When Ireland’s Bogs Become a Climate Time Bomb—and Who Gets to Remember

The Bogs That Remember What We Forget

Ireland’s bogs are burning. Not in the way you’d expect—no wildfires, no dramatic footage for the evening news. They’re being drained, mined, and erased, one millimetre at a time, at a rate that outpaces their 1mm-a-year growth. Beneath the surface, they hold 10,000 years of history: human remains, ancient tools, even entire forests swallowed by time. Now, they’re also holding something else: a mirror to Britain’s climate hypocrisy.

Photographer Shane Hynan’s Beofhód (Irish for "Beneath") isn’t just a visual elegy for these landscapes—it’s a political provocation. His images force a question the UK government has spent years avoiding: What does it mean to erase a land’s memory while preaching climate action? The bogs, covering 14-17% of Ireland, are carbon sinks so potent that their destruction releases centuries of stored CO₂ in a geological instant. Yet the UK’s net-zero rhetoric rarely mentions them. Why? Because acknowledging their value would mean admitting that the very industries propping up rural economies—peat extraction for fuel, horticulture, even whiskey production—are accelerating the crisis.

The Climate Change Committee’s warning this week—that weakening net-zero policies would "disrupt business and damage the economy"—rings hollow when the bogs are still being treated as disposable. Nigel Topping, the committee’s chair, frames the issue as one of investor confidence. But the real disruption isn’t economic; it’s cultural. When a bog is drained, it doesn’t just release carbon. It erases the evidence of how people lived, survived, and died on this land. That’s not just an environmental loss. It’s a historical one.

The Artists Who Refuse to Look Away

Camille Farrah Lenain’s Made of Smokeless Fire is another kind of reckoning. Her photo book documents queer Muslim life in France, but its emotional core is grief—for her uncle Farid, a gay man who died before she could ask him the questions that burned inside her. The project is a reminder: memory is political. Who gets to be remembered? Whose stories are preserved? And who decides what’s worth mourning?

The parallels to Ireland’s bogs are impossible to ignore. Both are archives of the marginalised—queer lives, rural communities, the working-class histories that official narratives often overlook. Both are being erased, not by accident, but by design. The difference? The bogs are also taking the planet down with them.

Alok, the Brazilian DJ, is trying to square this circle. His new live show, Rave the World, is an attempt to reconcile the carbon footprint of global touring with his climate activism. "There’s a way to fly mindfully," he says, before admitting he no longer owns a private jet. It’s a start, but it’s also a contradiction that defines our era: the people most aware of the crisis are often the ones most complicit in it. Alok collaborates with Indigenous artists and funds reforestation projects, but his industry—dance music—is built on fossil fuels. The question isn’t whether he’s a hypocrite. It’s whether any of us can avoid being one.

The Mountains That Might Save Us (If We Let Them)

While the bogs drown in neglect, scientists are turning to an unlikely ally: mountains. A study in the Journal of Geophysical Research suggests the Alps, Pyrenees, and Baetic ranges could hold vast reserves of natural hydrogen, a potential game-changer for industries struggling to decarbonise. The catch? Extracting it would require drilling into some of Europe’s most fragile ecosystems.

This is the tightrope the UK walks: between exploiting new energy sources and protecting the ones we’ve already destroyed. The government’s net-zero U-turns aren’t just about investor confidence—they’re about which landscapes we’re willing to sacrifice. The bogs? Easy. They’re already half-gone. The mountains? That’s where the real fight begins.

What’s Left When the Land Is Gone

Clive Davis, the record executive who shaped pop music for half a century, died this week. His obituaries will focus on the stars he launched—Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin. But his real legacy might be simpler: he understood that culture isn’t just about what’s new. It’s about what endures.

The bogs endure. Or they did, until we decided they didn’t matter. Now, as Ireland’s peatlands vanish, we’re left with a choice: Do we mourn them as relics of the past, or fight for them as warnings of the future?

The answer will define what kind of memory we leave behind.