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'Peak Wood' Offers Parallels For Our Time
Harperdog sends in a piece from Miller McCune looking back at the history of mankind's relationship with virgin timber. Again and again, civilizations have faced a condition of "peak wood," and how they handled it (or failed to) illuminates the current situation with regard to oil. The piece ends with a quote from the 19th-century social scientist and communist theorist Friedrich Engels, who is not generally thought of as an environmental seer: "What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind? ... Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."
You can't find 0.5ppm oil in some soil somewhere like you can with gold or uranium or neodymium or whatever fearmongering element you wish to be afraid about.
Clearly you don't live along the gulf coast.
I get "peak wood" looking at Natalie Portman.
I don't think there's any point being scared of redbaiting - the US right already thinks climate change legislation is a socialist plot.
I thought it was just that not burning coal made Baby Jeebus cry.
Similarly, most of the Republican Congressmen apparently require despoiling nature in order to stop thinking about underage boys long enough to satisfy their wives - thus, we need to drill in the Arctic. I predict a massive baby boom about 9 months from now, given the massive oil spill in the Gulf. :)
Of course, that probably won't happen until we blast the top off
every mountain in West Virginia to get cola.
Do we actually need to blast? Couldn't we just tell the locals there's free meth hidden 200 feet underground and let nature take its course?
I would be happy with your suggestion of using the term "local maximum" instead of "peak". Biological resources are renewable. Oil is not, and once you've used the resource, it's gone. You can't recycle burned petroleum like many metals. You can't regrow it like a southern pine plantation.
Peak Whale Oil, for example.
Should we be worrying about peak porn?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
As I get older, I wish I could get peak wood more often.
The point is this article has the phrase 'Peak Wood' right there in the title, and no one has scored above 3 with a joke about erections as far as I can tell. What the hell happened to slashdot?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I get "peak wood" looking at Natalie Portman.
I doubt she classifies as _virgin_ timber, however.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
You could just leave bowls of beer and whisky out in a forest and see what happens? :P
You end up w/ a bunch of (happily?) drowned gastropods.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
But now my girlfriend has gone to bed, and I better go play Mount & Blade while she cannot object.
I seriously thought that that was an euphemism to describe your sex life with your gf.
Out of my underpants. Thanks and good night.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Maybe he just reads a lot of Milton : that man was all about spaces before punctuation ; and blind.