Mapping deeper connections across peatlands

Greetings from the mire! And not just any mire, as these past few weeks we have been delighted guests at the Greifswald Mire Centre (GMC) - a peatland knowledge hub located in northern Germany. The GMC coordinates the largest database on peatlands in the world and hosts the Peatland and Nature Conservation International Library (PeNCIL) where you can find over 25,000 publications on our favourite ecosystem.The GMC bridges future-focused scientific research with the deep roots of history, natural heritage, and storytelling. At the heart of this effort are the library’s “peatland readings,” hosted by Hans Joosten (a key peatland researcher), which make the significance of peatlands come alive through literature, reflection, and shared human connection.

We were invited to spend a few weeks in residence at the Peatland Library as part of our Peatland Justice project. This residency offered us a rare and valuable opportunity: time to think, to read, to connect threads, and to deepen our relationship with peatlands through study and reflection. One of our central goals for the residency was to begin shaping what we’re calling a deep map of peatlands.

Rather than producing a traditional map (those familiar visuals marked by tidy borders and colour-coded patches) we’re exploring mapping as a subjective, interpretive act. What does it mean to map something as slippery, as alive, as emotionally and ecologically charged as a bog? How do you represent something that resists being fixed in place or time?

A deep map doesn’t claim to be neutral. It doesn’t flatten. Instead, it embraces complexity. It gathers stories, memories, sensations, cultural narratives, political struggles, scientific data, and ecological rhythms into one layered form. It’s a tapestry of what is often left unsaid in graphs, charts, and land classifications. In this sense, deep mapping becomes a form of listening, an attentive weaving together of multiple perspectives, temporalities, and experiences of place.

This approach feels particularly powerful when applied to wetlands. These ecosystems are inherently liminal, defying fixed categorisation. The soil shifts and reconfigures itself. Water levels rise and fall. Wildlife moves with the seasons, with climate, with time. Layers of peat hold the carbon of centuries past and the traces of those who have passed through: farmers, foragers, extractors, restorers, poets. Each imprint enriches the narrative of the bog, making it not just a landscape, but a living archive.

In mapping peatlands this way, we hope to move beyond dominant narratives that see land only in terms of utility, ownership, or conservation status. We want to surface other ways of knowing, ones rooted in relationship, justice, imagination, and care. And through that, we aim to offer a contribution to peatland storytelling that holds both the wounds and the wonders of these remarkable ecosystems.

In the following interviews you'll hear from three of our map creators—Beth, Lu, and Bobbi—who will bring the deep map to life by sharing their personal connection to the project and situating it within the broader context of our Peatland Justice campaign.

Map 1 - Beth

What is special about a deep map?

To answer this, I think it makes sense to turn to some of the people who we learnt from when we began diving into deep mapping. Here, in the words of Nuno Sacremento, who wrote a book with Brett Bloom called Deep Mapping: ‘“Deep Mapping is an investigation of a site of your choice, and the discovery of what is often hidden behind the official, sanctioned and authorised. Deep Mapping is about doing things differently from ordinary cartography, shifting away from large expanses of territory. Rather, it is about the small, the subjective, the embodied, the thick, and the porous. It is about digging deeply rather than gazing widely.”

With RE-PEAT, one of our main intentions is always to dive into the nuances and complications of our relationships with peatlands, how they vary through time and place, how different places and contexts may call for different approaches or activities, how we build or rebuild these relationships, and what other interactions are at play - be that with deep time, nature-human dichotomies, power dynamics and colonial relationships. Deep mapping felt for us a way that we could navigate all of this, digging deep as Nuno says into all these layers of peatlands.

What kind of map have you been working on?

The deep mapping project is currently part of our Peatland Justice campaign, so the starting point for the maps was the trade of peat across Europe: plotting extraction sites and supply chains, points of sale or retailers selling peat, different products you find extracted peat soil in, import and export countries, trading hubs, sites of profit, and the environmental consequences of peat extraction and who is feeling that. How does that differ from who is profiting? How can we capture the essence of such a systemic issue in a way that allows us to work through it while being just, for people, planet and creatures?

Naturally as we dove into some of these questions, other topics and personal connections arrived: how have peatlands local to us been degraded in the past - before the use of peat in the horticultural sector? Why are there sometimes such well-mapped areas of peatlands and for what purpose? What is the criteria for this and why are some peatlands that we know of not on these maps? How are peatlands mapped and present in stories and memories of communities?

All of this is to say, there is a lot of deep mapping going on and in the works!

The ones that I have personally been working on are:

• A soil bag, bought from Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, with the environmental consequences mapped on it, which tries to situate the real impact of this extraction against the way it is framed and phrased by a product trying to sell itself as a green and ecologically-friendly

• A timeline of peat extraction for the horticultural sector and how that sits alongside other developments of industrial agriculture over the past 50 odd years, and where the environmental impacts are externalised and not taken into account within this capitalist system that pursues efficiency and economic growth, at the expense of planetary-wide and people welfare. This map demonstrates that it is a relatively new phenomenon, because it uses books found in the Peatland Library written specifically to introduce peat to gardeners and dive into how to get used to using this new and tricky growing media. This sits really at odds with the moment we are at now where peat is positioned as the only option and all other options are framed as too difficult to grow with and too hard to get used to.

What made you include this process of deep map creation in the Peatland Justice project?

We see that it’s really important to approach the campaign from a few points, which are interlinked, provide different entry points for people, and generally allow for a more holistic way of going about the issue. So we have these activities that allow for direct calls to action and clear steps that people can take who care about the issue of peat extraction and use of peat soils in horticulture - things like our posters, videos, stickers. We have other activities aimed at talking to retailers and getting the issue on their rader; and we have activities that aim to alter the underlying conditions which we feel allow for the industrial extraction of peat to begin with. This requires addressing our relationship with these ecosystems, and our planet more broadly, which is built on exploitation, extraction, pure economic means (minus the externalities of course), rather than on recognising our deep intertwinement with the earth, the intrinsic value of peatlands, the importance of them for other species, for reciprocity and regeneration, and the importance of peatlands in a system where wellbeing - planetary, in economic, elsewhere - is put first.

This latter is why we feel the deep map creation has a place within the peatland justice campaign, which is pushing for the just transition away from peat in the horticultural sector. We reflected quite a bit on how to bring the different maps that are created in this process together - so that they can interact, converse, contradict one another and then landed on the exhibition as a way to do so. We’re now in the midst of planning the exhibition, and hoping to host it in autumn this year, so more updates soon!

Map 2 - Lu

What is your deep map about?

My deep map is exploring the ways that peatlands are often left out of many different traditional mapping techniques and how that often impacts their status and their ability to be protected and recognised under certain protection laws, because of the fact that they are essentially quite unmappable by traditional cartographic means. There's lots of different blurred boundaries and liminalities within peatlands that make them difficult to pin down. It's very difficult to put a boundary or a border on the peatland, so that's kind of where my deep map exploration started. I began by thinking about the implications of that and new ways of making peatlands recognisable by using more experimental mapping means.

Could you expand on what makes peatlands non-binary spaces?

Yes, I kind of see peatlands as non-binary spaces. I relate to peatlands as a non-binary person because of how liminal they are and how defiant they can be, especially in terms of resisting capitalist systems and frameworks for understanding value. As ecosystems they mirror some of the same ways that trans and non-binary bodies often evade these kinds of value forms as well, which comes with good and bad consequences for both peatlands and trans bodies. As peatlands exist in between so many different things, such as wet and dry land, life and death, etc. and how they contain very blurred boundaries, their embodiment is something that really resonates with me as a non-binary person.

There's no pinning down a classification for a peatland. It makes it very difficult to map, and I really like this parallel. I also find resonances in the kinds of ways that trans bodies and non-binary bodies have been – or queer bodies in general – talked about as kind of unproductive in terms of their reproductive abilities for various reasons. It's kind of the same way that peatlands are viewed in many colonial capitalist frameworks in terms of their lack of ability to be used for agriculture, and the ensuing ways that many people try to convert them. This is something that queer and trans bodies are very much subject to as well.

So I think there's a really nice parallel there. Both can kind of learn from each other in some way.

Can you talk us through how you will visualise your map?

The visualisation of my map is in a fairly experimental phase, but I think the outcome will also be experimental. I work a lot with zines and drawing. For this work I've chosen to work using a modular binding technique, which means that I'm kind of creating a zine which can be taken apart and reordered in different ways, to sort of show the fluidity of peatlands, gender and non-binary bodies. It's gonna be on tracing paper. The tracing paper choice was to show how when the pages are layered, they kind of all kind of blur into one. And there's lots of interesting overlays and interactions between different images and then with the modularity combined with that, it kind of creates this, this flowing piece.

In terms of the content, the illustrations and writing will be mainly different explorations and comparisons between non-binary and peat bodies, etc. Lots of cartographic imagery combined with wet imagery and queer imagery. All combined to the point where there's this kind of blur between what is and what isn't an organic body, and a map, and a peatland.

Map 3 - Bobbi

How did you choose to approach the deep map concept? What is your map about?

My map is a deep dive into the Dutch history of peatland drainage in order to understand what implications that history has for our present day notion of Peatland Justice.

So looking both at the importance of peatland history for Dutch history, specifically peatland drainage, and building on that, the export of peatland drainage techniques and knowledge to other countries in an effort to reveal and understand what colonial patterns we may observe there.

The reason that I chose this was because we do have a particularly Dutch focus within the Peatland Justice campaign, since the Netherlands is a huge player in present day peat trade. At the same time, there is not a lot of knowledge among Dutch people about our own history with peatlands and the relevance of peatlands to Dutch nation building, even though Dutch history and peatland history really cannot be unlinked from one another.

So I wanted to start making sense of this story, both for myself as well as for many other people in my shoes that do have this drive for justice and Peatland Justice, but are missing the historical context to truly make sense of this in a holistic way.

What opportunities do you think peatlands offer in the environmental activism space?

So I think this is an interesting question.

I think one really clear opportunity for me is that peatlands are not a topic that is as entrenched in camps and political narratives as some of the other topics that we're facing, such as animal agriculture. So with peatlands there is still some sort of conversational space and openness, so that, in combination with the sheer relevance of peatlands on a climate, biodiversity and water regulation, I think it gives really fertile soil for transformative change.

On top of that, considering that the Netherlands is built on peat, to truly understand what environmental justice means in the Dutch context, we have to understand what peatland justice is. In the end, they could very well be one and the same.

So there's really an opportunity here for the Dutch climate movement and Dutch people more generally to deeply investigate their own context, our own environment and begin to imagine and envision a just transition in our direct context.

How has your time at the peatland library helped with delving deeper into the topic?

It helped hugely because a lot of these stories are not easily findable on Google. There might be a PDF floating on the internet somewhere, but you kind of just have to stumble upon it. At the library, I encountered a lot of personal accounts and local stories of people involved in peat draining, peat cutting, peat transportation, etc. and it helped me understand a lot more about the social reality at the time of local peatland drainage, and really gave more color to this historical context. So really going beyond the facts and the year numbers and getting a more personal feeling of what actually was happening back in the days, and understanding in what tone, in what narrative people were writing about peatlands.

You can learn a lot from the adjectives and the subtleties used in these books — it is very telling of the conceptions of that time.

What I found very interesting is that there were just so many books about peatlands. There was a very strong connection between national identity and peatlands, or at least a strong association with peatlands.

There was a lot of shared and common knowledge — like you could tell from the sources in the library that peatlands were an integral part of Dutch society.

So I found it quite eye-opening to see how it was so alive back then, even though it was alive in a very destructive way, because of all of the drainage and all of the cutting. It was very alive. It made me excited to bring peatlands back into the public eye but in a different way. Like building on the precedent that we do have this connection, but now let's transform that connection.

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