In this episode of the podcast, I welcome back the topic of Peak Wood and John Perlin’s excellent book “A Forest Journey”. This time John Perlin himself joins me to talk about his book and its many facets. Topics of discussion include the role of wood in civilization, our perceptions of forests through history, the relationship between forests and language, and the parallels between Peak Wood and Peak Oil.
Useful links included below:
Purchase the book on Amazon.com
Agroinnovations Episode #66: Peak Wood
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7 responses to “Episode #68: A Forest Journey with John Perlin”
Very interesting discussion indeed. I have ordered a copy of the book and I’m looking forward to reading it.
These two podcasts (#66 and #68) have opened my eyes to the the multiple roles biomass has to play in the post-oil society. It will have to feed us and warm us, be the basis of our housing and packaging, run our cars, trucks and tractors. Forests, in addition to produce useful biomass, will have to provide areas for recreation for humans and insure biodiversity and wildlife habitats, All this of course requires vast areas. And now you tell me that it’s questionable that lumber is not a renewable source… …that is very troubling news indeed.
In the end of this podcast John Perlin talks about super insulated houses, so here is a link to an article in the Guardian about the fist so called plus-house or Active house in Denmark. There is one built in Sweden as well and several in Germany I believe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/21/active-house-denmark-zero-carbon
Most troubling is our inability to use resources wisely. Frank Rotering argues that this behavior has a biological basis. See the most recent episode of the C-Realm podcast:
http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/2009-11-04T09_07_38-08_00
Thank you very much for the two recent features on trees. Nice to see another ‘peak’ other than oil being discussed and introduced. I find the historical perspective in this look at forestry, trees and the energy-resources derived from them as important and valuable. Are we learning anyhting from past forestry practices? Hopefully we can learn not to repeat these mistakes and see how best to proceed given the unprecedented and varied collapses emerging now.
How do we weave climate change and other environmental shifts already taking place today into a sane, successful and adaptable forestry for the long haul?
I would like to bring the following article to the attention of those interested in the theme of peak wood and natural building. The piece is from the November 4th, 2009 NYTimes and is about using whole tree lumber, including small(er) ones, for building. The article, “Building With Whole Trees” can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/garden/05tree.html
David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture, takes a visionary and wise approach to trees and an intergenerational forestry in his seminal book, “Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability”, especially for the theme of slow wood or long rotation forestry. Just as important as this is the fast-rotation, expansive, pioneer, early succesion trees, but also those that hug waterways and are flood patterned and thrive in these violent crash-rebirth environments. Also something important in his work is the consideration of the length of time required for forestry to unfold and be successful. This is a challenge given that nowadays anything that is of long term seems out of reach or not taken very seriously. Trees are important examples of Holmgren’s fifth permaculture principle which suggests using & valuing renewable resources and services. Mollison refers to this same principle as using biological resources.
Bill Mollison once wrote an article on soil, trees and CO2 in which he referred to soil as the graveyard of the forest or vice-versa. It fits in with the above discussion by realising the value of trees as biological, self-organising systems, which also build soil, sequester carbon, regulate climate, hold the watershed,… If anyone has seen this article or knows where to get it, I would appreciate hearing from them.
Some concerns I have in order for forestry to flower are:
1. access to land for forestry, without necessarily being the owner (whether through partnership, ownership or communal land).
2. tenure or security of land, considering the time scale required for forestry if it is to be truly renewable.
3. community approach where there are interested or willing people contributing/collaborating in different ways to maintain regenerative, economic and useful forestry.
“Trees are, for the earth, the ultimate translators and moderators of incoming energy. At the crown of the forest, and within its canopy, the vast energies of sunlight, wind, and precipitation are being modified for life and growth. Trees not only build but conserve soils, shielding them from the impact of raindrops and the desiccation of wind and sun. If we could only understand what a tree does for us, how benficial it is to life on earth, we would (as many tribes have done) revere all trees as brothers and sisters.”
–Bill Mollison, Permaculture Designer’s Manual. Chapter 6: “Trees and Their Energy Transactions”.
Keep up the great work Frank.
Louis Laframboise
Ottawa, Canada
Perlin is not much of a conversationalist huh? At one point he was saying that since we haven’t got infinite land, we can’t have infinite wood, so we should instead build superinsulated houses and develop wind/hydro/solar, and I quote, “because once the sun stops to shine then humans will no longer, uh, inhabit the planet”. I’m sure his real feelings on this are a bit more subtle? We don’t need infinite wood, just a few terawatts. Of course it’s renewable, it grows like gangbusters! We’ve released so much prehistoric carbon recently, that material could reforest several earths over. Time to coppice like it’s 1399. 😛
Also, Frank, come on. Don’t belittle the deep/abiotic fuels people by saying they want to drill into the middle of the earth for oil. It’s already proven that enormous methane deposits exist at much greater depths than from known carboniferous geology. It’s accessible to human beings, we’re still just talking about the interface between crust and mantle here. It would obviously be ridiculous to tap that energy and use it to power further luxury consumption here on the surface, but don’t dismiss its existence. You sounded like some old Vatican astrologer talking about Galileo: “Ridiculous, this guy thinks the Earth orbits the Sun! In an ellipse! Are we funding this quack?” Time to restudy your extremophile microbiology and nanogeology.
To assert that nuclear power is foolish, we don’t need to deny the existence of uranium. Don’t question the existence, because the question is still under investigation. Just attack the motivation — which is timeless in its idiocy.
Also, one very fine Bill Mollison article on this topic is Yankee Permaculture Pamphlet #10, “Forests in Permaculture”. Less annotated history than Perlin’s book but a lot more actionable intelligence. Apparently all pamphlets are public domain — 155 pages of awesome. Hard to find on the interwebs:
http://www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org/PDC_ALL.pdf
I don’t belittle or question the existence of deep abiotic fuels. I’m intellectually agnostic about the subject, though somewhat intuitively skeptical about it. The point isn’t whether or not they exist, but whether they can be economically extracted. Just like wood that was far from waterways in the 16th century, abiotic fuels are probably too deep in the earth to be economic, at least with any technology we can expect to have over the next 30 years or so.
Frank, what you said in the interview was, and I quote parts of the passage:
“Yes and it reminds me of the ridiculous argument … that ‘the center of the world is oil, it’s filled with oil, if we could just get to it’ … it seems pretty ridiculous that we could drill down to the center of the earth and extract oil …”
So you are misrepresenting the “abiotic” hypothesis, even though its most common form is so retarded you don’t need to dumb it down to poke fun at it! If instead you said “it’s ridiculous to extract methane from near a mid-oceanic ridge” then at least you’d be painting the right picture.
You say: “The point isn’t whether or not they exist, but whether they can be economically extracted.” Wait, what? That’s not the question man — don’t underestimate the human will to drill. It’s whether extracting that material would be _sane_. It would not! The surface cannot handle any more carbon emissions, let alone free methane. We need an awesome sink for all that material before we exhale any more. Gotta be a timeless P2P, open-source method of carbon capture/cycling… seem to remember something about this… maybe starts with a W… formed in a being called a T… grows in a clump called an F… 😛
Drilling will not happen if a business case cannot be made for it.