Seacoast NRG

Time to revist the topic of wood and carbon neutrality.  My original post on this topic back in January has been, by a wide margin, my most heavily read and commented-upon post.  Because of the very good questions that have been raised over the last several months, I’m going to revisit this issue and address some of the common themes in an upcoming post.

But first, a slight digression (and hence, this is the titular part one).  In discussions and in browsing the web, I’ve been struck by the emotional nature of how we talk about wood and woodlands, and how it seems that we have an obvious solution to energy problems and climate change, right in our own forests.  I live in New Hampshire, a state that is more than 85% covered by forest, second only to Maine.  I grew up in New England, surrounded by trees and farms, and worked those farms as a boy, baling hay in summer, felling and chopping trees for lumber and fuel in winter.  That was in the 1970’s, when the first energy crisis was upon us, along with a nascent environmental movement that spawned many of the practices we take for granted now, such as recycling.  To reduce heating costs, many homes at that time installed wood stoves or even wood boilers and furnaces, to the point that some communities eventually banned home heating with wood because of the pollution and haze it caused.

I’m sure that in many communities across the US, wood and forests are an integral part of the local cultures.  But in a larger sense, I also think many people are, if not instinctually, then at least by some sort of instilled or inherited memory, tied to wood and forests in they way that others are to the oceans or the mountains.  The utility of wood and forest products is obvious, and well-established.  Less obvious, but just as well-established in our minds, are their intangible assets:  trees, woods, forests, like the sea, evoke poetry and song.  Who does not have memories of being warmed by a wood fire, or of the smell of wood itself?  Don’t the woods–lovely, dark and deep–seem teeming with life, as if they were a source of life itself?  But then would someone from the Midwest think the same of the plains and pairies–and corn and ethanol?  Or of the mountains and basins–and their coal?

What I’m driving at here is my sense that we want a simple solution to a maddeningly complex set of problems, so that we can get on with our lives as “normal” and stop worrying about everything.  And how satisfying it would be if something that we as individuals held dear, something that we’ve emotionally invested in, either from our childhood, our jobs, our where we call home, provided that simple solution. 

If only trees, or corn, or “clean coal” were the answer.