Nature's Evil

ELEVEN

Peat

Human appropriation of energy began with technologies that used the sun for nourishment and the wind for movement. Sailing ships were far superior to ox carts, sleigh routes or camel caravans. Windmills crushed grain, and waterwheels turned the shafts of industrial machines. The renewable energy of water helped to master the Old World, the renewable energy of the wind enabled the discovery of the New World. But then the technologies of Northern Europe – the draining of marshland and the construction of canals – first revealed to the world the decisive significance of fossil energy.

Holland had a rather cold climate. In the celebrated canvases of the Dutch masters we see snowy, frozen canals: this was the Little Ice Age. These same canals brought warmth to the Dutch people. The country was densely populated, and there was no commercial timber left by the middle of the seventeenth century. In the process of draining fields and digging canals, millions of tons of peat were extracted, delivered to houses and factories, and burnt in stoves. This process led to a dramatic transformation of the natural environment.

In the Middle Ages this whole coastal area, extending dozens of kilometres inland from the sea – the Low Countries, as they are still called – was covered in peat bogs. Peat is the first stage of the long process by which coal and oil are created, and peatlands are comparatively recent formations, 5,000 or 10,000 years old. Decomposing in stagnant water, the remains of bog plants rotted above and below the surface, so that layers of peat built up in both directions – a metre above and several metres below sea level. It was a stable ecosystem, resistant to floods and droughts. The Dutch dug drainage channels, cut out the drying peat with spades, heaped it into wooden crates and put it under cover to dry out. Alternatively, boats trawled for peaty slush with nets. The slush was taken ashore and trampled on to squeeze out the water, a process a bit like kneading dough. The heat produced from burning a cubic metre of peat equals that of firewood. The ash from peat is superior to the ash from a wood fire; it contains a lot of phosphorous, and a mixture of peat ashes and manure makes one of the best fertilisers. The building of ports and canals, the deepening of waterways, the digging of ditches to drain the fields – all these activities yielded peat. On the slightly raised shores of the bogs, towns grew up, and narrow barges brought peat to them along these same canals. 1

Peat holds water like a sponge – 90 per cent of its volume is water. As the Dutch drained the water or let it evaporate, burnt the peat and returned the ash to the soil, they lowered the level of the land. Until the building of the canals the coastline was stable. The peat bogs were a habitat that was of little use to people, but their surface was above sea level. Flooding resulted from the draining of the peat bogs, and, the more draining went on, the more effort had to be invested in the prevention of flooding. Dykes to keep out the seawater were as essential as canals were to drain the freshwater. All these defences were built out of local materials: underneath the layer of peat was a stratum of clay, and the deepening of the canals led to the strengthening of the dykes – or the necessity of buttressing the dykes led to the digging of deeper canals. Windmills to pump water from the fields became a regular feature of the landscape from the fifteenth century onwards. But people continued to burn peat, with the result that the average level of the land surface dropped further and further below sea level. Disastrous floods cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Institutions for collective flood defences had already developed by the Middle Ages. Then the state took over these functions. From Rousseau onwards, philosophers used the flood defences in the Dutch countryside as a classic example of the necessity for communal solidarity, the social contract and the state. They were not aware that the reason for the flooding was not Nature’s perfidy but human action and the ‘tragedy of the commons’: if there are no ownership rights over a resource, in this case peat, people will exploit it to extinction – the resource’s and their own. In Holland, flooding was personified as the ‘waterwolf’. Creating and preserving property rights, Leviathan tamed the waterwolf. Taking responsibility for dykes, locks and embankments, the sovereign divided land and water. With its day and night watch, its joint-stock companies and myriad anonymous diggers, this bog civilisation destroyed its environment but created a prosperous society and a great culture.

In total, more than 6 million cubic metres of peat were extracted from the territory of the Netherlands. The scale of work on the land surface grew rapidly. After peat had been extracted, the soil had to be built anew; returning from the city markets, the peat cutters’ barges brought ashes, mixed with night soil. So, at almost no cost, people heated the towns, organised transportation between them, and created new fields. If there had been no peat in Holland, generating the equivalent amount of heat would have required 800,000 hectares of well-run forestry, a quarter of the territory of Holland today. If there had been no canals in Holland, the transportation of this firewood would have required so many horses that growing the oats to feed them would have taken up a third of the country. 2

Holland remained a peat-dependent country for a very long period. The Dutch imported some English coal, but only blacksmiths needed it. Dry peat can spontaneously ignite, and such fires are very difficult to extinguish. In order to store peat, elaborate safety rules, which amounted to a ritual, had to be observed. Dutch cleanliness and punctuality, which amazed foreign travellers, were part of this routine. Ubiquitous and unremarked, the peat industry hardly produced any taxes; in fact, peat extraction was destroying the arable fields that did produce taxation, and the state was alarmed. But grain for the towns was imported on a large scale, and the Dutch state shifted to the revenue from long-distance trade with its colonies and the Baltic lands. This brought about those peaceful, productive relations between the state and society that historians still find impressive today. A diffused, labour-intensive resource that needed no capital investment, peat shaped many features of Dutch culture and politics.

In spring and early summer, for roughly three months of the year, peasants and fishermen cut peat, while the rest of the year they worked at other trades. Cheap fuel enabled the growth of industry, which was based almost entirely on the heat processing of local and imported raw materials. Breweries, factories producing salt, soap and bricks, workshops for pottery, porcelain and glass, bakeries, smokeries and other enterprises were all fuelled by peat. Using the cheap energy of peat, Amsterdam became a centre for refining English sugar. Linen from all over Germany was bleached in Harlem. Dutch peat did not produce a sufficient temperature to replace charcoal in the foundries, but the charcoal was produced using peat. However, peat was not suitable as a fuel for steam engines – or if there had been peat-fuelled versions they would have been very unwieldy.

Regardless of wars and floods, the price of Dutch land rose, and this inspired investors. In the middle of the seventeenth century they financed the draining of several lakes in the north of Holland; the area of arable land in these provinces increased by a quarter. The money investors put into this project exceeded the total capitalisation of the Dutch East India and the Dutch West India companies combined. Internal colonisation required more investment than external – and in this case brought a large return. 3 England and Holland competed for power over the North Sea and the world’s oceans. Despite her huge reserves of coal, England lagged behind for a long time: peat provided the Dutch economy with twice as many kilojoules per head of population as coal provided in England. Preoccupied with self-sufficiency in food supplies, British rulers prevented the export of grain and limited its consumption. The Netherlands, in contrast, bought large consignments of Baltic grain, paying for them with exports which included goods such as pottery, glass and alcohol, all of which needed energy for their production. Combining cheap energy with expensive labour and free trade was the Dutch road to modernity.

Under the Dutch influence, dykes, canals, locks, and windmills became typical of many countries in Central and Northern Europe. Dutch experts drained bogs in Scotland and all across East Anglia. The Norfolk Broads were artificially created by the extraction of peat. The Cambridgeshire fenlands were drained by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden; then 160,000 hectares of land – a territory a little smaller than the whole of Holland – were ‘improved’. The English bogs contained less peat that the Dutch ones, but no other fuel was available for brick factories. In the seventeenth century, land reclamation specialists – mostly Dutch experts – worked all over Europe, from Italy to Muscovy. Dutch emigrants drained the bogs in Prussia, as they did around the Calvinist port of La Rochelle in France. Later, Catholics also carried out this work; money from the papacy paid for the draining of the Pontine Marshes, not far from Rome. Peat bogs extended far upstream in European rivers. Pomerania, Silesia and Courland were mostly marshland; the deltas of the Oder and the Vistula, where flourishing cities now stand, were impassable. Nearly the whole bed of the Rhine was remade to improve navigation and extract peat. The work on the Rhine was massive and transnational – it lasted two centuries and was carried out mostly by Polish workers under the direction of Dutch masters.

In 1730 the young Crown Prince Frederick, the elder son of the Prussian king, decided to escape the boredom of court life by fleeing with his lover, an army lieutenant, Hans Hermann von Katte. Bound for England, they were captured in Küstrin (today western Poland) and imprisoned for desertion. By order of the king, von Katte was beheaded in front of the prince; Frederick spent two months in the dungeon before begging forgiveness from his father. The king ordered his son to audit the local administration and learn ‘agriculture from the ground up’. This was how the future Frederick the Great first developed an interest in draining marshland. One of his first projects was the draining of the Oder’s banks: the main canal was designed by Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician whom Frederick had lured away from St Petersburg. In those decades leading up to the Seven Years’ War, the monarchs of Europe competed for the services of astronomers, statisticians and chemists. But there were few places where the testing of theory by practice had such a dramatic character as in hydraulic work. Only when war broke out was Frederick able to tear himself away from his enthusiasm for bogs. He saw the Dutch art of drainage as a victory of mind over matter, the embodiment of the Enlightenment: the Dutch engineers implemented on the ground what French writers preached on the page. ‘Whoever improves the soil, cultivates land lying waste and drains swamps is making conquests from barbarism,’ wrote Frederick to Voltaire. He settled 300,000 migrants from the east and west of Prussia on the reclaimed land that they had drained. Militant rationalism, which was hard to implement anywhere else, reigned supreme on land won back from water. 4 A regular grid of ditches divided the fields. New systems of crop rotation were introduced there. English sheep and Danish cattle grazed on the reclaimed meadows. The elimination of malaria in Europe and North America was a direct consequence of the draining of the marshland.

Frederick thoroughly documented the work carried out on the Prussian marshland. Soldiers built wooden causeways that allowed people to move about on the marshland; this was the risky part of the work. Dug to connect to the nearest river, a network of ditches and canals drained the land. When the quagmire had partly dried, soldiers removed the top layer of light-coloured peat. Black peat lay underneath; this was sliced, dried and taken to the town market. Schooners brought back sand; mixed with the white peat, it raised the level of the ground. Wheat or buckwheat could be sown into this mixture. In other cases, the half-drained bog was simply set on fire and crops were sown in the ashes. Gradually, villages – ‘bog colonies’, as they were officially called – grew up in these places. In fact, more than a few of the beautiful cities in the world have been built on reclaimed marshland: Venice, Cambridge, St Petersburg, Princeton, Shanghai, New Orleans …

For a long period when people lived off the fruits of the earth, marshland remained a no man’s land which belonged to the sovereign. When he decided to build a university or a capital city, situating it in the marshes was a questionable but politically sound decision. The building of St Petersburg was one of the most significant of these decisions. Despite the abundance of marshland, Russians did not manage the extraction of peat for very long. Scotsmen and Dutchmen drained the land on which St Petersburg stands; they were experts in peat, but there was no demand for it because of the unlimited availability of firewood. In 1759, Mikhail Lomonosov, the founder of Russian natural sciences, made a study of peat. Although he had been brought up in the marshes of the Arkhangelsk region, he wrote about peat as if it was an alien speciality: ‘peat is extracted from bogs with nets … and is used by the Dutch instead of firewood … It has given rise to an amusing proverb about merchants and manufacturers: whoever trades in peat sells his land, his fatherland.’ 5

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Alexander I invited Daniel Wheeler, an English Quaker farmer, to drain the marshland around St Petersburg. During the fifteen years he spent in Russia, Wheeler drained more than 100,000 acres of bog on the royal estates. But the industrial production of peat in the Russian Empire started only in the mid-nineteenth century. It reached a peak in the 1920s when the Bolsheviks were seeking local sources of energy for their electrification programme. Mussolini drained the malarial marshes in Lazio and Stalin drained them in Crimea. Performed by imperial states at the height of their powers, these were Herculean feats of internal colonisation. For some followers of Frederick the Great, the fact that the vast Polesie and Pripet marshes in northern Poland and Belarus were left undrained was evidence of the inability of a local population – Slavs and Jews – to carry out the civilising mission. Eliminating or enslaving this population would open the way to draining the marshes and colonising the land. This project was not entirely successful – there is still a lot of marshland in Europe. And it is likely that many more bogs will develop.

Peat remains the most widely distributed of energy resources: 3 per cent of the earth’s surface is covered in peat today. Moreover, it is a renewable resource, although it regenerates more slowly than forest. But we will no longer dry and burn peat. For each unit of energy, peat emits more carbon dioxide than coal and considerably more than oil. Untouched bogs are an active carbon sink, but once they are destroyed by extraction they emit carbon dioxide. Drained peatlands remain barren for decades, and they present a serious danger of fire. Large peat fires are impossible to extinguish; they burn for months, years and, sometimes, decades and produce tremendous amounts of smog and carbon.

Peat fields near Moscow have mostly been abandoned, but their fires produce noxious smogs that haunt the Russian capital. The most deadly occurred in August 2010 – people did not see the sun for weeks and the number of deaths exceeded the monthly average by a third. The deep-seated fire in the Shatura bog near Moscow, where the Bolsheviks started peat production in 1919 and continued for decades, has now been continuously burning for forty years. Peat fires have been also very damaging in South-East Asia. Globally, smouldering peat fires are responsible for 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, a figure roughly equal to the emissions from all the combustion engines on earth. 6 Peat production continues in Finland, Russia, Canada and some other northern countries, though the outputs are decreasing every year. In 2018 Ireland announced a ban on peat cutting, and the last peat-fuelled power station on the British Isles has switched to biomass.

But peat played its role in history. A pioneer of modernity, Holland could not have made its great leap forward without peat; and, without the Dutch setting the pace, England would not have made its rapid progress either. The founder of the golden age was not a great painter, or a banker, or an explorer but the humble skipper of a peat barge.

Notes

1 De Zeeuw, ‘Peat and the Dutch golden age’; Unger, ‘Energy source’; de Vries and de Zeeuw, Barges and Capitalism ; de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy . 2 De Zeeuw, ‘Peat and the Dutch golden age’. 3 TeBrake, ‘Taming the waterwolf’; Kaijser, ‘System building from below’; de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age . 4 Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature , p. 45. 5 Kopenkina, ‘Lomonosov o torfe’. 6 Stracher et al., ‘Smoldering-peat megafires’.