TUDU, EstoniaWhat looks like a typical Northern European forest of scrubby Scotch pine, blueberry bushes, and ferns, about 15 miles inland from the Baltic Sea, turns out on closer inspection to be a peat bog—one that’s been drained and mined. A 10-foot-deep drainage ditch, now covered in foliage, still fills every time it rains. Furrows reveal where heavy equipment cut the peat into rectangular blocks, about the size of toaster ovens, which were dried and later burned in homes throughout the former Soviet Union.

Juri-Ott Salm wants to bring the wet bog back.

“We are taking measurements to plan how big the dams are that we need,” he says, hopping into the ditch and plunging a five-foot long wooden stick into the