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Sphagnum capillifolium moss close up, Scotland © Tony Hamblin / rspb-images.com seem not to be in operation, is the place to remember the effects of the changes we have been making. The oaks are absorbing about 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year – just more than the emissions of a single seat on a holiday jet to Barbados and back. But global emissions are running at about 10 billion tonnes of carbon a year. We would need about 38 million square miles of Arienas woods – itself a paradisiacal idea – to absorb those emissions. Oak woods would have to cover about two-thirds of the land area of the Earth. So what is to be done? What is happening in the Arienas woods is actually what needs to happen. The systems of the Earth itself can be harnessed to address a large part of the problem we have created. We need to look after the soil, particularly the organic peaty soils in which much of the wet west of Scotland is blanketed. Very nearly half of all UK soil carbon is in Scotland, and changes made to the use of organic soils are currently responsible for 15% of Scotland’s greenhouse-gas emissions. If a hectare of grassland on an organic soil is converted to arable, up to 8 tonnes of carbon a year is lost to the atmosphere. Ploughing up peat is guaranteed to increase global warming, but as long as peat stays waterlogged it very slowly but quite actively sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, locking it up in its anoxic depths. As soon as peat dries – and one of the internal contradictions of this subject is that there is no easier way of drying out peat soils than by planting trees on them – the peat starts to decompose. The Arienas oak woods, for all their micro-pleasures and moss-bedded calm, are somehow connected to the urgent realities of a warming Earth The carbon is released back into the atmosphere as the peat shrinks and blows away in the wind. No new drainage on peat, blocking up the old drains, and no plantings on peat soils will all contribute to a cooler Earth. Bogs are a modern good. But there are some subtle feedback loops here. Most of Europe will get hotter and drier this century, so the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere is likely to increase. But there will also be more plant growth, and that will sequester carbon to the extent that the loss of soil carbon will be entirely neutralised. An increase in yield from an improvement in technology can also be predicted. If management and a changed climate are aligned, it is possible to sequester carbon, even in a warmer world. With the right policies, European soils (except in Scandinavia) could become a net carbon sink in the next century. It’s the global poor, those who can’t adapt, who are in the most trouble. And the people who are suffering now are those who are going to suffer in the future. Central Africa has no money and no elasticity in the system. Lowlying Bangladesh is staring at the prospect of catastrophic 20 Resurgence & Ecologist November/December 2019
page 23
floods in the monsoon season for decades to come. The issue is not about saving the planet, but about saving people who are living in poverty, particularly children and old people. Relatively speaking, those in the comfort of the industrialised north are going to be fine – we can, at least for a while, buy our way out of trouble. And in all probability the planet is going to be fine. But generations of poor Africans and Asians are not going to be fine. And that is where it is true that anything at Arienas is irrelevant. Much harder choices have to be made, and those choices will impinge on the way we live now. This is not about saving the planet. What you and I feel anxious about – subliminally or not – is hanging on to our hugely enjoyable, vanity-satisfying, consuming, burning, luxury way of life. As well as attending to buildings and land, we have to stop burning oil. Those wonderful Arienas woods are surrounded to the south and west by huge plantations of Sitka spruce created by the Forestry Commission in the 1930s. Those plantations now produce 50,000 tonnes of softwood a year. Between 5,000 and 10,000 tonnes of wood is left as waste on the ground. The timber is currently selling at about £45 a tonne. But the energy in that tonne is equivalent to at least £100-worth of oil. We neglect it because the financial incentives to use it are not there. It is for the state to provide those incentives, as the market cannot. The core principle in mitigating climate change is simple enough – and revels in its simplicity: attach cheques to good ideas. A climate breakdown mitigation fund, both within countries and globally, is the necessary next step. We are caught in something of an irony trap. We are insulated by the way we live from many root realities of the climate crisis, but the thing that is insulating us is the very thing that is threatening global wellbeing. We are living in a kind of comfort bubble whose outer, unfelt edges are eating away at the world beyond our knowing. It’s as if the consuming north were one of those walled and gated holiday resorts on the Indian Ocean. Outside: poverty, degradation, disease and early death. Inside: riches, comfort, ignorance and an occasional flutter of concern. But surely we should be interested in imagining and investing in our own future. That is what the blessed trees on the shores of Loch Arienas are doing, slowly drawing from their surroundings the materials for their future persistence, laying down the structures that will guarantee their own health and allow their seeds to develop and disperse. As each generation reaches its term, the organisms of rot ensure that its successors will have nutrients on which to thrive. It is not a place of dreamlike sweetness. Like every ecosystem, it contains competition, exploitation and denial; it is an unforgiving theatre of struggle and destruction, its beauty at least partly in that fitness, that necessary vigour and resilience. But it is not self-consuming or myopic to the point of idiocy. It is, in fact, a model of what we might be. This is an edited extract from Notes from Morvern, by Adam Nicolson, published by the Andrew Raven Trust. www.andrewraventrust.org.uk Issue 317 “In nature’s economy … the currency is not money, it is life.” – Vandana Shiva Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace Resurgence & Ecologist 21

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Sphagnum capillifolium moss close up, Scotland © Tony Hamblin / rspb-images.com seem not to be in operation, is the place to remember the effects of the changes we have been making.

The oaks are absorbing about 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year – just more than the emissions of a single seat on a holiday jet to Barbados and back. But global emissions are running at about 10 billion tonnes of carbon a year. We would need about 38 million square miles of Arienas woods – itself a paradisiacal idea – to absorb those emissions. Oak woods would have to cover about two-thirds of the land area of the Earth.

So what is to be done? What is happening in the Arienas woods is actually what needs to happen. The systems of the Earth itself can be harnessed to address a large part of the problem we have created. We need to look after the soil, particularly the organic peaty soils in which much of the wet west of Scotland is blanketed. Very nearly half of all UK soil carbon is in Scotland, and changes made to the use of organic soils are currently responsible for 15% of Scotland’s greenhouse-gas emissions. If a hectare of grassland on an organic soil is converted to arable, up to 8 tonnes of carbon a year is lost to the atmosphere. Ploughing up peat is guaranteed to increase global warming, but as long as peat stays waterlogged it very slowly but quite actively sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, locking it up in its anoxic depths. As soon as peat dries – and one of the internal contradictions of this subject is that there is no easier way of drying out peat soils than by planting trees on them – the peat starts to decompose.

The Arienas oak woods, for all their micro-pleasures and moss-bedded calm, are somehow connected to the urgent realities of a warming Earth

The carbon is released back into the atmosphere as the peat shrinks and blows away in the wind. No new drainage on peat, blocking up the old drains, and no plantings on peat soils will all contribute to a cooler Earth. Bogs are a modern good.

But there are some subtle feedback loops here. Most of Europe will get hotter and drier this century, so the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere is likely to increase. But there will also be more plant growth, and that will sequester carbon to the extent that the loss of soil carbon will be entirely neutralised. An increase in yield from an improvement in technology can also be predicted. If management and a changed climate are aligned, it is possible to sequester carbon, even in a warmer world. With the right policies, European soils (except in Scandinavia) could become a net carbon sink in the next century.

It’s the global poor, those who can’t adapt, who are in the most trouble. And the people who are suffering now are those who are going to suffer in the future. Central Africa has no money and no elasticity in the system. Lowlying Bangladesh is staring at the prospect of catastrophic

20 Resurgence & Ecologist

November/December 2019

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