A big part of creating a commercial cranberry bog involves dumping sand to speed and improve growth of the plants. Climate change is making the bogs on Cape Cod and the islands less productive so some are going out of business. The Boston Globe reports (story is here) that’s there a growing business in removing the sand and letting the bogs revert to being, well, bogs.
The bog is in the thick of a transformation that will undo more than a century of farming and restore the land to its native wetland ecosystem. Wetlands, an area of land saturated by water, reduce the impacts of sea level rise and coastal erosion by acting as a sponge that can absorb flood waters. They can also mitigate climate change by storing carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Both make them a key strategy for Massachusetts’ battle to adapt to and fight climate change.
The soil at what was once a 231-acre organic cranberry bog is being upturned, removed, and jumbled as part of a wetland restoration project supported by a $1 million grant from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The total cost of the project will likely be more than $3 million.
I have visited cranberry harvesting in the Cape – it’s a really cool process that’s well worth seeing. But unnatural.
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