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permaculture - Fwd: [permaculture]Hydrogen, wood, peace, justice

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  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Fwd: [permaculture]Hydrogen, wood, peace, justice
  • Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 09:03:03 EDT


--- Begin Message ---
  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: john@eco-living.net
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture]Hydrogen, wood, peace, justice
  • Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 19:33:26 EDT
In a message dated 6/18/2003 2:40:19 PM Eastern Standard Time, john@eco-living.net writes:
Likewise, hydrogen energy systems are industrial non-living monocultures;
they don't 'stack' anything, and they consume great quantities of
non-renewable resources to (supposedly) benefit a small percentage of a
single species.

So implementing hydrogen as power source for those of us who *can* play
with these new toys leaves the majority of the world's people in the same
situation they're in relative to energy (and other) production systems -
poor, disenfranchised, exploited, co-opted, marginalized, used, ripped
off, colonized, whatever their various situations may be.

Okay, let's take a fresh look at wood, the "renewable resource". And let's not even look at it from our kids' world, with eleven billion people sharing this resource. Let's not even look at today's world with six billion, but at the world of 1960 with maybe half that many.

In 1960 most of the world was on a wood standard, and lived a life of austerity-- bare subsistence. They were admirably abstemious, without any luxury-- indeed without money. They were also without wood.

They had already chopped down all the forests within a one-day walk of their houses to cut house beams and pick up a few twigs and shavings for the cooking fire. Nobody threw any logs on the fireplace. In fact they didn't even much cook with twigs. They had to cook with animal patties, because there was no more wood.

Wood is not a sustainable fuel. It is in some place like New England, where the yuppies can buy a bundle of gourmet logs down at the grocery store, but those people don't actually have to cut down trees in order to get through the winter. If everybody in New England still had to do that, it would have no more trees than China does.

Because once you cut one down, you have to wait for a generation before you have another one. And when they start getting in short supply, your neighbors come over at night and poach your trees before they even get head high. We need a much, much better solution than wood. It only works for you, one person, when everyone else has a fossil fuel solution.

If we only had one or two billion people-- well okay, I would agree with you. We could sustain wood. But meanwhile, if you want to live off only renewable resources, make something out of tidal energy-- please don't eat the trees.

Mike Elvin


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