Must Love Bogs | Hacker News Reader

Must Love Bogs

thebaffler.com

44 pointsbale18 comments

"to move away from the perception of peatlands as “wastelands,” “spaces of nothingness,” and into a new understanding of their value."

People who are unfamiliar with wilderness do the same with deserts. I hear people refer to them as places where there is nothing. People unfamiliar with wilderness tend to think of nature as trees and animals, and park-like areas.

It's the areas that are inhospitable to humans that especially need protecting, as they are generally seen as useless.

On more than one occasion, in discussion of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the question has come up "ever been there? There's nothing out there!" Umm, as a matter of fact, I have been there. And you're full of shit, Person Who Has Never Been North of the 49th Parallel. I guess if one can't drive an SUV to a paved overlook, what good is it, eh?

>Historically, we’ve associated bogs with sickness

I always associated bogs with standards.

Edit: also whisky, another thing I didn't see in the article.

Yeah I expected they would tell me to stop drinking peated whiskey, but now I do wonder how much bog it destroys.

What about rattlin'?

In Ireland (and I'd guess in most of Europe) bogs are are artificial landscapes, the result of mass deforestation and overgrazing. I don't see them as warranting any particular preservation. At least in the case of Ireland peatland preservation is just trying to preserve a very particular artefact of the agricultural revolution. Maybe it's different elsewhere... . It's about as worthy a cause to me as a golf-course preservation movement would be (ignoring the carbon-sequesterisation aspect of the argument, which I don't feel like assessing right now).

In the UK there's an lot amount of wildlife 'preservation' effort + money spent on on 'preserving' the landscape as an 18th century agricultural-industry idyll (including making sure that the actually indigenous flora+fauna doesn't get out of hand) rather than actually returning it to a more sustainable wilderness. George Monbiot has a big bit on this with his re-wilding schtick - https://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/27/a-manifesto-for-rewilding... .

as I understand blanket bogs are formed as the result of human activities, raised bogs are a naturally formed

If you look at the map on this page: http://raisedbogs.ie/what-is-a-raised-bog/ you will see how much of Ireland had quite a few natural - and very old - raised bogs up until the 1800s. And we've lost many of them forever in the last half a century or so. Agriculture & commercial scale peat harvesting is unfortunately directly responsible for the destruction of most of our raised bogs (as well as the near total collapse of many of our trout and salmon fisheries).

interesting, thanks!

There are some great bogs on Dartmoor. Nothing quite starts you off right at the beginning of a day's walking like immediately getting knee deep in water at 7AM

A great podcast about peat bogs:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/for-the-love-of-peat/

In the UK bog means a loo (or toilet if you prefer) so I was most curious if this was an article about lavatories but it wasn't what I was thinking !

I visited a peat bog yesterday! The sphagnum mats are amazing both visually and olfactorally.

Too much de-bogging huh?

‘Bog,’ I said.

‘You may enter.’

— The Cuckoo’s Egg, Clifford Stoll

I wish bogs were more popular too, because it might mean more adoption for bogbook, which seems like a cool project IMO.

https://sr.ht/~ev/bogbook/

an open source distributed social network of signed feeds replicated between pub servers

I'm not affiliated with bogbook. It just seems like an interesting project to me. Others have told me the name is off-putting, hence my initial comment. I'm interested in whether or not that is the cause of the negative reaction here.

The downvotes are likely because it's pretty much unrelated to the topic, aside from a coincidence of naming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com