Bringing Peat to Life

- free resource from me, Anna and the IUCN Peatland Programme.

Hello everyone! Let me introduce you to Bringing Peat to Life!

The resource emerged from a very busy and slightly boozy four days at the IUCN Peatland Programme Conference in Derry in 2025, just a few days after the publication of The Book of Bogs. Anna and I - with the wonderful bryologist, Johnny Turner - were there to lead conservationists and ecologists from around the UK and beyond in a daylong participatory workshop. about how storytelling, poetry and art can empower environmental action. Johnny led the group on a city centre moss walk, and even the torrential Northern Irish rain couldn’t dampen his infectious passion for moss, or the conviction I share with Anna that words enable change and action, or the commitment and knowledge of all the peat practitioners and experts in our group. We ended the day buzzing with an energy and an excitement that we wanted to share far beyond the workshop.

And this is the result!

This beautiful resource is available to download for free, and it was launched on the IUCN website at the end of May, with a guest blog from Anna in which she writes about how her love of literature has always co-existed with a passion for science and maths. It was a similar story for me. In quizzes, I loved showing off my knowledge of animals, science and literature which seemed to flummox everyone else in my family. As Anna describes, the world demands specialism - and it looks askance at anyone who mixes maths with poetry; music with botany, sports with opera.

But look, says Anna in her blog, at Leonard Da Vinci, or Omar Khayaam, or William Carlos Williams - artist, anatomist, inventor; astronomer, philosopher, writer; poet and doctor. Mixing our genres, our passions and proclivities can lead to astounding results.

In recent years, bodies of nature writing have broken free of the convention that their writing - in ornithology, for example, botany, bryology, dendrology - must be purely, wholly scientific and objective. The work of Amy Liptrot, or Jason Allen-Paisant, Elizabeth Jane Burnett, or Anna’s latest novel “Orca and Bird”, all blend memoir, self-disclosure and emotion, poetry and fiction, with scientific observation and ecological insight. It’s clearly a development with Anna and I both enjoy.

You’ll see this is in Bringing Peat to Life, which supports conservationists and scientists alike to write in the active voice - the “I” - making themselves present in their work, using sensory and emotional details to bring experiences or ecological phenomena to life. We’re not presuming that this more subjective and personal way of writing will re-shape academic writing, or that Nature will be filled with peer-reviewed poetry and fiction, but we do believe that a more personal, expressive style of writing is likely to engage, and persuade, a general public who remain largely unaware of the importance and value of peat.

That’s why the resource, in Anna’s words “aims to support everyone working in peat restoration and beyond to unite the science, data and other vital elements of ecology and conservation work with the personal stories and the beauty, humour and commitment which motivates us all, and which speaks powerfully to our readers, colleagues and visitors". As well as introducing practical strategies such as editing, story structures and using sensory details, it also includes personal storytelling from a range of conservationists and ecologists working with peat - like Dave Steele, who has recorded birds on the South Lancashire Mosses every single day, for years.

Words bring about change, in knowledge and attitudes, in minds and hearts, in actions. Our ability to write impactfully has a direct bearing on our ability to protect vulnerable habitats like bogs, moors and other peatlands. That’s why, at the end of the resource, we encourage readers to share it wherever they can - because “we want as many people as possible to know and care about peatlands, to realise what amazing and important places they are, and how vitally important it is that we look after them”.

Now we’re extending this request to you.

You can download the resource for free here: “Bringing Peat to Life”, and you can also read Anna’s blog here.

Coming soon:

June 16th, online - “Bog Time: a Wild Writing Workshop” with Clare Shaw. One of a series of daily Wild Writing workshops, running through June, co-facilitated with Miriam Darlington from 9-10am.

June 17th, online - “The World of Moss: a Writing Bogwise creating writing workshop” with Clare Shaw and Anna Chilvers. From 10am-12 noon: recording available for those unable to attend at this time.

June 24th, online - Emergency Dream: a Reading Bogwise event featuring reading from the author and activist Polly Atkin, in conversation with Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw. Free to paying subscribers, and just £5 to everyone else. From 7-8pm: recording available for those unable to attend at this time.