In this episode, I start by giving a shout-out to Duncan and Jim over at the Kunstlercast, and also by voicing support for KMO’s C-Realm. I give listeners a brief pitch for a new Permaculture-Albuquerque Meetup group facilitated by Agroinnovations.
I then go into a discussion of John Perlin’s book “A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization.” Perlin’s book illustrates nicely the concept of “Peak Wood”, a reality long before Peak Oil was even a possibility. Peak Wood is illustrated in different historical and imperial contexts, including Rome, England, and North America. Peak Wood and Peak Oil are sure to interact in the near future, and we must reassess our relationship to wood and forests so that we can manage our forest resources in a sane and reasonable manner.
Links:
Kunstler Cast: Food in World Made by Hand
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11 responses to “Episode #66: Peak Wood with Frank Aragona”
just thinking that if we all use wood to heat our homes, won’t that cause some problems with the air quality?
I think air quality will certainly be an issue, but ultimately it is about population. Massive gains in efficiency could be made with a true application of permaculture, but that would still probably leave us with a carrying capacity of about 1 or 2 billion people.
At that population, air pollution from wood burning seems much more manageable. Of course, we still must deal with the massive legacy load of CO2 in the atmosphere. It will be complex, and not pretty if we don’t voluntarily down-size as a species.
Very interesting show. Although I was at least aware of the situation in the Roman Empire with regards to the role of wood, deforestation and so on I was not aware of much else that you said. As an accompaniment to this program I would recommend the following lecture on the Mises.org web site by Joseph R.Peden on Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire. http://mises.org/story/3663 Although not entirely linked to the main subject it does seem to have relevance with regard to the our own economic situation in relation to environment and fuel. People seem to understand that the economy is bad but few make the link between the economy and the underlying supporting pillars.
I love the program and learn much from it.
Thanks
Trevor
Isn’t the air pollution primarily a matter of how the wood is burned, i.e. if the wood has enough air and the temperature is high enough it should burn without too much soot or carbon-monoxide. If the stove is well designed and the wood pre-cut and dried sufficiently the heat would be maximized. If then its heat is used efficiently again less wood would be required.
In Britain Wood burning stoves go along with a rather frilly middle class notion of exactly what being Eco Friendly involves.
When I was young in the sixties most winters we woke up to ice on the inside of the windows and getting out of a warm bed was difficult to say the least. But we survived the process and it did no real harm. One of the problems of modern society is that we feel walking around in a thin t-shirt in the middle of a hard winter is a fundamental human right.
It has so much more to do with conserving energy by not using it in the first place but of course that does not fit with the current economic paradigm of perpetual growth. Unfortunately the we live in an insane world where people spend half of their free time running on a treadmill like demented hamsters while they leave their gardens looking like jungles. How healthy is digging and hoeing and weeding. When you think of all the fuel that could be saved and carbon emissions that could be avoided if people just got out in their gardens and grew some of their own vegetables.
Just lately our councils have given everybody green bins for residents to put garden waste in which is trundled off every two weeks by a large truck using a lot of energy then processed into compost. Its like everything these days, another inappropriate use of technology. What about supplying everybody with a few bins for making their own compost thus no energy used whatsoever and thus providing a great FREE soil improver to grow lovely vegetables fruit and flowers.
By the way I’m not a Luddite, I think technology is great but I am truly fearful that most people believe and put their trust in the notion that NEW technology will solve all the problems we are facing today and by the time that they realize this is not the case it will be too late.
Even the technological revolution in car manufacture is on the most part green washing and a misplaced venture. The point being that while hybrids may give good millage they are ridiculously over engineered. If you want to increase your millage per gallon there are many small cars on the market that will achieve the same but with much less to go wrong and much less to manufacture. An even more revolutionary idea is to leave the car at home and go by bicycle or public transport(I’m speaking from experience). I also think their is some truth to the notion that car manufactures are driving the process towards ever greater reliance on more sophisticated computerized systems not to increase efficiency by any great amount but to ensure that repairs can only be done by approved garages with equipment designed specifically for those cars. Maybe we are seeing the resurgence of the guild system. This of course is energy inefficient because customers will do the sums and will scrap manufactured items long before they need. I have owned many cars in the past that were commercially uneconomic but with some knowledge, skill and a few pounds of sheet mild steel and an arc welder were made serviceable.
Rather than getting people interested in becoming part of the local solution by encouraging people help themselves, governments such as ours seem hell bent on dumbing the nation down in favor of a more Fascist solution. Everything is becoming a specialism and ever more E.U laws are being enacted to prohibit people from doing things for themselves. Soon it will be illegal to change a fuse. Rather than making things more serviceable, manufacturers are actively doing the opposite and trip to any local dump in the western world would inform us of that fact.
The amount of energy were are using to recycle and and re manufacture is staggering and serves more the interests of money velocity than the interests of the global community. While Politicians make noises about global warming they don’t propose to outlaw shoddy manufacture or to enact laws which force manufacturers to design products to maximize their serviceability or even just to make manufactures install battery backed up CMOS systems so that people don’t have to leave recorders and such like on over night. No, what they want is to maximize production while reducing the amount carbon blown into the atmosphere. So its like turkeys voting for Xmas. Once the great and the good have established the principle, manufacturing costs will gradually rise as the new costs are factored into process. Rather than this being a solution to our current problems I think, like the current bail outs of the financial system, it will be an attempt to buy a little more time before we have to face reality. Unfortunately the longer we leave it the more likely we are to enter reality with a crash rather than a nudge.
Thanks for all the great comments, guys!
Burning wood in log form to heat a house is INSANE.
Seen it done since I was a kid. Did it myself one long NY winter.
Biomass pellets are the only way forward.
Sweden knows this. Germany knows this. Some Canadians know this.
The US needs to wake up.
Small pelletizing machines exist. Local production could be a reality with a snap of the fingers.
The stoves exist right now.
Thelin Stoves make a wood pellet only stove that can run off a small battery and a single solar panel:
http://www.thelinco.com/
Bixby makes stoves that burn biomass:
http://www.bixbyenergy.com/stoves/products.html
This Cornell site will give you an introduction:
http://www.grassbioenergy.org/intro/intro.asp
That site is a little out of date though.
They don’t even know about the professional grade small Italian made pelletizing machines. Small US made units also exist.
You can make heating pellets out of sawdust, cold season grasses, ornamental grasses such as Miscanthus, switchgrass etc. These grasses are renewable season after season.
Check into the German videos on youtube. They grow fields of Miscanthus and use it to heat entire villages.
Get working on it. Lots to do!
To me it seems like a waste of resources just to burn the wood for energy. Isn’t it better to turn it into cellulose to make paper and packings, recycle that a couple of times and then burn it?
That said, I don’t think that burning logs is INSANE. Here in Sweden as koffeekommando says pellets are the big thing, but logs play an important role economically for small farmers selling it locally to friends and neigbours. A lot of house owners think it’s a good way to save money chopping the wood themselves. And remember the old saying: Wood warms you twice, when you cut it and when you burn it:-)
Using wood in construction of houses and buildings is a very good way of getting carbon out of the carbon cycle. First a tree grows for a hundred years, then the wood is used in a house for a hundred years, or even longer if the quality of the building is good. In Sweden we have a lot of houses made of wood that is more than 200 or 300 years old, rightly maintained they are as sustainable as buildings made from brick or stone. My local church for example is made of wood and was built in 1680.
I don’t know how I got off the subject so thoroughly. It sometimes happens when I’m worried about something else as I was the day I wrote the last comment.
Wood, Its great stuff, I’m a big fan of it.
Ok, Not much better but more on subject.
Trevor, all comments are good ones. Thanks for contributing.
I understand that peak oil is true and that we are now past the point of peak oil. I believe many of the current events have to do with this senerio and it won’t be long before the main stream media and population wake up and understand what is going on. For me and my family, we are preparing for the life after the crash.