News and Insights
- Coaxing Water to Stay on the Land Across N.C. Peatlands
New York Times
“In its natural state, the soggy, spongy soil known as peat stores exceptional amounts of planet-warming carbon. Peatlands cover only about 3 percent of land on Earth, but they sock away twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests put together. They also offer protection from wildfires, floods and drought, and support rare species.
“But decades ago, in peatlands across North Carolina, people dug ditches to drain the waterlogged earth, often to fell old-growth trees or plant new ones for timber.
“As peat dries, its virtues turn upside down. The soil itself becomes highly flammable. Even without burning, drained peat starts to emit the carbon it once stored, converting a climate solution into a climate problem.”
- Wetland are disappearing
The Convention on Wetlands reports that nearly one-fifth of the world’s wetlands have been lost in the last 50 years. It’s easy to shrug off abstract statistics like that, but what does that loss mean for life on Earth, including ours?
These ecosystems feed human and animal populations, support the water cycle, and reduce the impacts of climate change by buffering extreme weather. But agricultural expansion, urbanization, water drainage, pollution, invasive species, and infrastructure development all threaten these delicate, essential ecologies.
Indigenous and local communities, who often have the deepest ties to these landscapes and depend on them for sustenance, are also key stewards and must have a central role in decision-making. In many cases, preventing destruction in the first place is more cost-effective and ecologically sound than attempting restoration later.
The wetlands that need our help are all around us. What’s in your neck of the woods? Explore the interactive map below!
Events and Community
- The Forest is the Sea’s Lover”
Large chunks of human and more-than-human communities dodge a geological bullet this week, as tsunami threats after an historic earthquake in the Pacific largely failed to materialize. But it certainly got our community thinking.
From Jim Laurie’s Symbiosis Team, Tim Jones (Gladney Farm, Hokkaido, Japan) thought of Shigeatsu Hatakeyama.
Hatakeyama-san, whom Jones met in 2011, was a fisherman and essayist who championed the connections between living systems.
He began planting trees at the age of 45. He understood that the nutrients sustaining oysters in the sea are carried by rivers—so to nurture the sea, one must first enrich the forests at its source.*
“For a fisherman to plant trees in the mountains is also to plant trees in people’s hearts.”
*The Asahi Shimbun
