Here, Cutting Down Millions of Trees is Actually a Good Thing | National Geographic

you
in general in the conservation movement
you know we’re very favorable to tree
planting yeah what could be better
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what we’re doing here is we’re restoring
one of the most important conservation
sites in Britain if not Europe there is
an estimated 400 million tonnes of
carbon that’s stored on the peat that
we’re looking at that’s as much as 20
million tanker trucks full of petrol and
that is more than all the forests of dek
together
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people store more carbon than any other
terrestrial ecosystem on the planet so
for that they are very important for the
global climate regulation the peatland
should not have trees on them the trees
and the drainage ditches that have been
plowed through the peat lines are very
bad at drying out the peat and breaking
it up once the peat is exposed to the
air it starts to always oxidize and
deteriorate and every time a peat is
eroding away like that
we’re losing carbon back to the
environment these towers constantly
measure the carbon is coming out of an
open landscape restored landscape and a
forested landscape
to restore the peatlands we need to
remove these trees which should never
have been planted and we need to re-wet
the ground and then nature will take its
course we can see here one of the old
Horace tree furrows that would have been
plowed gradually that the bulb muscles
are filling up over the forestry residue
and it’s laying down P you know it might
be another 20-30 years before it’s
restored back to natural state but the
bog is coming back to life
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