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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Healing Hawk doesn't do enough observation

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Healing Hawk doesn't do enough observation
  • Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:35:36 -0700

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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