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.
I agreee totally with jockeyshield. Wedholme Flow National Nature Reserve and others in Cumbria have been rewetted to such an extent that breeding populations of lowland grouse have been made locally extinct. Wedholme Flow is now a vast lake used by roosting geese and swans . There have been upto 600 whooper swans roosting here and with excessive nitrates introduced from excreta there is no way that sphagnum mosses will thrive. Glasson Moss National Nature Reserve has been blanket sprayed with herbicide to destroy birch, but bog myrtle and heather has also been destroyed . What was a fantastic wildlife site with thousands of orb web spiders and feeding dragonflies is now a wildlife desert. Biological diversity is being destroyed to gain a few points in order to get a bit more government cash. This is not wildlife conservation it is political and economic manoevering