Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

For a long period when people lived off the fruits of the earth, marshland remained a no man’s land which belonged to the sovereign. When he decided to build a university or a capital city, situating it in the marshes was a questionable but politically sound decision. The building of St Petersburg was one of the most significant of these decisions. Despite the abundance of marshland, Russians did not manage the extraction of peat for very long. Scotsmen and Dutchmen drained the land on which St Petersburg stands; they were experts in peat, but there was no demand for it because of the unlimited availability of firewood. In 1759, Mikhail Lomonosov, the founder of Russian natural sciences, made a study of peat. Although he had been brought up in the marshes of the Arkhangelsk region, he wrote about peat as if it was an alien speciality: ‘peat is extracted from bogs with nets … and is used by the Dutch instead of firewood … It has given rise to an amusing proverb about merchants and manufacturers: whoever trades in peat sells his land, his fatherland.’ 5

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Alexander I invited Daniel Wheeler, an English Quaker farmer, to drain the marshland around St Petersburg. During the fifteen years he spent in Russia, Wheeler drained more than 100,000 acres of bog on the royal estates. But the industrial production of peat in the Russian Empire started only in the mid-nineteenth century. It reached a peak in the 1920s when the Bolsheviks were seeking local sources of energy for their electrification programme. Mussolini drained the malarial marshes in Lazio and Stalin drained them in Crimea. Performed by imperial states at the height of their powers, these were Herculean feats of internal colonisation. For some followers of Frederick the Great, the fact that the vast Polesie and Pripet marshes in northern Poland and Belarus were left undrained was evidence of the inability of a local population – Slavs and Jews – to carry out the civilising mission. Eliminating or enslaving this population would open the way to draining the marshes and colonising the land. This project was not entirely successful – there is still a lot of marshland in Europe. And it is likely that many more bogs will develop.

Peat remains the most widely distributed of energy resources: 3 per cent of the earth’s surface is covered in peat today. Moreover, it is a renewable resource, although it regenerates more slowly than forest. But we will no longer dry and burn peat. For each unit of energy, peat emits more carbon dioxide than coal and considerably more than oil. Untouched bogs are an active carbon sink, but once they are destroyed by extraction they emit carbon dioxide. Drained peatlands remain barren for decades, and they present a serious danger of fire. Large peat fires are impossible to extinguish; they burn for months, years and, sometimes, decades and produce tremendous amounts of smog and carbon.

Peat fields near Moscow have mostly been abandoned, but their fires produce noxious smogs that haunt the Russian capital. The most deadly occurred in August 2010 – people did not see the sun for weeks and the number of deaths exceeded the monthly average by a third. The deep-seated fire in the Shatura bog near Moscow, where the Bolsheviks started peat production in 1919 and continued for decades, has now been continuously burning for forty years. Peat fires have been also very damaging in South-East Asia. Globally, smouldering peat fires are responsible for 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, a figure roughly equal to the emissions from all the combustion engines on earth. 6 Peat production continues in Finland, Russia, Canada and some other northern countries, though the outputs are decreasing every year. In 2018 Ireland announced a ban on peat cutting, and the last peat-fuelled power station on the British Isles has switched to biomass.

But peat played its role in history. A pioneer of modernity, Holland could not have made its great leap forward without peat; and, without the Dutch setting the pace, England would not have made its rapid progress either. The founder of the golden age was not a great painter, or a banker, or an explorer but the humble skipper of a peat barge.

Notes

1   De Zeeuw, ‘Peat and the Dutch golden age’; Unger, ‘Energy source’; de Vries and de Zeeuw, Barges and Capitalism ; de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy . 2   De Zeeuw, ‘Peat and the Dutch golden age’. 3   TeBrake, ‘Taming the waterwolf’; Kaijser, ‘System building from below’; de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age . 4   Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature , p. 45. 5   Kopenkina, ‘Lomonosov o torfe’. 6   Stracher et al., ‘Smoldering-peat megafires’.