permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Healing Hawk wrote:
> How long can the ecologically ignorant position that our
> behavior has no effect on anyone else hold up?
Okay, Tommy: I can't stand it anymore. The best I can say about the many 
statements you make like that is, on this list, you are preaching to the 
choir. Everyone here already knows this; that's why we're all here. But 
more often, these remarks are accusations toward people on this list, 
and that comes off as incredibly arrogant and offensive. So, please, I 
respectfully ask that you ease up on the unnecessary and condescending 
preachiness. It just gives truth to Che's dictum that "on the Left, we 
make our firing squads in a circle." I know a fair number of the folks 
on this list--for example, Rain, whom you demeaned for inquiring about 
efficient wood stoves and advised that a small electric heater (built 
with a staggering carbon footprint equivalent to perhaps 100 large trees 
or more http://anthropik.com/2005/10/*peak-wood*
and powered by a nuke or coal plant), would be a better choice for him 
than wood. I'd estimate that Rain's ecological footprint is smaller than 
that of 99% of the people in North America. He's conscientious and wise 
enough to find a source of regenerative, carbon-negative firewood, 
which, on this list, is the intelligent and supportive assumption to make.

There are a lot of idiots out there. But not a lot of them in here. 
Hurling insults and diatribes around in this small space isn't 
productive or informative. So if you gotta hurl 'em,  how about making 
sure they go "out there" somewhere, where they might hit a deserving target.
> Burning wood is a contributor to global warming, no matter where or how you
> got that wood.  
Not true. Anthropogenic global warming is caused almost exclusively by 
the net addition by fossil fuels to global carbon flows. You know this! 
Burning wood does not add to net carbon flow, since for a couple hundred 
million years, most carbon in trees has simply been a briefly 
sequestered part of natural carbon cycling. A tree burned in 1750 
(pre-oil) didn't add to carbon flux, so it's inaccurate to say that 
burning wood now adds to it, when the culprit is oil's addition to the 
flow (about 6.5 petagrams per year). Besides, total carbon flow from 
plants into the atmosphere is roughly 100 petagrams per year
(see, for example, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/OceansGlobalWarming.php 
<http://www.i-sis.org.uk/OceansGlobalWarming.php> )* 
*while the amount of carbon contributed by all human deforestation is 
about 2 petagrams, or 2% of that flow. And some tiny percentage of that 
2% is human burning of wood for fuel. Utterly insignificant for global 
warming, particularly since the carbon is properly part of the pre-oil 
carbon flux. Most deforestation is from logging and agriculture, so our 
food choices will have more of an impact on carbon than foregoing 
firewood.(Fuel wood is a minor source of deforestation, mostly in the 
developing world. For us loathsome urbanites it's a by-product of timber 
production.)

And particularly for this audience, the statement is wrong. Many of 
those I know here are planting trees and using the prunings for 
firewood. Result: net carbon sequestering. My own woodlot had three 
times as much wood in it after taking 2 cords a year from it for a 
decade, and the thinning sped the growth of the remaining trees. You are 
literally missing the forest for the trees, and not thinking 
systemically, by focusing only on the wood burned rather than where it 
came from.

(Just to be provocative, I'll point out that if we burned every tree on 
the planet, within a century, or probably much less, all that carbon 
would be pulled back out of the atmosphere and re-sequestered into 
plants, leaving a brief blip on global carbon flux and almost certainly 
no effect on global warming.)

It's my suspicion that while global warming will be hard on humans, 
nature will quickly figure out something wonderful and beneficial to do 
with all that precious, energy-rich carbon. CO2 and methane are 
incredible feedstocks. I'm curious to see how nature will use the surplus.

Wood is a near-perfect and regenerative storage of solar energy, and a 
small fuel woodlot can be a superb contributor to carbon sequestration. 
As Scott Pittman points out, an efficient, clean burning stove in his 
cold (New Mexico) climate needs only two small bundles of faggots a 
day--my urban yard of less than 1/10 acre (1/25 Ha) can almost supply 
that now in dead twigs while my trees grow and sequester far more carbon 
than that.

Wood isn't a good fuel for West Texas. But for much of the rest of the 
world, it can be about the best fuel around. You want to see more trees? 
Then use wood (intelligently, I don't need to add). That's the best way 
to see that trees, instead of being thought of as some idealized CO2 
storage machine or other easily forgotten abstraction, are nurtured and 
planted. Who plants more trees, by orders of magnitude, than anyone 
else? Timber companies. As rapacious and destructive as they can be, 
they know which side their bread is buttered on, and their land (as 
opposed to the "public" forests their subcontractors destroy) is quickly 
becoming some of the best and most innovatively managed forest I've seen.

And finally, using sustainably grown wood for heat forces us to live 
within our solar budget, which is not a bad idea.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com




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