L’ottanta per cento delle torbiere dell’Inghilterra sono asciutte e degradate, mapping spettacoli

We get headlines like this every time the sun comes out for more than a week.

Suddenly, everyone forgets the 300 days of solid rain we had prior to it.

If we want to do something about this we need to make grouse shooting less tax efficient.

For upland peat, anyway. East Anglian flatlands are never going to be returned to peat because they’re way too useful as agricultural land.

Moorland is essentially useless, apart from activities that involve charging people to come onto it and do them. You can scratch a living from sheep farming but it’s hard and not economically viable in a modern developed country (those sheep are only there because of subsidies). Selling shooting experiences is one of the main ways to make money off a moorland estate.

And if you want to drive Range Rovers up to the butts and then walk across the moor to them, you don’t want it to be a peat bog, you want it to be dry moor. (With heather for cover for the birds, which won’t grow in a bog either.) So there’s an incentive to manage it as dry moor, with drainage channels and burning and what have you.