'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."

Comments

Collapse by Jared Diamond

[slagheap]

The book Collapse by Jared Diamond (who also wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel") covers several historical cases of societies that collapsed. Deforestation is the main trigger that comes up in most of the stories. He also makes parallels to our current relationship with oil.

Re:Abiogenic Petroleum

[modmans2ndcoming]

Or, someone could read about the idea and see it is considered bunk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[Martin Blank]

Forests in the US have been increasing for almost the past 60 years. More wood is grown than harvested by a ratio of 3:1, and significant acreage has been returned to forests, in part because more responsible timber farms have been created over the decades. We may have at one time reached peak wood, but usage and growth patterns changed, and that is no longer the case.

Other nations may have problems with their forests, but the US is not one that does.

Re:I Hate to Be the One to Point This Out

[Rogerborg]

explain how Germany is the world's second largest exporter, behind only China

1. By value, not by tonnage. A BMW costs more than 10 Chinese motorcycles.
2. China (or Korea or Malaysia) manufactures the components. The pollution happens there. Germany then imports them, pays a man to program a robot to stick them together, and charges a 500% markup on the component price because the end product is Made In Germany.