The humble plant that could save the world -- or destroy it
Clean energy expansion could destroy this crucial climate solution. The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.
Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.
Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.
The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”
“It’s the world’s temperature regulator,” said Valérie Courtois, executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which works on Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada. “It’s like we have a big fridge on top of the planet that is helping keep everything the way that it should be.”
But now, the fridge is hanging open.The world’s peatlands are increasingly at the center of conflicts over resource extraction, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
In northern Canada, one of the biggest fears for peat conservationists is mining for rare-earth minerals.
https://www.vox.com/climate/464782/peat-hudson-bay-peatlands-renewable-energy-critical-minerals-carbon-sink?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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