Before Peatlands and after Peatlands: RE-PEAT five years on.

Written by Bethany Copsey and Frankie Turk

Looking back now, it’s clear that September 2019 is a sort of BP and AP situation for a few of us: before peatlands and after peatlands. It is funny looking back now to that legendary excursion, and how we came up with the name re-peat jokingly on the bus ride home (we would soon learn that the peatland world loves a pun!). Since then, as RE-PEAT started to take shape and more people became enveloped into the peaty world other moments of BP/AP appeared, as a sort of time-travelling multi-perspective starting point.

Over the course of the last five years together, we’ve learnt a lot more about peatlands. We have travelled across land and sea to visit them, listened to memories and built our own relationships with these landscapes. We’ve seen the importance of finding playful, metaphorical, collaborative, and imaginative ways of relating with peatlands and sharing their peculiar values. In return, the peatlands have guided us through explorations of grief, deep time, intergenerational thinking, migration, extraction, cultural symbols and more.

It’s also been a tough journey, navigating the legal and administrative tasks of setting up an organisation, balancing RE-PEAT work with our studies or other paid work, realising that there was no way this funky and ambitious collective could be squeezed into our lunch breaks, weekends & evenings, and getting totally excited about potential projects while writing applications, only to have our dreams sit on the shelf for the next round (and the next round). It’s also certainly been much more time spent in excel sheets, zoom rooms, funding documents, and online webinars than the constant peatland adventures we may daydream of.

So then, half a decade in, here are some reflections and thoughts on how it’s been so far to create a community around peatlands together and to stay connected online, through fluctuating capacities and life changes. Each one is linked to a particular aspect of peatlands that we find inspiring or resonate with.

LAYERED

Peatlands are made up of layers upon layers of partially-decomposed organic matter. These layers can extend meters below our feet. These ancient layers of underground peat create a foundation for new life to appear above ground, until before long they too get sucked into the earth.

Since the beginning, we have been supported by the wealth of knowledge and the passion of people who cared for peatlands long before we arrived. Without these older mentors (you know who you are!), words of encouragement, and peatland histories, we would have definitely found it harder to take root. Then there are the early starters in RE-PEAT, those who (without plan or prospect) dedicated months, years even, of their lives to create something that would bring about positive change. These pioneers built a base where others could join and bring their perspectives, ideas, energies, experiences, and methods to the team. Thus, this process of being grounded by those who came before while giving space for fresh shoots, is something that we have learned and value.

POROUS

Peat is a complex, highly porous material, which allows for the movement of water. Water is vital to peatlands, and in turn peatlands play a major role in global water cycles.

Starting a collective with a group of people who are also studying, working and travelling meant that we have had to design systems that allowed for a flow of capacities, and an ever-changing variety of ongoing projects. On the one hand, this ability to ebb and flow was vital to our formation, allowing us to move with peoples lives, rather than people moving their lives with the work. On the other hand, it has been a challenge to keep everyone in the loop and on the same “wave-length”. We found that being in always flowing water can be quite ungrounding for those who are trying to take rooted in the group. This is why, like the peatland, we have slowed this fluidity down by exploring contracts and looking into ways of leaning into already established projects and activities.

MOSTLY FLAT

Peatlands take different forms, amongst them blanket bogs, raised bogs, and fens. Fens are often found in low-lying flat areas, while raised bogs are domes of peat that sit above the surrounding landscape.

SEASONAL

Each season comes with different effects and sensations on the peatland, with varying levels of precipitation and peat growth, with flowering, spawning, hatching, and some moments where the plants die back and turn to peat.

Rather than trying to keep a constant level of ambition throughout the year, we have embraced the natural (and cultural) seasonal patterns, creating a rhythm to our year that is divided into quarters with more space left in winter and summer. Yet, perhaps even more significantly, up until this year we have been blessed with conditions that have allowed us to grow as a collective, welcome new people into the fold, increase our ambitions and receive enough funding to pay for these things. Now, looking into the future, there is certainly some more stormy weather ahead. As we face 2026 with less funding than we had anticipated, the prospect of scaling-down our activities means that we need to find new ways of staying resilient together. This uncertainty requires us to tune even deeper to where we are all grounded: as individuals, as a team, and in a wider movement pushing for a better future. It also asks us to look back and analyse what the big learnings have been.

THRIVING IN DECAY

Coming back to the first point of decay. On a meta level, peatlands often form in places that many consider to be “uninhabitable”. Here, in these harsh environments, they take root and create a place for strange creatures to reside in and even flourish.

Somehow, this seems to resonate with the state of the world right now and the need to create small pockets that can take hold and support new ways of living and thriving together. We hope that the work of RE-PEAT can make a difference for the peatlands themselves, and can also continue to nurture a culture of care for those who do not fit into the mainstream or need some respite from the dissonant state of the world right now.

As we look forward to the next five years of RE-PEAT, it’s hard to know exactly what’s in store, but as we keep changing and developing as an organisation, we know we’ll keep turning to peatlands for guidance.