WaPo: “Up and down the coast of North Carolina, as well in other parts of the Southeast, environmental advocates and wildlife officials have spent years working across tens of thousands of acres to reverse the toll caused by the network of ditches and roads that long ago altered a landscape critical to plants and animals, and essential to combating climate change.
Site by site, grant by grant, they have constructed a series of water control structures — some of them little more than aluminum or wooden risers installed across existing ditches — to help regulate the flow of water and maintain moisture across vast swaths of parched peatland.
“A big plumbing job,” Brian Boutin, director of the Nature Conservancy’s Albemarle-Pamlico Sounds Program, calls it.
And as scientists scramble to restore as much peatland as possible in this corner of the South, they are insistent that nonprofits and public agencies have neither the funding nor the manpower to do it alone — so they’re looking for ways to make it attractive for private landowners to become saviors of peat, as well.
While the basic idea is simple, the implications can be profound.”