For much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, peatlands sat awkwardly at the edge of public consciousness. Neither conventionally scenic nor easily commodified, they were drained, burned, planted over, or dismissed as wasteland. Only gradually did they come to be understood as systems of consequence: for biodiversity, for water, and, increasingly, for climate. That shift owed less to sudden revelation than to sustained, patient work by a small number of specialists who understood both the science and the politics of land.
Among them was Stuart Brooks, who died on December 11, aged 56. He spent much of his career explaining why peat mattered and persuading institutions to act accordingly. He was not the first to do so, but he was unusually effective at translating technical knowledge into policy, and policy into practice.
His professional life unfolded largely in Scotland, though he was not born there. Trained as a geographer, he encountered peatlands as a student and stayed with them as they moved from obscurity to prominence. In the 1990s he worked on raised bog restoration and helped assemble what was then a scattered body of practical knowledge. That effort culminated in Conserving Bogs: The Management Handbook, published in 1997, which became a standard reference for practitioners.
He later rose through the Scottish Wildlife Trust, eventually serving as its director of conservation. From there he moved to the John Muir Trust, first as chief executive, where he pushed the organization to articulate a clearer philosophy of wild land, and then, after 2017, to the National Trust for Scotland as director of conservation and policy. In those roles he oversaw everything from footpaths and buildings to deer management and climate policy, usually arguing that conservation worked best when it aligned natural processes with public values.
Peat, however, remained central. In 2009 he helped found what became the IUCN UK Peatland Programme and later served as its chair. Under his guidance, peatlands moved from being a specialist concern to a recognized element of national climate strategy. He represented the UK internationally through the Global Peatlands Initiative and was adept at explaining, without exaggeration, why a habitat covering a small fraction of the land could store so much carbon, and why damaging it was costly.
He resisted rhetoric. Peatlands, he once wrote, were a “Cinderella habitat”: overlooked, abused, and hardworking. They did not need romance, only care and restraint. His career was built on that premise. The result was not a single breakthrough but a quieter accumulation of protections, strategies, and restored ground, much of it still wet, dark, and doing its work.
