Home | Friday 9th July 2010 | Issue 730
BOG ROLL OF HONOUR
Protesters in Manchester have been acquitted after an action against peat bog extraction. The Chat Moss site near Salford was the target of an action on April 15th in protest against the environmental impact of removing these natural, ancient carbon sinks – 94% of which have already been destroyed in Britain. Activists locked onto a peat extraction digger and the lorry it was trying to load to halt activity at the site, and two were arrested and charged under the Public Order Act Section 4a for causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ to the employees at the site.
After hearing from three peat employees about how ‘harassed, alarmed and distressed’ they were, the magistrate didn’t even ask to hear from the defence before acquitting the two, saying it was not more than an ‘irritation’. He also rejected a request for a restraining order on the pair stopping them returning to Chat Moss. Inside the court and outside were supporters from Save Our North West Greenbelt.
The peat extraction site at Chat Moss is owned by Peel Holdings, a powerful corporate investment firm in the north-west who also own shipping ports, airports, shopping centres and more, and have a large stake in UK Coal. Local public opinion is firmly against the Chat Moss extraction site, including the local MP and council, who are proposing a ban on future extraction and seeking to return parts of it back to wet mossland.
Chat Moss has been forming as a peat bog for up to 10,000 years. One part of it is an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), another is an EU Special Area of Conservation. It is also an archaeological site, with the discovery of ‘bog bodies’ preserved for millennia. Peat bogs like Chat Moss lock carbon into the soil and soak up further carbon, and disrupting them has a great environmental impact: in the UK alone, peat extraction causes 3 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year. Most of the peat from Chat Moss ends up in garden centres for potted-plant mulch.
* See ‘Save our North West Green Belt and Green Spaces’ on Facebook
