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

In general, in the conservation movement, you know we're very favorable to tree planting. Yeah, what could be [Music] better? 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 tons of carbon that's stored on the peak 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 the UK together.

[Music] Peatland stores more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, so for that, they're 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 are very bad at drying out the peat and breaking it up. Once the peat is exposed to the air, it starts to almost oxidize and deteriorate.

Every time peat is eroding away like that, we're losing carbon back to the environment. These towers constantly measure the carbon that's coming out of an open landscape, a restored landscape, and a forested landscape. To restore the peats, we need to remove these trees, which should never have been planted, and we need to rewet the ground. Then nature will take its course.

We can see here one of the old forestry f that would have been plowed. Gradually, the bog mosses are filling up over the forestry residue, and it's laying down peat. You know, it might be another 20 to 30 years before it's restored back to natural state, but the bog is coming back to life.

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