'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

Abiogenic Petroleum

[hsthompson69]

It's also quite possible that petroleum products do not come from buried organic material, but are created as methane is synthesized deep beneath the earth's surface, and it combines into more complex hydrocarbons as it percolates up. The Russians have been working this theory, very successfully, for decades. "Fossil" fuels may not really be made out of fossils at all.

Re:In other words

[Ethanol-fueled]

Only humans are arrogant enough to believe that they're "above" the other animals.

When do you see a monkey choosing cocaine over food in its natural habitat?

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

[DarkOx]

Consumption in the West has got to fall by a significant amount, whilst consumption in the Developing World should rise.

Why should this be the case? On what do you base you claim that consumption should rise in the developing world? Why should the western world have to give anything up. I can just as easily argue the current situation is our manifest destiny; and I will.

When it comes down to it me and mine matter much more to me then theirs and them; I am for keeping things as they are.