Peatstack

I returned home a few hours ago after spending the morning tending to my peats. Good progress, though ground very wet. Some (especially the monadh dubh) are ready to come home, others still need some drying time. The moor was empty, save for myself, a few noisy skuas and the occasional piping of a plover. At one time, on a morning like this, the moor would have seen many a person out at their peats. In my home village now though, there is only a handful of households still cutting the peats, yet all around us remains the evidence of a time when peat cutting was a vital part of the year's work. Hard graft but also with a communal and social aspect that many miss, and many will still say that a day at the peats is hard to beat.

The reasons for the decline in peat cutting are many - relative prosperity, the coming of the electric and oil-fired heating systems, population change etc. But I suspect that concern for environmental damage is pretty rare as a reason why many have given up peat cutting, and rightly so. As a subscriber to the view that the crofting life (when widespread and part of the survival of the crofter) was an intrinsically environmentally friendly form of land and animal management, I am bound of course to say that today's concerns about peat cutting and CO2 release is fundamentally misguided.

Environmentally damaging mistakes have been made in the recent history of crofting - including the widespread use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides - and the recourse to machine cutting of peat in some areas. But I believe that hand peat-cutting for solely domestic usage should be encouraged in the interests of the environment.

At present, in a relatively few years - in the post war period - the islands of Lewis and Harris have gone from being quite self-sufficient in terms of fuel, heat, light to being highly dependent on imported fuels - especially oil. That oil is brought into the islands in container ships, and the environmental damage caused by the freighting of fuel via road and sea is surely very substantial. Lewis also has fossil-fuel powered electricity generation, and a liking for bottled gas as a means of fuel for cooking.

This blogger would like to see the development of a sustainable energy and fuel plan and policy for the outer islands based on principles of sustainability and self-sufficiency - and a move towards greater wind and wave power along with sustainable use of our in-situ solid fuels - peat etc.

I could support the developemnt of wind turbines if the power they generated was for island use alone. Why should we ruin our landscape for the sake of meeting the ever increasing and unsustainable demands for (cheap) energy in the rest of the UK? The principle for self-sufficiency and sustainability would remove the need for the costly grid interconnector and pylons and all of its blighting of the Highland landscape.

Therefore, before commenting in isolation on notions of environmental damage and CO2 emission etc, remote, charities and think-tanks should examine the use of peat in the broader context of environmental damage caused by our existing use of all fuels types and sources, and our plans for the future of the islands as a platform for energy generation / export, while we, as communities, remain a heavily dependent energy and fuel importer.