Do you use peat in your garden - I wish you wouldn't! About 70% of UK peat use is through retail sales to you and me (except not me - so it must be you).
Peat doesn't come from bags - it comes from peatlands and its mining destroys peat habitats and its use leads to totally unnecessary increased carbon emissions. Annual carbon dioxide emissions from horticultural peat use are 630,000 tonnes. That's a lot of carbon.
We have been banging on about alternatives to peat for garden use for ages now and I know that many RSPB members have reduced or eliminated their peat use. I'm no gardener - I'm really not - but I am told by those who are that good alternatives to peat are available.
And governments always prefer asking people, rather quietly, to use less peat. It's that voluntary Big Society thing - although that's also the approach that the previous Labour government relied on too. And we know it doesn't work very well.
Back in the 1990s - remember them? - a target was set for 90% of materials used in growing media and soil improvers to be non-peat alternatives by 2010. The target was missed by 32%. And things aren't getting better very quickly - between 2007 and 2009 total UK peat use fell by a very small 1.63%. That's not a great success for the voluntary approach.
Since the Government is looking for green taxes - I can't help but think a tax on peat use might be a good one.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Sooty, yes it really is about the magnitude of the carbon stored in peat and the level of emissions. We should be very very careful about anything that affects peatlands. It is a fact that damaged peatlands are a source of carbon emissions whereas intact properly functioning peatlands are a sink, they absorb CO2 and do us all a great service. An 'ecosystem service' that we should all pay for but currently don't.
Temperate peatlands contain seven times more carbon than any other ecosystems and although peat only covers 3% of the worlds surface it holds more than twice as much carbon than all the worlds forest biomass. Peat is staggeringly important.
1.6% of the world's peatland is the equivalent of the entire global human green house gas emissions.
So for peats sake and for humankind sake lets not get complacent about peat use. We need to stop peat extraction, switch to alternatives and step up the pace of restoring damaged peatlands now.