The Venice Agreement on Peatlands: locally together for hope*

Facing an undeniable climate and biodiversity crisis, we may tend to think that there is nothing more than an obscure future…and that such a dark and dry future is the best one we can aspire to.

We even have been taught that the future is something we don’t have the key to knowing. Or creating.

But the truth is that after our collective 600 years of learning, experiencing, imagining, and constructing, we actually know how the future can be ignited and transformed into infinite possibilities. And we can do so by conserving our peatlands locally, now.

Today, Global Peatland Day in 2022, we are bringing here a plan: The Venice Agreement. A memory of a future that can be. A compass to get lost in the finding of new worlds, new imaginations, and new futures.

Today The Venice Agreement starts to exist. The wisest, truest, most committed, most

experienced, most tangible, most real, most diverse, and, above all, the strongest call for the recognition, appreciation, and effective care of peatlands in each territory of this planet.

We aspire to The Venice Agreement can help free peatlands, can help them be seen in plenitude, help them to remain alive, and get involved in conversations that must never end: between peatlands, between people and peatlands, about possible futures, and future human well-being.

The degradation of our planet and its peatlands may ultimately be the failure of imagination, eclipsed by accountability systems that are not able to account for what really matters. And peatlands matter. By capturing carbon, they matter for climate change mitigation. By storing and purifying water, they matter for producing food, materials, and medicines.

By being, they became our ancestors, and in the future, they can sustain lives and livelihoods forever.

The tyranny of quantifiable distinguishes what can have monetary value, over those things we cannot assign value: private over common, efficiency over enjoyment and quality of life, utilitarian over the mysteries and means, and the treasure of having a purpose, being courageous, to make human life worth living. Through a collective work like the Venice Agreement, we invite each one of us to live the infinite lives of biodiversity and nature. Forever.

The tyranny of language is in part the failure of language and the speech to describe complex, subtle, fluent, and ubiquitous phenomena of life. Like peatlands. The Venice Agreement invites us to create new languages to name those things that need to be named. Things that need to be known if we expect to live, and let peatlands live a good living around the globe.

The Venice Agreement is full of stories, like mine, like Randy’s, like Hans, like Camila’s and Nancy, Suzanne, Jane, Jan, and so many others, who gathered here and around the world to share, and who now start to become part of an explosion of former silent stories, who can now be told, be learned and exist all over the world.

The Venice Agreement is released today. And like Pandora’s Myth, it is released to the entire World, locally. Unlike that Myth, Hope is what we are releasing first, along with knowledge, inspiration, love, and joy. Thanks to our commitment, unlike that old and well-known story, all these virtues are never to be put in a cage again.

Celebrating Global Peatland Day today, we invite you to join and add to this peatland protection movement on this vast planet of ours. We invite you to dissolve the cultural, financial, and social barriers, and assume the evident ecological fact that we all depend on nature, and the ethical/practical need to care for peatlands.

Let experience be bigger than knowledge. Let different experiences feed different "knowledges". Let peatlands feed our futures. Let peatlands be our future. Everywhere.

I thank you all from the deepest and darkest of my peatland heart.

*Closing speech presented for the launch of The Venice Agreement, Venice, Italy, June 2, 2022.