Miring in the Muck: Imagining Canada’s Regenerated Peatland

Abstract

It is time that we mire ourselves in the muck. Peat-producing wetlands are disappearing into the atmosphere quicker than arctic sea ice is melting into the ocean, and they are taking millennia of sequestered carbon with them. A strong aversion to peatland is embedded in Western culture, pervading myth, religion and language, unconsciously influencing our environmental worldview. The regeneration of Canada’s lost peatland is a re-initiation of the carbon sequestration process and an opportunity to reframe our relationship with these ecosystems. This thesis seeks to mire phenomenological imagination in restored peatland through dwelling, using architecture as framing device and interface between people and peatland. Everyday experience will be broken into programmatic fragments and redesigned, derived technically and poetically from the environment to inform a phantasmagoria of moments. Dwelling is used as a means of revealing the wonder of place and admiring the muck of the mundane.