WE DRAINED THE SWAMP. NOW WE’RE UN-DRAINING IT.
A 23-square-mile tract of drained North Carolina peatland is being rewetted, replanted and restored to hold water, reduce fire risk, rebuild habitat and stop releasing so much stored carbon. Sometimes progress is admitting the ditch was a bad idea.
WE DRAINED THE SWAMP. NOW WE’RE UN-DRAINING IT
Near Belhaven, North Carolina, scientists and investors are putting the water back into 23 square miles of peatland that was deliberately drained decades ago.
WHAT HAPPENED
Roughly 50 miles of ditches, dug for an abandoned peat-mining and agriculture scheme, drained the tract and left the peat drying out — which turns a carbon store into a carbon source and raises fire risk.
Duke University ecology professor Curt Richardson and research scientist Neal Flanagan have been sampling the soil as the project rewets and replants the site, aiming to hold water on the land again and rebuild native habitat.
The restoration is financed in part through carbon credits, which ties the work to a market whose accounting is still argued over.
WHY THIS IS HOPESLOP
This is what repair actually looks like: unglamorous, decades late, and mostly a matter of undoing a confident decision somebody made with a shovel.
The financing caveat is real and we are not hiding it. But a landscape being allowed to be wet again, on purpose, after being drained on purpose, is a genuinely hopeful category of news.
ORIGINAL SOURCEAssociated PressRead the original report