'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

I Hate to Be the One to Point This Out

[eldavojohn]

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.

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

[Grishnakh]

This is where the expression, "even a broken clock is right twice a day" comes into play. Just because someone had some other ideas that were bad doesn't mean all their ideas are bad. America's founding fathers, who any true American patriot reveres, weren't exactly correct on the slavery issue, after all, but they were very wise about many other things. No one is right 100% of the time; we all have our failings, or certain ideas or principles that aren't correct.

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

[Lord Kano]

From their perspective, we got where we got by burning our resources; if we don't let them do the same, it's Da Man keeping them down.

So what? They're developing nations. If the rest of the world says so, they have to abide anyway. I say this not because I think that the "world community" should be pressuring sovereign nations on how to conduct their economic business but to prove a point. If it's wrong to force them, it's wrong to force me.

Now, could you explain what motivation the "socialist plotters" have to exclude the developing world?

Fair question. Restricting emissions in the industrialized world will have a negative impact on heavy industry, manufacturing is the biggest example. It will immediately result in leading countries not being able to compete on the world market with "developing" countries. The amount of emissions won't be changed by much in the long term because all of the emissions that are coming from currently industrialized nations will in short order end up coming from developing ones. The clear result will be to depress the economies of developed nations while inflating the economies of developing ones, when the outcome is that clearly predictably it's not unreasonable to think it's the intended one.

China has an enormous capacity for industrial production but somehow China and India were exempt from Kyoto.

LK

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.

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

[mrogers]

Meanwhile, the socioeconomic evolution of the US is progressing in almost exactly the fashion predicted by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto...

Sorry, but that's just not true. Up until about 1945, things were looking pretty good for Marx's theories: increasing alienation and exploitation of the urban proletariat, a falling rate of profit, militant mass movements among the working class; but since 1945 we've seen a series of developments in capitalism that Marx failed to predict. That's not so say that Marx was an idiot, or that his methods were wrong - clearly, many of his predictions were correct - but if Marxist economics wants to call itself a science, it needs to accept that some of its predictions were wrong and that its theories need to be revised.

Here are some of the things a modern Marxist economic theory needs to deal with:

• Consumer capitalism. Since 1945, American and European workers have played a dual role in the economy: they're not just producers but consumers. The entire world economy is now dependent on the creation of artificial demand through advertising. Production is no longer the only important economic force.
• The managerial class. There's no longer a clear distinction between capitalists, who own capital goods such as machinery and run businesses, and workers, who sell their labour power to capitalists. There's now a third class: managers, who sell their labour power like workers, but whose job is to run businesses on behalf of capitalists. This renders the traditional struggle between workers and bosses increasingly meaningless in Marxist terms, because it's no longer a struggle between a wage-earning class and a property-owning class: it's a struggle within the wage-earning class.
• Small investors. The line between capitalists and workers is further blurred by the rise of small investors, who are typically workers in one business and capitalists in another. This doesn't mean, however, that workers now own the means of production: the structure of the stock market is such that one can be just as badly exploited by a million shareholders as by a single shareholder, while simultaneously being responsible for one millionth of someone else's exploitation. This split between worker and capitalist within the individual has grave implications for the idea of class consciousness.
• Globalisation. Factories haven't ceased to exist: they've just moved abroad. People in advanced industrial countries, who now have the collective political power to challenge capitalism, no longer see its ugly face. They're increasingly employed either in clerical jobs within international businesses, or in service jobs, making life comfortable for other clerical and service employees, as well as capitalists and managers, with whom they share a culture, a language, and a national identity. The idea that these people might side with the foreign proletariat in a revolution against their own neighbours seems increasingly remote.
• The welfare state. Another factor working against the kind of revolutionary explosion Marx predicted is the mitigation of some of the worst effects of capitalism by the state. This hasn't happened only in European "socialist" countries. Whether you see this as a safety valve instituted by capitalism or a series of hard-won victories by working class movements, the fact remains that between 1900 and 2000, the life of the average worker in the United States became a lot safer.
• Financialisation. Some capitalists believe they can escape the problem of the falling rate of profit by investing, not in productive industries, but in derivatives of other investments. We've recently seen the kind of economic instability this can cause. The questions now facing us are whether, and how, financial speculation can be controlled, and more broadly, what impact the increasing separation of profit from material production will have in human terms, and in terms of economic analysis.

None of this should be read

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.

Arguably, the timber examples are even less

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You're right. It's the floor.

[weston]

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?

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[starfishsystems]

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.

Re:Please don't use "peak" with regard to non-oil.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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).

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[gothzilla]

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!"

A: because it breaks the flow of a message

[DNS-and-BIND]

Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?

Re:Comparing apples and oranges

[cptdondo]

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.