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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."
Life has unforeseen consequences.
Engels (as in Marx & Engels) is one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto and largely a lot of the Communist doctrine. To use a quote from him and his research to debate oil usage would be pure suicide on a political realm because your opponent would have an easy time pointing out that a socialist -- possibly one of the earliest socialists -- did research to point out the horrors that Capitalism wrought upon the environment. The resulting suggestion for Cap and Trade or retarding economic growth in the name of environmental consciousness would be taken up by the opposition as the evil socialism from the old enemy of Communist USSR and readily gobbled down by the older American people. Because it's fairly common for the American people to choose to see things in black and white where someone is either 100% wrong or 100% correct. Complete and utter bullshit but that's the logic the summary will invoke and it would be impossible to use this logic in any sort of debate. To further this comparison in the United States at least, you'd do better to just re-research Engels' work looking at Peak Wood instead of trying to quote or cite him.
My work here is dung.
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource. We can plant more and within enough time for it to be economical there is more timber. For oil to be a renewable resource we are going to have to bury a lot of organic material for a long time.
Enigma
"What lessons from the multiple experiences of Peak Wood can today’s society learn for addressing global peak oil?" - On the surface it would seem that the lesson is that eventually a new resource will come along that made all the worrying about the dwindling resource irrelevant.
Heartening than they appear. Oil, unless you subscribe to one of the abiotic origins/provided by Jesus to empower the American Way of Life(tm) theories, is in more or less fixed supply. The exact number varies based on the price and the available technology, which dictate exactly how crazy the techniques are that you are willing to use to get at the stuff; but it is more or less fixed. You can't have "sustainable" oil production by making sure only to harvest adult oil and restore any juvenile oil you accidentally catch back to its natural habitat.
Forests, on the other hand, are a population, not a mineral resource. If you are willing to forgo some short-term profit, you can generate modest returns more or less in perpetuity. If you aren't, you'll find yourself with a fancy new lunar resort. Anyone who destroys a biological resource isn't, as with a mineral resource, simply reaching the inevitable sooner rather than later, they are effectively pawning an annuity for pennies on the dollar.
With oil, the only real questions are 1). "Will we invest some of the convenient energy and chemicals in finding another source of the same before the first runs out?" and 2."How far will we go, in terms of sacrificing other resources(ie. drilling in the middle of highly productive fisheries or digging up large chunks of canada and boiling it down for tar) in order to secure that one?" There is no question of whether or not we will be "sustainable"; because, for mineral resources, there is no such thing, only a question of how fast you want to dig up the supply you have.
Peak Whale Oil, for example. Of course, the rising cost of whale oil led to the development of new technologies and new sources of energy - like kerosene.
There are many, many, many examples of people pointing out the impossibility of then-present trends continuing. Of course, if trends can't continue, they won't.
If you want an American patriot as an example instead of Engels (communism! gasp, shock, horror) take a look at Gifford Pinchot. An early leader of the Conservation movement, first Chief of the US Forest Service, quite a guy. Peak timber, peak ore, peak coal - he wrote about 'em all, back in the day.
While it's well and good to be aware of these things, and the market tends to reward those who make some smart bets on that basis - human beings have always found ways to satisfy their wants. Some are more sustainable than others, but necessity is the mother of invention, and sustainability/entropy is really only a concern when faced with a finite "universe." Technology is the key that gets us out of that box, and if we have to consume resources in order to make new ones available to us, well - such is, has been, and will be life.
by design; we do not conserve, we consume.
Tens of millions of Farmville players would like to disagree.
Okay, seriously: As near as anyone can tell, organised human society became possible with the rise of agrarian societies, so stewardship and resource management are rather central to the human condition.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource.
True. The question is -- if we tend not to do well with even renewable resources, how well are we likely to do with exhaustibles... at least, without some greater discipline than we've got now?
Tweet, tweet.
Your point sounds more plausible than it is: Biological resources(wood, fish, etc.) are in principle renewable. That is, there exists one or more courses of actions that allows a steady yield in the very long term, or even increased yields. However, in practice, if a human population cannot adhere to one of those courses of action, they will deplete the biological resource(sometimes just to the point where it is no longer economically relevant, sometimes to the point where the remaining population is no longer self-sustaining, and becomes permanently extinct). In fisheries management, for instance, it is a simple point of fact that we have hit, and passed, "peak" yield for dozens of wild species. Same goes for really nice big chunks of hardwood. We have plenty of structural steel, and crappy pulp-pine; but anything that took 200 years to grow is getting thin on the ground.
Since, (barring extinct species with no DNA on file), one can always, at least in theory, restore a population back to its old levels, or above, and exceed the "peak", we can refer to it as a "local maximum" if you wish.
As for oil, it is actually pretty similar to other minerals. In many respects actually more convenient. Oil is, basically, a very convenient source of energy, and hydrocarbons in chemically convenient configurations. The entire planet is absolutely covered with at least one, often both, of those, just in less economic forms. Solar, wind, tidal, plants, worms, poor people, etc. The problem isn't that we are going to run out of energy, or run out of hydrocarbons; but that we will run out of convenient energy and hydrocarbons. This is pretty much exactly the same game as other minerals, where the problem isn't running out; but having applications that used to be viable being priced out.
"Scarcity" rarely means that there is literally no more of something. It just means that some people can't afford it. More scarce means that more people can't afford it. That's the problem. Supply isn't a binary thing "oil exists = all is well" or "neodymium has disappeared = apocalypse". Supply is a matter of degree. If the cost of the cheapest watt goes from X to X+1, the scope of activity that you can afford just shrank. If the cost of a gram of the element you need goes from Y to Y+1, the same.(worse, since most flavors of mineral extraction require energy, when the cheapest watt goes from X to X+1, the cost of every mineral will increase).
If you're going to call something bunk, try to cite a reputable resource.
Except that peak refers to production, not reserves. Yes, trees continually replenish themselves (as some argue oil does). However, the cheap trees are gone, and (like fish stocks) the cost of increasing production is extremely high. The fewer trees there are, the less rapidly you can grow more to increase production.
"Peak" is an entirely appropriate term to apply to oil production, timber production, fish production, whale oil production, coal production, natural gas production, and any number of other natural resources that are being harvested at faster than their replenishment rate (at a viable price).
Just because some morons say that there's no such thing as peak oil because there's plenty of oil left sitting around in fields impossible to exploit doesn't mean that we should all change our terminology.
No, it's exactly the same, at least the comparison of mineral and oil deposits. There's lots of oil deposits that are too costly to exploit at the moment, but will become profitable as oil prices rise. It's the same with metals mining, where it's starting to become profitable to mine the ocean floor. There's all kinds of resources that aren't exploited because they're too costly.
Wood really is the same; sure, you can regrow it, but it takes a LOT of time to do so, and it takes investment. Forests don't just grow by themselves; it takes millenia without any disturbances for a few trees to reproduce into a forest. To regrow a whole forest in a generation or two requires a fair amount of work by humans (cultivating seedlings, and planting them) which costs money. It also takes up land that can be used for other things, like agriculture. So if you overharvest you run out of wood until a new forest grows 30 years later.
And yes, you can find oil in soil. It's called tar sands and oil shale.
Nonsense. You can find oil almost anywhere. It's a byproduct of biomass. You probably have at least a litre of it in your kitchen in one form or another. So the argument that "peak" is a term to be reserved for non-renewable resources means that it should not be applied to oil either.
In fact, the notion of peak production has to do with sustainability: that is, the relative rates of production and consumption. Resource exhaustion is another topic entirely.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
It won't enable green tech. It will just make expensive sources of energy relatively cheap. It will also devastate the poor when it happens too. We have to use whatever energy is the cheapest and most abundant. Not doing so is a death sentence to people who don't make that much money.
Green tech will take off when someone figures out a way to create energy that's more plentiful and cheaper than oil, coal, or gas. Until then it's simply not viable. Our current "green" tech can't even survive on it's own without subsidies. It's nothing more than the stuff of fantasies.
Look around you. I bet you can't find a single thing that was not made with nor shipped with oil. Green tech will never completely replace oil. It's one of the most useful resources we've ever found. It won't be replaced until we invent star trek replicators.
From alpha decay of radioactive isotopes, same as most helium?
So, you're saying we're going to brick the planet?
The main problem is not the growing population, but rather the growing demands of a small segment of the population.
Amm ... a society with one child per family may not be sustainable. You are making the same mistake everybody that thinks that there is an obvious solution. ... maybe some of his great grand parents.
... but what's another expensive lesson between enemies (I mean cohabitants of this planet) ?
...
Imagine in a few generations a single great grandchild will have to support his parents and their parents and considering life expectancy
That would be 6-10 people plus him/her self.
To add to that, it is western society that desperately needs more youth. Third world countries are having population problems.
Finally the earth has ample resources to go on if only we where fair and efficient. Australia can support 200 million on the coast alone. 2 billion if you green the desert. You can green the deset if you have energy. You can get clean energy from nuclear fuel. This at the cost of the natural environment, but then the aboriginees changed that ahead of us as well.
The above is oversimplifying it, but the solution will find us do not worry. We will probably damadge the environment before we do so
PS: I may be guilty of what I accuse you
This is exactly what is happening. As well as exploiting third-world workers in sweat shops we are knowingly exploiting future generations.
While it is somewhat true to say that the USSR was never a true communism, that is more or less the same as the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. You are right in that it didn't function precisely how it should on paper. However, it is in fact how all communisms implemented in the real world have ended up.
The reason is because communism does not take real people in to account. Real people are lazy and greedy. There are exceptions to this in various circumstances and for various people but over all, yo find this is true. As such, any economic/social system has to take this in to account. If you give everyone free choice to do whatever they want, and have all their needs met, well then many will choose to do nothing.
The only solution in a communist system is to force people to do what is needed. You tell them "You must work or the state punishes you." Then, to make them work hard you tell them "You must meet these quotas or the state punishes you." Net effect? Low personal liberty, low motivation, and the perfect environment for a police state to grow in. The government has to be involved in everything since the state owns everything and has to keep tabs on people. In that controlling environment, a dictatorship/police state is easy to grow.
So sorry, communism may sound nice on paper but it has never worked in the real world on a large scale. As such, without evidence to the contrary, I'd say it is pretty safe to say it won't work. Capitalism, at least when subject to some regulation and control, works. It allows for societies with high individual liberties and where most people have their needs met. It's not perfect, but no endeavor involving humans will ever be.
Also if you really think that social class per Marx exists in America today, it tells me you spend far too much time absorbed in a philosophy you want to be true, and not enough time examining the evidence. The biggest difference is that there is complete class mobility. Nobody tells you that you are limited to the class in which you are born. Doesn't mean you can move up the economic ladder with ease, but it does mean you can. There are countless examples. This is far different from the system of nobility you saw in places like Czarist Russia where if you were born a noble, you were one and could more or less do nothing to lose it, and if you were born a peasant, you could never rise above that. In the US people can move up and down depending on what they do in their life. You can go from living on welfare to super rich, and indeed it has happened.
Another difference is that there is not a "rich/poor" divide. For sure there are rich people, who can have a kind of life normal people cannot, and there are poor people, who lack basic necessities. However most people are neither, they are somewhere in the middle. They have their needs met, have some autonomy and independence, but still work for a living. The middle class is where most of America is. You can also further divide that middle class in terms of how stable someone is in it, how many assets they have and so on. It is not a bourgeoisie / proletariat divide.
Finally there is the simple issue of definitions of rich, middle, and poor. What they talked about when they talked about poor was abject poverty, lacking in even the barest essentials. That is exceedingly rare in the US. Our poor are not, by the standards of much of the world and history. They do not have everything we consider essential, and they must rely on help, but they are not attempting to live through subsistence farming (which happens in much of the world).
To me, it sounds like you've spent far too much time reading philosophy and not enough time looking at the world, and its people. Communism is a neat idea, but it is not a better system.
Probably not, it would just mean that the nations that didn't control their population would control the nations that did.
Exactly. Just like Africa is totally dominating the world economy right now.
Population growth as a strategy for dominance worked a lot better some centuries ago. Knowledge, weapons, machinery and resources is much more important.
If you mean the rise of slash and burn and then chemical / biotech centric farming,you'd be straight on. We're still far from the rosy picture you're trying to present of us being stewards.
Odds are pretty good that a major pandemic will prove to be the solution. I'm convinced that the collective intelligence of the viral and bacterial comunnities exceeds that of our species.
That's what I'm saying - agriculture is a necessary precursor to city building.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Not just Easter Island either. Scotland USED to have quite a dense pine forest until it was cleared for farming by humans. That meant the soil got poorer and now many places are UNABLE to support trees where there used to be loads of them.
You can plant trees and reap the timber in just a few decades. You can plan to create new oil, but the process takes 50 million years. There's a slight difference in practicality between the two.
We've become exceedingly good at forest management (except in California where they're so concerned about saving the poor underbrush that they'd rather burn down the entire forest, along with San Diego, than properly manage their forests). Timber is a renewable resource, whereas we are pretty sure oil is not.
We can manage timber to avoid "peak wood," but we cannot manage oil to avoid "peak oil," if such a thing exists.
Amm ... a society with one child per family may not be sustainable. You are making the same mistake everybody that thinks that there is an obvious solution.
Imagine in a few generations a single great grandchild will have to support his parents and their parents and considering life expectancy ... maybe some of his great grand parents.
No, you, sir, are making the mistake everyone makes. In game theory, it's called the Horizon Effect: where you fail to make the move that produces the best long-term result, because you aren't looking far enough ahead to see the disaster that will ensue if you keep on minimizing short-term losses.
Yes, lowering birthrates will mean that the generation that decided to have only one child per couple will have fewer children and grandchildren to take care of them. *Not* lowering birthrates leads to a world where natural resources are so depleted that your large number of grandchildren will have nothing to support you with.
We're already collectively screwed; the longer we stay in denial about this, the worse the pain will be when starvation forces population growth to zero or less.
A couple of things here:
Every day we delay fixing our energy problems, the consequences get worse. But hey, at least ExxonMobil, et al, are making a lot of money, so there's that.