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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."
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.
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.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
"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.
only to those too stupid to leap ahead with out thinking.
it is only renewable if it is used in such a manor.
One just needs to look at Easter Island to see how "renewable" trees were to the natives.
Please stop using "Peak" when referring to non-oil resources. Wood is renewable. The production of wood can be sustained, or can be engineered to increase over time, depending on management resource. You can't do that with a finite resource like oil. And don't use the term for mineral resources either. You can almost always find another deposit, with a slightly lesser yield than the one you just mined. That continues until you are mining the ocean for elements. It's a matter of how economic the resource is to mine. Oil is none of that. 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.
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.
If someone came up with a grand unified theory, you'd say, "so, the universe functions a certain way. wow."
and this isn't merely that "shit happens." It's "short-sightedness causes shit that could be prevented from happening."
An earthquake, a volcano, a hurricane, an asteroid strike...these things are "shit that happens." Deforestation, global warming, pollution...these things are made to happen.
In that the societies mentioned were consuming much faster than the resource could renew itself, I think it to be a valid comparison. Nothing mentioned in the article involved replanting of trees, to my knowledge, but maybe someone knows differently.
Or, someone could read about the idea and see it is considered bunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
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.
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
The problem is that our economies work on much shorter timescales than trees. If we destroy all the forests, our economies collapse and people starve or relocate. Sure, a couple of generations later the forests may regrow, but that's a lifetime or more to humans. Worse, forests only regrow if you put a lot of effort into planting them properly. Left to their own devices, they don't; a few trees may regrow, but it takes millenia for a whole forest to regrow from a few trees by natural reproduction. Humans have only started replanting forests within the last century at best, and then mainly for business purposes (timber harvesting), using fast-growing trees.
Yes, exactly.
There was no option for the natives of Easter Island to plant new forests, once the last tree had been felled. There was no potential renewability for them. They couldn't even build seaworthy craft to go in search of seedlings. In a word, they were FUCKED. And they did it to themselves.
So every historical and archaeological record that bears on how we handle the extremes of resource management is instructive, insofar as it tells us about our patterns of past successes and mistakes.
We live with a finite set of resources at the bottom of a massive gravity well isolated by millions of miles of hard vacuum from anything else at all. We are consuming many of those resources at an unsustainable rate. If we don't want to end up like the people of Easter Island, we'd better not take any of it for granted.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
It doesn't work quite like that. There's lots of oil reserves that haven't been discovered, and also some that have, but are not cost-effective to exploit. As the price of oil increases, those reserves will be exploited. Tar sands are one example of this: they require a lot of energy to process and refine (unlike light sweet crude), so it's not as profitable as better-quality oil.
Of course, if the price of oil triples, making many of these reserves profitable enough to exploit, that price alone is going to cause other problems, probably causing people to seek out other sources of energy.
And also, this doesn't take into account the environmental cost, as we're seeing with the BP disaster. And aside from the incalculable environmental cost, the cleanup has a giant cost too, which is going to figure into companies' plans as a giant risk.
Easily, sure. Quickly? I think not. In a time when businesses operate quarter to quarter, it takes decades to grow a tree and a century or more for the most valuable hardwoods. Old growth trees are still being cut. Why do you think this is?
Why is is it that every time there's a weird theory floating around, someone comes up and says "The Russians did it/are using it, so it must be true", without there ever being a shred of evidence for the Russians either having used or done it?
Is it because it is so far away, or because some people can see it from their houses?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
That is set to reverse. The price of wood has dropped so low here in the south that many timber companies can't afford to stay in business and the huge plots of land they grew trees on are in danger of being sold. If that happens, they will most likely be cleared for development or cattle and will never again grow forests.
I live in an area surrounded by forests that are planted and cleared for use by lumber companies and paper mills. We fear the closing of lumber companies because it will mean our forests will start shrinking.
The really sad part about it, is the huge number of enviro-nutbags that want lumber companies out of business in a completely backwards effort to "save the forests."
I really want to get a tshirt that says "Save the trees! Use more paper!"
Or selfish enough to know full well - and do it anyways.
Then think energy, not oil.
The oil we're using with such wild abandon is valuable to us because it is comprised of densely stored solar energy from millions of years ago.
That's not a lot different from using lumber stored in forests, and when the stored item runs out, we're reduced to using the much less dense renewable versions.
It's not impossible, but it does take more effort than simply collecting the stored versions.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
As Jared Diamond says in Collapse that's not true! There were smaller and smaller trees re-growing and the island being covered by great trees were just a distant memory. It did not happen like 'dense forest -- all big trees felled - - barren' but rather gradually and slowly.
Sure, WOOD is renewable, but FORESTS are not.
What I mean is that man cannot create the complex ecosystems that exists in a forest. And we are more dependent on these ecosystems than most people realise. Reference: "The Revenge Of Gaia" by James Lovelock. It's a really good book.
Actually, rats will push a button that sends an impulse to their pleasure center, and ignore food, sex, etc... Monkeys will easily get addicted to alcohol, some drugs, etc...
I think that the average human is still less likely that the average rat to die of hunger and bed sores because of an addiction. But now my girlfriend has gone to bed, and I better go play Mount & Blade while she cannot object.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Any time these conversations come up, the only real solution (reducing the population to about 2 billion) is ignored by everyone.
Which means, we really are not going to solve the problem before it blows up in our face.
Reduce the population to 2 billion and the earth becomes verdant and rich within 50 years.
It's possible to peacefully reduce the population to 3 billion in 50 years. Just stop saving people who have more than 1 child per 2 parents and stop providing tax incentives for second children.
But it's not going to happen. We are going to 9 and probably 11 billion people with all the hell that results from that.
By my current math, it happens a little while after I die.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Not sure where you got your quote from, but it wasn't from the link you gave, and the entire site doesn't hold a single reference to Yukos. Not completely surprising, because it is the webpage for International Continental Scientific Drilling Program - nothing to do with Yukos. Not to mention that drilling a super-deep well has nothing to do with whether the drill probe found an economically viable field.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Look up thermal depolymerisation - changing organic waste into long-chain hydrocarbons can be done using fairly straightforward refinery processes (cycles of controlled changes in pressure & temperature). It's a fairly artificially-accelerated process (since we don't have millions of years to wait for the oil to come out), but it does show how patterns of changes in pressure & temperature can create long-chain hydrocarbons from basic organic waste.
How many of those particles should we find, as a percentage, of any given biological mass? 1%? .0001%? Does that account for the quantities of He found accompanying natural petroleum deposits?
Probably not. There's no need for the oil source to be the same as the Helium source. The most likely source of all the helium in a petroleum deposit is the radioactive material in the rocks in and below the deposit's formation. For example, the amount of Americium found in your smoke detector creates 30,000 alpha particles per second, a kilogram of Uranium ore produces 25,000,000 per second (scroll down a bit to see the activity rates table in the linked reference). Since alpha particles are equivalent to ionized Helium nuclei, ore and mineral deposits that generate alpha particles are basically Helium sources. The Helium migrates upwards until it's trapped by the same formation that prevents the upwards migration of underground hydrocarbons.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
This is exactly what is happening. As well as exploiting third-world workers in sweat shops we are knowingly exploiting future generations.
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
Gimme a break. That's because there's no such thing as a "cocaine lever" in the wild. If you did have piles of cocaine around (very small ones so it didn't kill them immediately), rats or any other animals would probably get addicted too. As someone else has pointed out, pets can become addicted to alcohol.
which is totally what she said
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.
For some reason reading the words "virgin timber" and "peak wood" makes me want to break out in song.... "Ohhhh... He's a lumberjack, and he's okay. He sleeps all night and he works all day. "
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.
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.
So what do we do then ? We all know our parents (or "babyboom generation") and their parents are responsible for the really excessive "borrowing" from nature. When they started, world population was less than 1.5 billion people. Worse : those 1.5 billion people lived a lot more efficiently than us (not that they knew, there just wasn't sufficient energy. Nothing makes a man quite so frugal as an empty wallet), so "efficiency" increases, barring getting nuclear fusion plants operational, aren't going to help us get above that 1.5 billion.
If this is true :
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.
Then we're about to lose 3 out of 4 people worldwide to genocide, war or hunger. Including 1 out of 2 Americans. But the countries that would be truly fucked in this case would be Europe and Africa.
What I don't get is how this can even get discussed ? Surely anything -anything- is preferable to losing the large majority of world population ? Add to that, the "sticky" question : who dies ? We all know how the question of "who dies" is going to be answered, since it's just the same as ever : with wars. If you lose, you get exterminated. If you don't fight, and are lucky enough not to get attacked, you starve to death. Anyone in favor of that ?
And before anyone says birth control, please remember "birth control" will only have real results in 50 years, and 90 or-so if birth control is done in a sustainable manner (meaning there is both an upper and a lower limit to how many babies we get to have). And even if you do compulsory birth control, who gets to have babies, and what do you do about "over the limit" babies ? Or perhaps more directly : how do you kill "over the limit" babies ?
Seems to me that unless you want every state world-wide to start it's own holocaust, you'd advocate the solution of funding every man with an idea about power generation. Funding it, not just through academia (who have a somewhat tarnished track record here), but more along the lines of : if a dog comes with a napkin with an idea, give him 1000$ for it and see where it goes.
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.
Except they aren't countries.
P.S. why do you leave that space before question mark? It's fucking retarded.
actually there has already been an experiment that demonstrated the converse rat park
which appeared to demonstrate that addiction in rats was as much related of their being held in tiny cages, as to the inherent "addictiveness" of opiates
the funding was withdrawn, and doubt cast as to Alexander's integrity
one could speculate that it is not popular opinion that the way to reduce drug dependance in humans is to improve their general quality of life, such that they don't feel the need to compulsively take drugs in the first place
I certainly don't believe that there's no choice in addiction, though some people do have much weaker wills than others. That's an interesting study, and I identify heavily with your last sentence. I find it sad that so many people feel they need to resort to heavy drinking to actually "enjoy" a night out. I even find it even more sad that so many people are addicted to sugary junk food. A lot of society today is so dull that people need to entertain themselves with what they ingest rather than what they do.
which is totally what she said
Add to this that as a species we desperately need land for food cultivation. We don't have enough right now, even with advanced farming techniques, to feed everyone.
This is utter nonsense. There is enough food for everyone, people in developing countries are starving because their dictators are diverting that food to fuel their petty armies.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
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!
I live in an area surrounded by forests that are planted and cleared for use by lumber companies and paper mills. We fear the closing of lumber companies because it will mean our forests will start shrinking... The really sad part about it, is the huge number of enviro-nutbags that want lumber companies out of business in a completely backwards effort to "save the forests."
I'd suggest every time you feel an urge to assert an absolute of some sort, you take a few seconds and reconsider.
The "forests" your favourite lumber company has planted (so full of form and colour from afar), is a forest only in the loosest definition of one. I'd suggest "a collection of trees". The enviro-nutbags have a point, one that's easily recognised by someone who's been in a forest, or otherwise knows what the term "monoculture" means and what its implications are.
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.
Out of my underpants. Thanks and good night.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource.
To be pedantic, petroleum *is* a renewable resource, only on a time-scale much larger than the human life span :)
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.
I guess I'm one of those "nutbags" who hikes regularly through some of those replanted forests. There's a lot of difference between a healthy forest composed of a variety of trees, and a monoculture stand of genetically selected fast growing softwoods.
One supports a variety of life and is a pleasant experience with animals and the sound of birds; the other is a wasteland with mostly insects to keep you company.
Taking out a large sitka spruce that may be 600 years old and replanting three seedlings is not an equivalence.
If our forests are "growing" why is the timber industry pushing to get at the few remaining stands of old growth forest? Just harvest the three trees you planted last harvest season. After all, that's 3 times the trees you will find in the old growth forest.
No doubt there are plenty of examples of leaping without looking, and leaping while knowing everyone else behind is going to get screwed.
But there are also a lot of times when the full impact of an act can't be known in any practical way. Nature is extraordinarily complex and many very high order interactions can have serious long term consequences. For instance, farmers are finishing up planting here in the midwest. Once again the guy I lease my farm ground to cannot bring himself to understand why I make him leave 10 yard untilled perimeters around all my fields. To him that is just leaving money in the fields. When 'clean farming' first became popular no one thought that it would wreck the quail population, but it does, unless you purposely leave transitions.
And if your fencerows are too clean you hurt the rabbit population.
And with fewer quail and rabbits you have fewer hawks.
Fewer hawks to prey on, say turkey chicks, means more turkey.
More turkey attract more larger predators like coyote.
So I have coyote everywhere because of clean farming. And I left out many dozens of other factors. That natural resources are anything other than inexhaustable is a relatively recent development. For the above, Game Management was published in 1933 and wasn't taken seriously until some time later. As far as widespread application of research based management methods the same time frame applies to forests and waterways and minerals and petroleum and wetlands and etc etc.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The issue is not the term "peak" I believe, the issue is the definition of renewable. We think of things like wood as renewable resources, but if you overuse a renewable resource, you can indeed collapse the population. We saw with whale oil in the 19th century, its production peaked in 1845. The reason for this was that whale populations had collapsed, and to this day they have not quite recovered for many (most?) of the species that were hunted. There was also that petroleum oil thing for which they started to drill.
The point is that whether a resource is renewable or not is a relative term. It's relative to the rate at which you are consuming it and the rate at which it is replenished. Petroleum oil, on a geologic time scale, is renewable. On a human time scale it is not. Whales were being consumed much faster than they were reproducing, so the resource became non-renewable (each year there were fewer and fewer whales). Wood is the same way, you see it again and again in ancient societies, that the ability to sustain themselves is dependent on availability of wood. Once the population gets too big and consumes all the wood in easy transport distance, the civilization is finished.
Do you see any hope that the U.S. can transition itself off of petroleum oil? I have my doubts, but I have no doubt that sometime in the first half of the next century oil production will stop increasing, if it hasn't already. Here's hoping for massive wind farms, solar arrays and good batteries (and nuclear).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Maybe he just reads a lot of Milton : that man was all about spaces before punctuation ; and blind.
It would be great if it were that honest.
Some dictators starve their populace on purpose to receive foreign aid.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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.
Well, I find it pathetic that people actually waste their time going out and polluting the environment with their cars, when they could be staying at home watching the walls melt! What's wrong with those people, that they have to seek enjoyment from the filthy, disease-ridden outdoors?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)