The humble plant that could save the world — or destroy it

Clean energy expansion could destroy this crucial climate solution.

Vox | Oct 17, 2025
By Anna North

The Hudson Bay peatlands are a haven for biodiversity and a powerful carbon sink. | The Water Brothers & Wildlands League

The largest herds of caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil, some of them more than 200 years old. And birds like the Arctic tern fly north every summer, some from as far south as Antarctica, to breed and lay their eggs.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.

Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.

Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”

“It’s the world’s temperature regulator,” said Valérie Courtois, executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which works on Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada. “It’s like we have a big fridge on top of the planet that is helping keep everything the way that it should be.”

But now, the fridge is hanging open.

Though they cover only 3 percent of the earth’s surface, peatlands store nearly one-third of the world’s carbon. And these ecosystems around the world are vulnerable to development and destruction. Today, only 17 percent of the world’s peatlands fall within a protected area, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The world’s peatlands are increasingly at the center of conflicts over resource extraction, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

In northern Canada, one of the biggest fears for peat conservationists is mining for rare-earth minerals. Part of the Hudson Bay peatland sits atop the Ring of Fire, a mineral deposit containing nickel, chromium, and other metals used in clean energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries. Some experts see the minerals there as key to Canada’s clean-energy transition and a crucial part of the fight against climate change. And it’s true; minerals like the ones found around Hudson Bay are necessary for solar panels, batteries, and other technologies we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

But in the process of mining them, we may just destroy a crucial climate regulator.

The government of Ontario, where the Ring of Fire is located, sees mining in the area as necessary for Canadian energy independence, especially amid President Donald Trump’s trade wars. “This is how we make ourselves less reliant on the United States,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this summer.

And already, the area’s peatlands are at risk from mining expeditions, which experts say have disturbed the ecosystem even though no mineshafts have yet been sunk. First Nations and conservation groups are working to protect the lands around Hudson Bay, but it’s a race against the clock as mining exploration ramps up with support from the Canadian government.

The carbon stored in the Hudson Bay peatlands took thousands of years to build up, said Lawrence Martin, director of lands and resources for the Mushgewok Council, a group representing several First Nations in the area. If it’s released now, it could take thousands of years to replace. And if humans want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we don’t have that kind of time.

“These are the lungs of the earth,” Martin told me. “If you start tampering with that, you have to be really, really careful.”