Seems as if you're not alone.

I was speaking to Adam Porter last night, and he was relating how the real effects of $40 oil were finally reaching the rest of the economy right now because of the long lead times in global economies.

And people are already talking about making concessions on forestry practices.

What happens next year?

I rather suspect that people choosing between food and heat, aren't gonna give a flying rat's ass if it's Eco-friendly or not.

Yup. I fully expect us to drill ANWR, the Florida coast, even the White House lawn if there's any hope of finding oil there. And burn coal, even if the air turns black and kills people, as happened in Europe in the bad old days. The trees we don't cut down will probably be killed by acid rain.

Not that I expect many trees to escape. Heck, we've had trees cut down and stolen from our yard in broad daylight. Pines, for use as Christmas trees. If people are willing to do that for a flippin' decoration, what will they do when it's fuel for heat and cooking at stake?

Crude oil has been over $40/barrel for more than 480 days now.

I think we are looking at different sides of the same coin - of course you are correct in your assesment of the average large single tree. Although many speices of pine around here will far exceed that growth rate thats probably accurate for the hardwoods. We have a type of oak around here (gamble oak - aka scrub oak) which grows amazingly fast and comes back from a ground cut even. It makes a pretty good firewood even though it is usually less than 5 inches in diameter because you can just cut it to length and then use it (no need to split). It can be difficult to get started but if you start your fire with pinon or juniper then throw on the oak your'e in buisness. The scrub oak are ~10-20 feet and spindly and grow in large clumps. You can cut randomly half of the clump and the ones you cut at ground level will be 2-4 feet high in one year. Most of what is growing (at least on my lot) is being added at the canopy level. Not a lot of sapling due to shading (except with the scruboak which don't seem to care). But when one large pine tree succumbs to drought or insects you can be looking at half a cord right there. I think I had 4 die last year, and I only cut 2 down. You wouldn't even notice it though since there are hundreds in this 3 acres alone...

-G

Yeah, I guess we are.

This is a topic of more than passing interest to me as I have an aging propane boiler (tankless system that provides both heat and domestic hot water) and I'm trying to figure out whether I should replace it with an outdoor wood furnace. I have about 8 acres of forest but it is reverted pasture land that was "high-graded" about 15 years ago -- so it doesn't have top quality timber on it.

Working from a ballpark figure of 1 cord per acre per year of woodlot productivity, I was trying to decide whether the outdoor wood furnace would be anywhere near sustainable (ignoring the materials & energy that went into the production of the furnace, of course). Certainly, I could see going through eight cords per year if I didn't burn propane. So, it could be close in terms of producing enough wood on my eight acres, over the long haul, to fuel my wood furnace.

I remember reading once how much wood the average colonial American family burned for fuel each year and while I don't remember what that figure was, I remember being astounded by it. I recall that it was in the tens of cords of wood per year.

Are you looking to use this for total house heating? Or just domestic hot water? Depending where you are you could offset a lot of the heating with a solar thermal system in addition to the wood boiler. Since the colonials used wood for all fuel needs (such as cooking) and thier insulation and house designs were not very efficent I suspect that figure is not far off.. In a heavily wooded area I think 1 cord/ yr/ acre is not unreasonable. If you have an area with lots of field you could plant favorable varieties of trees for wood production.

-G

I'd like to use it for both -- though from April through October, I really don't need whole house heating (we do have a conventional woodstove). Then, it becomes questionable whether burning the outdoor wood furnace during the warmer months just to supply domestic hot water makes sense (I'm sure it doesn't). So, a solar hot water system for all domestic hot water might be the way to go (in which case, I would only burn the outdoor furnace from, say, November through March and it would supply mostly space heat though I imagine that I could pipe the solar domestic through it while we were sitting out one of our legendary Nor'easters). Something to consider, I guess.

As far as planting some sort of fast growing tree (pine, poplar), I need all of the open space I have for food (veggies, tree fruit/berries, green manure).

I'm also a bit leery of the potential wide-scale adoption of wood monocultures that could wreak havoc with the local ecology.

To quote that most sagacious of TV personalities, Beaver Cleaver: "There's something wrong with just about everything."

Here in Melbourne everybody routinely burns River Redgum, which burns very prettily and makes a good coal bed.

Shame alot of it is cut from the banks of our pretty crook inland rivers (the Murray, Loddon, Campaspe, ..) by farmers desperate for any kind of cash (since most drought aid goes straight to the banks); i believe this based on conversations with >dozen farmers doing exactly that and observation of wood sold in city.

Its actually often illegal for farmers to clear this native veg., under laws supported by many city folks, but nobody wants to put 1 & 1 together because it would mean more expensive BBQs for city folk (which would be downright unaustralian), and incidentally be another icepick in the ear for small farms.
Makes me wonder about the millions of tons/yr of woodchips we export, but mostly i just try to guess if the oil will decline in time to leave any trees.

After Peak Oil hits and people start fighting over the remainders, we're going to have more and more people express the opinion, as has been expressed in this thread, that 'public land' belongs to them and that it's their right to do with it as they will. No offense to anyone here but I believe that this attitude is disastrous and will make the long term effects of Peak Oil magnitudes worse.

More and more environmental protections will be 'eased' further and further. You've seen how quickly we're willing to do this over what are currently small-scale crises, compared to what we have in store for us. A couple of decades after the Peak this continent, and probably all others, will be completely trashed by hundreds of millions of people trying to cling to old comforts, or just trying to stay warm, and deciding that the environment is a necessary casualty. In the long term this will only make survival even more difficult for those remaining, as the last of our precious resources disappear, arable land and water tables become scarce, dirty and quick coal use is ramped up, and the worldwide climate changes for good.

This will be the true tragedy of Peak Oil, this worldwide enactment of the Tragedy of the Commons by a global population beyond any scale even remotely sustainable. Forest Management? I'm sure it has its issues and illogicalities just like any other bureaucracy. But go ahead and get rid of it, and other protective organizations, if you want the human race to sputter out and take the planet with it. It will be a long time recovering.

Peace.

A farmer friend of mine estimates that you can get a cord or wood per acre per year (approximate) from a wooded lot... That has been the basis of my desire to buy some land near town to help in the years to come... 10 acres of wood producing 10 cords of wood a winter would be about all I would need for a smallish house, don't you think? (I've never had a wood stove, but am looking into them... )

What does this mean?


Is this meant to ease the reliance on oil and coal?

I believe the way they do it is to plant the firewood trees along the edges of the fields, as sort of fences or windbreaks. Dunno if there's any suitable fast-growing tree that would thrive in Massachussetts, though.

Coyote...I fear you are right. It's going to be much harder for us than it was in pioneer or colonial times. One, there's a hell of a lot more of us now, and two, the land is in much worse shape than it was then (and will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better).

Also it's unfamiliar to most. You can trying to imitate your parents, but grandparents or great-grandparents? It may only be the next generation that gets comfortable with these ideas again.

Certainly that's an issue, but we will also have the advantage (hopefully) of greater knowledge. We have access to not just European techniques, but the knowledge of all the world.

I'm more concerned about natural resources. Greer makes this point, about Rome's collapse:



If we follow that pattern, we'll have less technology than the Native Americans had. And the reason will be because we've turned all our natural resources into subdivisions, Wal-Marts, SUVs and Big Macs. And they can't easily be turned back into clean water, lush forests, and fertile soil.