicious
Drew Elves: Tart though, huh?
Adam Huggins: Oh, but I love things that are sour. Oh my god.
Drew Elves: That's good.
Adam Huggins: I love sour things.
Mendel Skulski: Ah, yes. You were there to see your good
friend... the cranberry.
Adam Huggins: Of course, and my colleague, Drew Elves.
Drew Elves: I teach at University of Victoria in the
Restoration of Natural Systems program and in the School of
Environmental Studies. I am ecohydrologist by training, a
peatland ecohydrologist with a focus on sphagnum mosses.
Adam Huggins: So I'm standing out there in the bog with Drew,
bobbing up and down on this thick mat of peat in the sun.
Mendel Skulski: No, I'm not jealous. Thanks for asking.
Adam Huggins: And we're looking at this wild variety of colors
all around us.
Drew Elves: 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.
Adam Huggins: And these colors we're seeing, they tend to
correspond to different species of sphagnum moss.
Drew Elves: There are 12 documented species
Adam Huggins: Growing in slightly different parts of the
mossy landscape, the hummocks and the hollows.
Drew Elves: The ones that make the hummocks, they are slow
growing and they're recalcitrant, meaning they don't
readily decompose. These recalcitrant hummock species are
really resilient. They can take up water and stay moist much
further into the drought period than hollow forming species. The
Hollow forming species, though, they'll grow really fast, but
then they don't have the specific phenolics, meaning they
don't have those chemicals that impede breaking down. They're
not robust in that way. They decay.
Mendel Skulski: Tag yourself. I'm the not-so-resilient fast
grower.
Adam Huggins: I'm recalcitrant, slow and stubborn all the way.
Drew Elves: So it's two very different traits. One's a hare,
one's a tortoise. The hare are the hollow growing species.
They'll grow really fast during a time when moisture conditions
are right and temperature conditions are right, and
they'll grow really quickly. So because of that, they are
lateral growers. Whereas these hummocks, they slowly build up.
They have this like apical bud, meaning a topmost layer where
they keep growing from. And so they just keep growing higher
and higher.
Adam Huggins: So it's a beautiful, diverse bog scene.
But at the same time, this is a part of the bog that was
harvested and prepared to be a cranberry farm before it was
abandoned. It's still recovering from that disturbance.
Drew Elves: The hydrology has been brought back to within
historical bounds, and that means that peat forming
processes have been reinitiated
Adam Huggins: and Drew is there studying that recovery.
Mendel Skulski: How is he doing that?
Adam Huggins: With light and a very, very nice camera pointed
directly at the ground.
Drew Elves: We can take the properties of light. The sun
comes in, and it encodes a lot of information, especially for
plants and photosynthetic organisms, right? What they use,
what they take. Meaning, what part of the sun's light that
they use at different times of year, and then what they reflect
back can tell us a lot about what's happening underneath.
Adam Huggins: And just as a very basic example, when sphagnum
moss gets dry, it tends to turn white, and that increases the
albedo of the bog, helping reflect sunlight and cool things
down a bit. That's something that we can see with just our
eyeballs, but Drew is looking at what we can learn with better
equipment than what nature gave any of us.
Drew Elves: The affordances we have in terms of our vision,
they're not entirely objective, right? I often tell students,
you know, remember that dress?
Adam Huggins: You know the dress, right Mendel?
Mendel Skulski: Ah the dress, of course I do. It's obviously
black and blue.
Adam Huggins: Oh no, it's clearly white and gold.
What color was the dress?
Drew Elves: I don't answer that question, because I think as a
lot of people who have a significant other, it may be led
to a bit of acrimony, and so I'm not going to say what color the
dress was.
Adam Huggins: So instead of relying on his merely human
vision, Drew is using the NDVI.
Mendel Skulski: The what?
Drew Elves: The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. So
that's where it goes from being the dress and being subjective,
to being something that's standardized and reproducible
and decipherable.
Adam Huggins: And I brought us here just to say that this is a
lot of what goes on in the black box of Burns Bog. It's basic
science — developing techniques to better understand all bogs,
by studying the recovery of this bog.
Mendel Skulski: That's so cool. And you know, how are things
going?
Adam Huggins: Well, we did mention that the bog
occasionally erupts into flames, right?
Mendel Skulski: We did.
Adam Huggins: And that's because those kilometers and kilometers
of ditches and roads crisscrossing the bog, many of
them are still actively draining it, drying it out. And a big
pile of dead dry peat is a magnet for wildfire. This is the
primary reason why the public isn't allowed in the bog.
Mendel Skulski: Sure that makes sense.
Adam Huggins: But in addition to researchers, there are also
folks in here looking after the bog, and so I caught up with a
couple of them on a group field trip on a freezing cold, rainy
day. You're actually going to hear the raindrops hitting the
microphone, and I just want you to know that every single one of
them felt like frostbite on my hand.
Mendel Skulski: Thank you for your service.
Adam Huggins: It is also on the flight path of the Vancouver
International Airport, and so there was so much plane noise.
Markus Merkens: I'm Markus Merkens. I'm a Regional Parks
Biologist, and I've been working in the bog for the past 15 and a
half years, trying to take care of the bog the best I can. I'm
gonna pass over to Sarah here.
Sarah Howie: Sarah Howie, Climate Action and Environment
Manager with the City of Delta. I've been working in the bog
since the year 2000, and Markus and I co-manage the bog.
Adam Huggins: And without much further ado, they ushered us
into the bog.
Sarah Howie: If you see what looks like a mud puddle, don't
step there, because it's basically a sinkhole and you
will fall in. That would be a fun experience for you, but we'd
rather you not have to deal with that, so you can just step on
the vegetation instead. It'll keep you afloat.
Markus Merkens: Bogs are incredibly complex ecosystems,
and to quote a professor of mine at UBC, bog ecology isn't rocket
science, it's way more complicated than that.
Adam Huggins: Markus told us that the peat in Burns Bog is
five to eight meters thick, and to demonstrate, he pulled out a
Russian peat auger.
Markus Merkens: So I've just taken a core sample of the bog.
This peat is about a meter and a half below ground. This was
sequestered at a time when the Vikings were exploring the
eastern coast of North America. That's how long ago this was
laid down.
Bog tour participant: Welcome back to the sunlight.
Adam Huggins: So Mendel, as you know, normally, bogs are too wet
for anything but a few stunted trees to grow. But where we were
walking, there were hundreds of dead burnt out tree trunks, and
beneath them, thousands of stout little pine saplings.
Markus Merkens: If you look around us, you can see these
burnt out trees. These are the trees that release the cones and
seeds post fire. And if you look behind me, you can see the
lodgepole pine stand very dense. If you have six trees in a
square meter or square yard, you have 60,000 stems per hectare.
So that's, that's a huge number of trees.
Mendel Skulski: Oh, my God. What is it with us and this season
and cataloging the density of stands of trees?
Adam Huggins: I have no idea. Honestly, it is a through line.
There were a lot of pines there.
Mendel Skulski: Yeah, what's up with that?
Adam Huggins: Well, when you start draining a bog, you make
it a lot easier for trees to grow, 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.
Markus Merkens: Trees are hydrological pumps. Pine is a
weaker pump than other species, but in the aggregate, 60,000
stems per hectare push a lot of water out of the bog.
Adam Huggins: They suck water out of the ground.
Mendel Skulski: More sucking
Adam Huggins: And then things get even drier still, and then
they catch fire and burn. And then the seed cones open, and
1000s more trees start to grow, and the vicious cycle continues.
Mendel Skulski: So what are they doing about it?
Markus Merkens: We physically remove by hand trees, now over a
19 hectare, or almost 50 acre section of the burn that
happened, which was 37 hectares within the conservancy area. So
very labor intensive.
Adam Huggins: They rip up and pile the trees. I pulled a few
myself just to be helpful. You know?
Oh, that is delicious.
Mendel Skulski: ...Are you eating cranberries again?
Adam Huggins: Possibly, but more to the point, the trees are only
one part of the problem. Those old settler drainage ditches are
still doing their thing.
Mendel Skulski: Ouch.
Adam Huggins: And as the bog is drying out, especially at the
edges, the peat is subsiding away as it's being oxidized,
with all of that carbon going back up into the atmosphere.
Mendel Skulski: Whoa. It's kind of like the bog is still
burning, only on a slower time scale.
Adam Huggins: Yeah, you could definitely look at it that way.
And this edge of the bog, also known as the lagg, is where
organic peat meets the surrounding mineral soils. As
Richard told me, it's really important.
Richard Hebda: You can't have a bog without a lagg. Essentially,
the lagg is kind of like that transitional skin on your body.
If you don't have that, if you just cut into the tissue and
expose the raw flesh, you die, you scar right. The more cuts,
the more it's bleeding, the less chance it has to survive. And so
we need to stop the loss of water, in this case, the life
blood of the bog.
Adam Huggins: Fortunately, Sarah Howie is an expert on laggs and
how to revive them.
Sarah Howie: So Markus has been talking about his big tree
seedling removal project. My project that I've been working
on for 20 years is restoring the water table in the bog. So
there's about 100 kilometers of drainage ditches that were put
into the bog during the peat harvesting days. So we're trying
to reverse that and stop those ditches from draining. So we've
got these dams, about 479 dams, and almost all of them were
built by hand, by people carrying materials and shovels
into the bog, digging borrow pits of peat, filling the dams
with peat, and actually using Coroplast boards like these
ones, recycled election signs.
Mendel Skulski: Election signs?
Adam Huggins: Yes, even bog restoration is political,
Mendel.
Unknown: After we would have a local election, they were really
just going to dispose of them anyway, and so, yeah, they're
buried. They're basically like sheet piling, and we use them to
block the flow of water in the ditches and then cover it with
peat so that the plastic is not exposed. It's buried basically
forever in the peat.
Adam Huggins: Sarah says this works so well because the signs
are really light and pretty tough, you can carry them into
the bog on your back and create permanent ditch blocks.
Sarah Howie: And because we have to, you know, walk for
kilometers sometimes to get to the places where we're working,
that's the best material. And we actually ran this by our
scientific advisory panel before deciding 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
contributing chemicals or nutrients. I mean, I don't love
the idea of putting plastic out there, but it's buried, and it's
not damaging the bog in any way.
Mendel Skulski: I guess sometimes practicality comes
before romance. Are they also using, like, big heavy machinery
excavators, like Robin?
Adam Huggins: At times, yeah.
Sarah Howie: It's actually the same excavator operator that was
working for the peat harvesting folks, and now he's helping us
with restoration.
Adam Huggins: Sarah told me that they've basically blocked off
most of the ditches in the center of the bog, and so she's
turned her attention to the lagg.
Sarah Howie: The next goal is to restore the edge, and that's
probably going to take me to the end of my career.
Adam Huggins: But that's all right, because, as Richard told
us, they have a 100 year restoration plan in place for
the bog, and we're just a quarter of the way into it.
Richard Hebda: I think that in the 25 years that we've been
doing this work and gathering more knowledge, it's as well and
better than I had hoped for.
Adam Huggins: You can see that, especially in the middle of the
bog.
Sarah Howie: The water levels are generally where they're
supposed to be, within about half a meter of the surface,
Adam Huggins: But we are not out of the woods yet, not by a long
shot.
Sarah Howie: The other issue that we're dealing with is
climate change. So we've re-wetted the bog, we've raised
the water table, and now we're getting drier summers, and so
it's much hotter, and the water table is dropping.
Adam Huggins: And so Sarah will continue blocking ditches, and
Markus will keep removing trees, and Drew and other researchers
will continue to study the system, and hopefully, in the
meantime, the bog doesn't go up in smoke.
Mendel Skulski: So it's great to hear that some level of recovery
is possible, right? At least on a 100 year time scale. But it's
clear that harvesting the peat from this bog, along with other
disturbances, has had a pretty profoundly negative impact.
Adam Huggins: Which brings us back to the question that we
started with. Can we justify harvesting peat from bogs so
that we can use it to grow plants, say, native plants for
restoration?
Mendel Skulski: To answer that question, we needed to talk to
one more person.
Line Rochefort: My name is Line Rochefort, Professor in
Restoration Ecology, holding a chair in Ecosystem Restoration,
and also I'm the North American national expert at the RAMSAR
Convention.
Mendel Skulski: Line is widely recognized as Canada's leading
expert on peatland restoration
Line Rochefort: Canada, in terms of managing, caring for
peatlands has a world responsibility, because we have
a lot of carbon stock in our peatland, 34% of all the
peatlands in the world are in Canada.
Mendel Skulski: followed by 33% in Russia. So between our two
circumboreal nations, there are two thirds of the world's
peatland, which is a lot of carbon. Now Lynn is quick to
point out that peatland destruction is a serious issue
at a global and a regional level, especially in the more
developed parts of southern Canada.
Adam Huggins: Like the Fraser Valley, where Burns Bog is
located.
Mendel Skulski: But overall, she says of Canada's total 128
million hectares of peatland, only a tiny fraction have been
directly impacted, estimated at less than 2%
Adam Huggins: These and the numbers that follow are from the
2022 UN Global Peatlands Assessment, by the way.
Line Rochefort: So in Canada, if we go by order of impacts
through time, we have drained for agriculture, 1.3 million
hectares of peatland.
Adam Huggins: About and after agriculture, the next biggest
impact to Canadian peatlands is actually the fossil fuel
industry.
Line Rochefort: Second in line is the oil and gas and we don't
have national statistics about all our impacts, but we do know
that it's about 400,000 hectare. So, it's an order of magnitude
less than what happened with agriculture.
Mendel Skulski: And after fossil energy, next comes hydro
electricity.
Line Rochefort: Hydro dams. So a lot of flooding in peatland rich
area, be it in Quebec, Newfoundland, Manitoba,
Mendel Skulski: And then it's good old fashioned drainage.
Line Rochefort: Some drainage for forestry, for urban
expansion, road development.
Adam Huggins: And finally, we have the subject of our inquiry,
peat extraction for peat extraction's sake.
Line Rochefort: One of the least is using it for peat. Since
1931, about 38,000 hectare.
Adam Huggins: In other words, the area of peatland that has
been impacted by harvesting for horticultural uses is absolutely
dwarfed by the area impacted by agriculture, oil and gas and
other forms of development, all of which has only impacted a
small portion of the bogs in Canada. But even so, when you go
to the store and buy a bag of peat, chances are good that it's
coming from right here in Canada.
Line Rochefort: Canada is one of the biggest peat producer in the
world. The use of peat in Canada is really in horticulture. 85%
is sold in the United States. It's for the professional grower
in greenhouses, cucumber, green pepper, tomatoes and the
mushroom industry.
Adam Huggins: So for Canada, peat is largely an export
industry. Historically, some of that peat was harvested from
bogs in Western Canada, like Burns Bog, especially after the
Second World War. But for the most part today, that peat is
coming from the vast boreal peatlands of central and eastern
Canada. And before we continue, it's important to mention that
much of Line's research has been funded and undertaken in
partnership with the horticultural peat industry —
something that she is proud of.
Line Rochefort: What I would say is that it's an industry that
really care about managing the resource, because it's really
their living and usually they are family based, type of
companies also the been investing since the end of the
80s to develop peatland restoration measure or to manage
better. I have always been a big believer that it's good that
more biologists, environmentalists and on that
should work with industry to find solutions.
Mendel Skulski: So Line is sympathetic to her industry
partners. And to be fair, they've come a long way
together.
Line Rochefort: Before I started, nobody knew how to
manipulate masses on a large scale with machines without
killing everything.
Adam Huggins: To address this, Line and her colleagues in the
Peatland Ecology Research Group eventually developed what has
become known internationally as the Moss Layer Transfer
Technique. To make a long story short.
Line Rochefort: Uh... it's very technical, but in peatlands, we
have two hydrological layer one is called the acrotelm, the
other one the catatelm.
Adam Huggins: The catatelm is the thick mass of dead peat
that's typically below the water table and storing most of the
carbon.
Mendel Skulski: And the acrotelm is the thinner layer composed
largely of living peat on the surface, kind of like your skin.
No wait, kind of the opposite of your skin. Kind of like a tree.
Wait, no, kind of the opposite of a tree. It's pretty
different.
Adam Huggins: Yeah. So it's the first 10 or so centimeters of
the acrotelm
Line Rochefort: Where there's all the propagules — spores,
seeds.
Adam Huggins: Everything you need to catalyze the recovery of
a bog that's been harvested.
Line Rochefort: Once you have a peatland that's been drained for
maybe 20 years, we need, usually to reprofile to a fresh peat,
because we really need to have a good contact by capillary rise
of the water.
Adam Huggins: 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 on top of the restoration site.
Line Rochefort: So once we spread all our material, then we
need to protect it with a straw mulch. Usually that we use, it's
to create a microclimate, because the mosses have no
roots.
Mendel Skulski: And in addition to straw mulch, they add
phosphorus.
Line Rochefort: Because phosphorus is good. It's not
necessarily there to help the sphagnum, but it's another moss
that we need a nursing plan. We call it polytrichum.
Adam Huggins: Go into any bog, and amidst all that fluffy
sphagnum, you're likely to see other mosses, including the
pointier polytrichum, looking like a miniature palm tree. Or
as Line calls them, little aloes.
Line Rochefort: Or pineapple, because they have all these
spikes along the edge.
Adam Huggins: I found this aspect particularly fascinating.
Line and her colleagues have discovered that a little bit of
phosphorus really helps polytrichum to establish in the
transplanted sphagnum. And this polytrichum is much taller than
the sphagnum
Line Rochefort: So that's why, if you get this polytrichum,
nice carpet to establish, then it binds the peat and also
creates a nice microclimate.
Adam Huggins: And that miniature forest of polytrichum protects
the sphagnum moss from destruction through frost
heaving, which otherwise can be really damaging in northern
climates.
Line Rochefort: The sphagnum survive there, like, you know,
in the shadow, but they take over because they are a
co-engineer type of organism.
Mendel Skulski: That's so cool.
Adam Huggins: Yep. And then the last step, you re-wet the bog.
Line Rochefort: You have to re wet. You have to block the
ditches.
Mendel Skulski: And that's about it. Presto. There's a functional
bog, once again.
Line Rochefort: Yes, we do get the bog at the end of it, we
have a rate of 75% success.
Adam Huggins: Based on Line's monitoring work. It takes about
nine to 12 years for the bog to once again become a carbon sink,
and about 20 years to fully offset the carbon cost of the
restoration.
Line Rochefort: The biodiversity in terms of vascular plants, we
know that after five years, we're getting 82% back. What
does not come back easily is like orchids, but you know, they
have a complicated reproductive cycle.
Mendel Skulski: So it's pretty good, but not perfect.
Adam Huggins: Restoration just never is. But as far as Line is
concerned,
Line Rochefort: in Canada, sphagnum-dominated peatland
restoration is close to a solved problem.
Adam Huggins: She's now turned her attention to the restoration
of fens, which are a different kind of peatland, and to
mitigating the impacts of wildfire on peatlands, which is
an emerging and very pressing issue.
Mendel Skulski: Yes, so to return to our question, what
does Line think about using peat for restoration and for
horticulture?
Line Rochefort: Well, I see peat. It's a bit hard to replace
for now, I think we should not stop ourselves from finding
solution of other growing substrate.
Adam Huggins: But she argues, all of the alternatives
currently on the market have their own issues. Wood chips,
for example, are not a great replacement.
Line Rochefort: Productivity when you're using just wood
chips goes down quickly, when you don't have at least mix with
some sphagnum.
Mendel Skulski: and rock wool, also used in home insulation,
takes a lot of energy to produce and isn't biodegradable.
Line Rochefort: Piles of things that goes in the dump, do not decompose.
Adam Huggins: Coconut coir, while it is a byproduct of palm
plantations in India and Sri Lanka, has serious labor land
use, water use and transportation issues to consider.
Line Rochefort: Coconut fiber, it is a good growing substrate,
but it's it's ecological footprint. You really have to
look at your whole life cycle analysis,
Mendel Skulski: Plus something we weren't even thinking about,
perlite, which is often used in soil mixes, is a mineral which
itself is extracted and processed in a very energy
intensive way.
Line Rochefort: Make sure you don't do mixes with perlite,
because the perlite, if ever it goes in the environment, it
floats and then amphibian can choke on that.
Adam Huggins: Line pointed us to the only peer-reviewed study
that we could find specifically on our question, which performed
a life cycle analysis of the environmental impacts of peat
extracted in Latvia compared to imported rock wool and coconut
coir. Latvia, incidentally, also exports about 85% of its peat,
just like Canada. The researchers found that the full
life cycle impact of coconut coir was seven times higher than
that of peat. Rockwool, significantly better than coir,
but still higher impact than peat.
Mendel Skulski: 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 it would appear that all of the
commercial alternatives to peat for horticultural use are at
best, flawed and at worst, worse.
Adam Huggins: Still, does that mean that we should be using it?
We asked some of the other folks that we spoke to. This is Drew again.
Drew Elves: I bought peat for the first time in my life this
past spring, and it was because we were planting bog Labrador
Tea in this small pocket bog, this engineered bog in a Place
of Medicine at UVic. How did it feel? Really complicated.
Mendel Skulski: And Richard is an interesting case, because in
addition to being a bog restorationist, he's also a
serious horticulturalist. Besides Burns Bog, his other big
project is studying the productivity of potatoes under
climate change. And he strikes a cautious note on the subject of peat.
Richard Hebda: I think for certain kinds of horticultural
uses, sphagnum peat is the best choice, and that would be things
like rhododendrons, things that require acidic environments.
Adam Huggins: As for the alternatives, he acknowledged
that there are lifecycle issues, but he turned the question on
its head a bit.
Richard Hebda: What's renewable on a short time scale? Coconut
husks, not sphagnum moss on peatlands.
Adam Huggins: And while he recognized the work of Line and
others in this area
Richard Hebda: Dr Rochefort has shown, yes, you can recover
small scale excavations of peat and bring back peat species, but
you have very strong constraints on what you can do.
Adam Huggins: He also argues that what is lost is more than
just carbon dioxide.
Richard Hebda: the consequences on large areas of feed land
being harvested for peat takes away millennia of organic matter
accumulation and disturbs that PEAT ecosystem. And on the basis
of what we need to use peat as just as an organic matter in
soil, I think it's not appropriate, not for large
scale. This is where we need to be growing all kinds of organic
matter and returning it to the ground and into our ecosystems
Adam Huggins: Like compost, he says. Lots of compost. It's not
a perfect peat substitute for some uses, but for others, it
definitely gets the job done.
Mendel Skulski: Yeah, I think we can all get behind that. So to
finally summarize the answer to our question, synthesized from
all of these conversations, in the style of Michael Pollan, use
peat, not too much, and whenever possible, use compost instead.
Adam Huggins: And if you do use some peat, always keep in mind
that what you're using is part of a super organism.
Richard Hebda: The bog is a quintessential embodiment and
example of what goes on all over the natural ecosystems of our
Earth. So the hydrosphere, the water table, the atmosphere, the
source of the rain and the oxygen that they need, the
carbon dioxide that they need, the Geosphere, the physical
substrate upon which the conditions are such that the
sediments, the peat, can accumulate to support all the
living creatures, the living creatures of the raised bog,
which you can draw a circle around. It's a porous boundary,
but there is a boundary, and you can see it and understand it as
a physical structure living in equilibrium, a dynamic
equilibrium, that it's shaping for itself with the hydrosphere,
the atmosphere and the Geosphere. And now we face the
greatest challenge of all — where the social sphere is now
of a scale equal to the other four spheres in terms of shaping
the land, but not in equilibrium. And what's the
fundamental lesson from those other four spheres? They will
bring us back into equilibrium. And we all have to take
responsibility to speak for them. To listen to them and
speak for them.
Mendel Skulski: In this episode, you heard the voices of Robin
Annschild, Richard Hebda, Drew Elves, Markus Merkens, Sarah
Howie, and Line Rochefort. Music by yours truly, Thumbug, and
Sunfish Moon Light.
Special thanks to the Wetland Project, Brady Marks and Mark
Timmings for letting us use a clip from their incredible 24
hour recording of a marsh on ṮEḴTEḴSEN Saturna island, on
unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory. And to the organizers of the 2024
SER North American Conference, Tony Ballard specifically, thanks.
If you like what we do here, you can help us do more. Check out
futureecologies.net/support to find out how. Thanks to all of
our patrons who keep us independent and ad free, we just
could not do it without you. This episode was produced by
Adam Huggins, and me, Mendel Skulski, with help from Eden
Zinchik. And as always, you can find a transcript and citations
on our website, futureecologies.net. That's it
for this one. We'll see you soon.