Sphagnum moss is the most important plant for the peatland ecosystem. As its body simultaneously grows and decomposes into peat, it teaches us that new life and possibility emerge from decay. This wet, acidic soil creates the biodiverse home to many close-to-extinct species, purifies water, and keeps the surrounding landscape intact. The semi-decomposed plant-matter in peat soil stores a third of the terrestrial carbon – twice the amount of forests worldwide – even though peatlands only cover about three percent of the earth. In times of global warming the carbon-absorbing function of intact peatlands promises the possibility for a liveable future.
Considering that the superficial measurements used to map peatlands don’t quite fit their complex nature, their impact might be even greater. Especially in remote places, many potential peatland areas haven’t been mapped properly. This isn’t necessarily bad – traditional mapping is closely tied to colonialist mechanisms, and in many cases peatlands’ resistance to being mapped has protected not only themselves, but the human and non-human beings that find refuge in and around them. On the other hand, with an intention to protect and honour peatlands and peat-beings, tracing and bringing attention to what colonialism has tried to eradicate and invisibilise can also be a way toward decolonisation and repair.
I was confronted with the issue around the visibility of peatlands when trying to find out more about them in my area after my return home to northern Germany some years ago. At the time, I had already spent several years engaged in climate activism. The first time I heard about the importance of peatlands for the climate was while reading Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul on a bus full of fellow activists travelling to COP25 from Amsterdam. On that same bus were others who talked about peatlands. They were about to found RE-PEAT, a youth-led collective committed to change the narratives around peatlands, and engage in different projects, creative and educational, to restore and protect them in favour of environmental and social justice.
At a moment when many of us were burned out from the overwhelm of political organising, peatlands seemed to call to us from different directions, rooting us back into the soil and tangible change work. As Covid led me back to Germany soon after, where I went for walks along their traces daily, my newly gained theoretical knowledge and my deep love for my ancestral lands merged into a new passion. I decided to shift my research focus to my homelands which I knew encompassed peatlands and to join the collective work of RE-PEAT. It was only through the renewed focus on local land history that I realized the extent to which peatlands had shaped my and my ancestors’ lives and lands, even though I had long been familiar with places I assumed to contain peat soil.
One such place is the Uklei Lake. How many times have I sat by this lake in the forest with my dad, comforted by the peaceful silence, only interrupted by childhood stories of drowned cows, weapons and adventures on its dark waters. It must be a living peatland or at least contain peat soil still. But when I looked for it on the official maps, the lake wasn’t shown as a peatland, nor were other places I expected to find.
How can I find my more-than-human peatland relatives if I can’t see them? And what can their seeming invisibility or absence teach me?
‘We learned to be human in large part from the land and our other-than-human relatives,’ writes Daniel Heath Justice in Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, ‘and our humanity is enhanced and enriched by actively – and imaginatively – engaging them again and again in respectful relationship.’ How can I find my more-than-human peatland relatives if I can’t see them? And what can their seeming invisibility or absence teach me?
Mapping peatlands was often a colonial attempt at civilising or ordering their indeterminable nature that wouldn’t fit into the binary Western paradigm of death/life, wilderness/civilisation, soil/water. The colonial and increasingly capitalist Western society framed them as wastelands that could only be made profitable through either turf extraction or drainage, in order to ‘cultivate’ them as agricultural fields. Due to this centuries-long history of erasure and destruction, I can’t see many peatlands when I look for them, whether on maps or in the landscape.
I am interested in more than those large consecutive peatland soils mapped for big, often state-supported restoration projects. I care about the stories and wisdom they carry in their deep dark bellies, where time stands still and memories are preserved. Rather than reinforcing a flattened-out landscape view which reduces them to productive management projects, I want to honour them in a manner that might heal our relationship on a deeper level.
Apart from missing out on smaller and hidden peatland remains, contemporary mapping misses the cultural and spiritual entanglements, as well as the violence and displacement connected to extractivism, from earlier agricultural drainage to the contemporary trade of peat for the horticultural industry. Likewise, the complex interactions of peatlands with the global climate, different species, mineral flow and myriad other processes are missing. Conventional maps are not adequate to represent peatlands in their complexity. Could alternative ways of tracing or representing peatland remains help to visualise their wondrous details, queer entanglements and life-supporting processes?
If we are aware of peat deposits we can protect the peat by keeping it wet, so it can continue to ‘hold its breath for us’, as Dr. Magdalena Górska said at one of the ‘Peatlands and Grief’ workshops I hosted with other members of RE-PEAT recently. If we let those peat deposits continue to dry or the peat gets exposed though, they can turn into a carbon source. Bringing attention to such peat deposits by tracing and visibly representing them can thus be lifesaving.
On the other hand, there is the danger of reducing peatlands to a mere statistic as carbon storage. In RE-PEAT we believe that only when we get to the roots of the broken relationship we have with peatlands (which allowed for their large-scale destruction) and rebuild this relationship can restoration and stewardship be done in a sustainable, long-lasting way that is in alignment with social and climate justice.
The first challenge that comes up when looking for alternative ways of mapping is peatlands’ avisuality. In his 2005 book Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), professor of cinema Akira Mizuta Lippit describes the avisual as something that might leave traces but nevertheless remains invisible, comparable to atomic radiation. The remains that we can find after years of peatland destruction are not easily detectable, but rather traces of their existence or their attempted erasure. Neither can we see the peat soil’s workings in relation to the atmosphere even though they impact the state of the world.
So how do we render visible the avisual workings of peatlands on the global climate? And how do we trace their avisual remains? Is it possible to use the visual arts to represent them more holistically than traditional maps do? And what does the avisual reveal to us regarding the challenges and limits of visual representation?
In my own research, to first make out potential remaining peat deposits, I relied heavily on experiential ways of knowing to trace local remains and histories of peatlands. One essential practice for me was immersing myself in my environment through walking off track and looking for indicators of possible peat deposits. I had to get more intimate with the local land history which allowed me to get a sense of how much of the land could have been peatlands and what kinds of stages they go through. To be able to see potential peatland remains, one has to commit to actually getting to know them and their ecology.
I often have to look for the absence of peatlands to get a sense of their ghostly, ancestral presence and possible remains. There are indicators of peatland remains such as sinking houses, and street or place names including ‘fen’ or ‘moor’. Since most peatlands were drained, the top layers of soil might now look like a monocultural field. But beneath those layers, there might be remaining peat deposits. In some local birch forests around sand pits, I found weirdly shaped moon landscapes run through with tiny craters and – with the help of local storytelling – I realised that they were the remains of peat cutting. When I asked people from the area, they said that they used to go turf cutting for decades after World War II.
An elder from our village, Rosswita Richter, told me about the history of the Patengrube which is the old name for the Uklei Lake which I love so much. It translates as ‘godparent-pit’ which goes back to the history of the local earl once having taken on the godparenthood for every family’s fifth or sixth child. As a gift, the child would get a part of the Uklei Lake, which was probably less of a lake but rather a peatland.
Come to find out that the lake is not only important for my family as a kind of ancestral shrine but, as a living peatland, it is also a literal portal into the future which I fought for so desperately in the activist realm.
I could now identify the cut-off shapes and ditches around the lake as indicators of absent peat, as well as of possible remains beneath the lake and around. Looking at the lake with fresh eyes, I finally found living Sphagnum around its shore, the indicator of the peatland’s survival. Come to find out that the lake is not only important for my family as a kind of ancestral shrine but, as a living peatland, it is also a literal portal into the future which I fought for so desperately in the activist realm.
Tracing these living memories, I tried to connect the dots. There are several wet, boggy patches around. Maybe this peatland even used to span beyond the forest’s edges. There is a sandpit behind the forest which, like so many in the area, could have begun with turf excavation. You can sometimes hear the mechanical sounds of the monstrous machines echoing through the dense, dark walls of spruce, carried by the Uklei’s waters, resonating in the sound chamber of the peat’s absence.
If what we trace and try to render perceptible does not offer an image of itself, traditional modes of representation are challenged, and more questions arise. What else, alongside experiential methods like walking and local storytelling or simple photography indicating absence can help translate the avisual for human perception? How could we possibly represent the avisual workings of complex ecosystems like peatlands including carbon storage and the way carbon travels, transforms and impacts other places through art? Is it possible to translate the avisual into the visual?
RE-PEAT, has been working on a deep-mapping project whose scope extends from tracing peat exports for the horticultural industry and intervening where possible to imaginatively engaging the more-than-human by creating maps through direct perception of peatlands. To do so, we use microscopes and lenses to zoom into the peat’s tiny, star-shaped worlds and then we play with creating more-than-human maps.
If we let go of the capitalist desire to market our art, the art we’re looking for may lie in the mundane, in that which can’t be sold or easily consumed. Could the amateur practices I have engaged with be considered ways of mapping through the experiential arts of living? The way I massage the soil with every step as I consciously draw new maps while tracing the ghostly imprints of living Sphagnum amidst drained soil and sandpits. Maybe the uncivilized art we need today is not necessarily an object to look at in a gallery, but embraces the avisual, moving through the world in the awareness of all that is lost and could be lost, shaping, as Lippit writes, ‘our experience of seeing, a sense of the visual, without ever offering an image’.
The artwork not alienated from its subject may be the imprint of life in the soil that can’t be photographed but is recorded in stories. The way peat soil re-forms and at the same time preserves memories, lives, stories and bodies, in an altered form. As with the Sphagnum growing over the tracks that carry the myth of a drowned tank in my village, keeping an imprint while continuously living through it, growing over and from it, altering the print.
When living beings and ecosystems are frozen in a moment in time by reducing them to a still map, picture or painting, we not only risk failing to show the avisual, but we might also be reproducing a view which erases life’s complexity. The question for the visual arts is whether we can capture this complexity in the form of exhibitable representations or can we create living maps of complex entanglements and histories?
Maybe it is time to decentre our individualised, competitive artist or author perspective and shift focus toward the more-than-human as a collective of artists themselves. In his essay ‘Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes writes that meaning is produced through the reader interpreting and engaging with the text and the different contexts and connotations flowing from it. In a similar way the more-than-human can be seen as both artist and artform, creating variable, living meanings.
Through this way of looking for art and meaningfulness in the more-than-human, a relationship based on appreciation can be established. Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes that gifting our attention to plants and appreciating their gift is what keeps them alive. In times of ecological collapse, returning to the arts of living and walking in the forest to give plants and ecosystems our attention can support their liveliness which is the basis for our own lives and the future of a habitable planet.
Dark Mountain: Issue 28
Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world
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