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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
only to those too stupid to leap ahead with out thinking.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!"
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.
Or selfish enough to know full well - and do it anyways.
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.
Yes, because every single time our ass is in danger, miracle/breaktrough will happen. Right.
In related news, Easter Island had quite a lot of success with "new resource will come along that made all the worrying about the dwindling resource irrelevant." strategy.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Exploitation by itself is not a problem.
Even wild animals "exploit" nature. Hunting and foraging both take away resources, and animals breathe out CO2 all the time.
Ever seen a beaver dam?
Nature was designed to be exploited, within reason, since she has mechanisms for restoration and recovery.
The problem comes when we exploit too much and hamper recovery efforts.
Similiar to how you start having cash flow problems when you raid revenue-generating capital.
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.
Well, yes and no.
The mistake you're making is treating all timber the same. The timber that 'peaked' in the 19th century (and is now nearly vanished) took centuries to grow. The timber we harvest every few decades today, well it took only a few decades to grow.
The differences between the woods are immense. Wood from virgin forests (as opposed to modern managed farms) is extremely dense, with many more growth rings per inch. Wood from such forests, both hardwoods and softwoods, are much stronger and longer lasting. (Even taking into account selection bias, this is the key reason we still see wooden structures from decades and centuries ago still standing.) Not to mention the wood varieties that take centuries to grow in the forest aren't available from managed tree farms at any price.
This mattered a great deal back then, when wood filled so many niches that steel, concrete, and plastic fill today.
So yes, it's a valid analogy. Don't be mislead by how we take poor quality wood as the norm today.
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.