Peak Wood

[Bentiron1946]

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2005-10-25/peak-wood
I wa s doing some reading on deforestation and how the Bronze Age accelerated it and how one fellow thought that this shortage of wood helped bring about the Iron Age and then another fellow added in how the Iron Age was on it's last legs until the discovery of the Americas and that now we are in another "peak", Peak Oil, it's all kind of interesting. Makes you wonder what's next for civilization, Peak Recycling?

[jmccustomknives]

I would respectfully disagree with him. Iron replaced bronze because it was superior just as steel has replaced iron because it is superior. We are however at the peek of civilization, what comes next; a new dark age. As long as there are men lets not forget forging iron and steel ('smiths have always recycled), that will insure that men will not go the way of the dinosour. Or if you are a Christian, disregard the last line as it has no bearing. I've read the last chapter.

[son_of_bluegrass]

Interesting read.

Well I for one am slowly but surely getting ready for the next dark ages. Maybe it won't come but I plan to be ready as that is the way we seem to be heading.

[ThomasPowers]

Actually early wrought iron was NOT superior to bronze having similar hardness and being much harder to refine and work unlike being able to melt and pour items to close if not their final shape. (Not to mention the whole rust issue)

Iron making takes a LOT of wood too! (Some of the earliest environmental laws were put in place in England to limit the number of ironmaking furnaces as they were running low on wood to build the ships to protect the country---Elizabethan IIRC) I have the book at home, I'll try to look it up tonight.)

Where early iron wins is that it's found all over the place. In the bronze age people were even traveling from the Mediterranean to *Cornwall* England to get tin to make bronze. A terrible trip with no roads and no deep water ocean going boats. You can find iron ore *all* over Europe. (Shoot in WWII Italy actually reprocessed Roman iron refining slags to get more iron out of them using modern refining techniques)

Only after iron was the common metal did it gradually improve enough to be considered "superior", learning to quench harden and temper was a massive big step forward though even unhardened higher carbon steels are harder and tougher than "mild" (Pleiner's "The Celtic Sword" has great details on metallurgy of the time they were beginning to work with such materials)

As to "Peak" at one time we were at peak oil; whale oil for lighting and we faced a new dark age. Technology came up with kerosene and the lamps to burn it and now few people even remember that energy crisis. It's very hard to guess the future when you have no idea of what technology will come up with. Remember the old extrapolations where NYC would be 10' deep in horse dung because of the increase of horse drawn vehicles? I know of one in the telephone business that forecast that by a certain date---now passed---every women in America would be a telephone operator. Changes in technology trump extrapolation!

[Bentiron1946]

http://www.claytoncr...ished/Iron2.pdf
Here is a link to the pdf on on "What Caused the Iron Age" by C. E. Cramer, an interesting read also.
The copper/bronze industry sure changed the ecology of the Eastern Mediterranean, the use of coal during the early industrial revolution and later has sure change the climate and the use of oil is changing our age. I have sure had a good day doing all this reading. I hope that you all are having a good time too.

I met an old man who worked for the New York City Sanitation Department and he talked about the shipping of rail cars full of horse manure out of town for disposal along with dead horse that dropped in their traces being sent to be rendered. Ah, the good old days before gas driven automobiles.

I'm looking for an article that I read about west central Africa and their Iron Age, no Bronze Age there, and how they destroyed their forests and left huge slag heaps smelting iron, in ever expanding rings away from the center of their culture until it collapsed. Also a good read.

[ThomasPowers]

Wrought Iron and Its Decorative Use (Dover Jewelry and Metalwork) Maxwell Ayrton, Arnold Silcock;

Easy to find now---dover has re-printed it. I have one of the 1929 editions...

Mentions 3 separate edicts during Elizabethan times and one from Henry III (13th century!) revoking a grant from Henry II as the furnace was injuring the forest.


BentIron; what a lovely paper! Easy to read, well researched and nicely documented. (and agrees with me!)

My reading time is fairly limited; but I often read during breakfast---my wife generally snores at that time and often enjoy digging though my research library over my tea and cereal.

[Bentiron1946]

That's unusual, something that agrees with Thomas :P It didn't take long for kings to realize that the use of wood as a fuel was dangerous to the overall health of the forests. The phrase by "hook or crook" came about because it allowed the peasant to collect any deadwood they could reach with a hook or a shepherd's crook. If it was alive or higher than that it was against the law to harvest it. There were those however that were licensed to produce charcoal, after all the wealthy had to have their needs met. <_<

[ThomasPowers]

Ohio has some lovely large forests in the Hanging Rock Region that are the results of charcoal smelting of iron in the region. Each furnace would own enough square miles of forest that it could coal a section and then move on and when they finally made it back to the starting section the forest would have grown up to be ready to coal again!

The last charcoal blast furnace in that region went out of blast around WWI and the paper companies (and the state) snatched up these massive woodlands and preserved them until modern times---we toured a bunch of old sites there when I attended the IronMasters Conference in Athens OH, (My friends were presenting on 10 years of short stack bloomery experiments at that one)

[Bentiron1946]

The area that is now Saguaro National Monument was once covered with Foothill Palo Verdes but the charcoal burners cut them all down for fuel for the local copper miners. This deprived the saguaro's of nursery trees for future generations of new saguaros. One of the unintended consequences of clear cutting but not to be to harsh on the charcoal burners it was just not understood by them nor was it even part of the early nineteenth century mindset.
I have been doing some reading on the Calcolithic Age in India and it seems that it and the true Bronze Age that followed also lead to the demise of the dense forests of the subcontinent. Once the forests started to go cereal cultivation started and then a population boom ensued which increased the demand for metal products, which lead to a demand for more charcoal. It was interesting to note that India seemed to get their metal technology from Southeast Asia rather than from the Middle East.
During India's recent electrical system failure it was somewhat surprising, to me at least, to note that India had such large internal supplies of coal and yet was importing such quantities. I wasn't surprised that it was because of graft and corruption that the internal sourcing was so messed up. They are still working on a late Nineteenth Century mining system.

[John McPherson]

American Civil War buffs will remember that the Battle of The Wilderness was fought in the slash piles, blackberry brambles & plum thickets that grew up after a central Virginia furnace had clear cut the area a decade or so before. No one replanted trees in those days, just let nature take its course.

Pictures of the Carolinas and Virginia landscapes from 1860's until 1940's look nothing like today: trees were only to be found shading houses, along fence rows, and in creek bottoms.

[ThomasPowers]

Charcoal wasn't only for smelting and metalworking. it was the primary fuel for heating and cooking in towns in medieval times. Wood was mainly a rural fuel where it could be harvested and used directly.

Note that in medieval times "coal" meant charcoal and the rock stuff was "earth coal" or even "sea coal" as it washed up along the shore in some areas---causes confusion when folks say "I read where the rental for a piece of property was 3 loads of coal so they were using coal in the early medieval period!" (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...)

[Don A]

Yeah, I 've got some pictures of the TN side of the Great Smoky Mountains in the 20's & 30's and it looks like Mars with stumps...

The lumber co. with the rail skidders scalped it and left it. What the tourists see now is all second growth.

A stick of virgin timber is a rare thing to find on this side.

Now the bugs are taking what is left. Chestnut (long gone), balsam fir, hemlock; now ash and dogwood.

At least we have kudzu and mimosa to keep things green.

[Bentiron1946]

Having lived in the drier parts of the Southwest most all of my life I was somewhat amazed when in 2000 I flew back to Lexington, KY for a five day visit to see if I could adapt to a wetter colder climate that there was really such a little amount of forested area. It was pretty much a barren landscape that I flew over. Most all of my trips except one in 1978 have been by ground transportation and from the ground things can look pretty well covered with trees when they are taller than you but from the air you can see that the forested areas are those only are what can not be plowed or are needed to drain the water away. We have pretty much bladed, graded and plowed every thing east of the Mississippi River and a goodly portion west of said river. Yet we encourage other nation not to follow our example as we continue to buy their forests products in great quantities. All we need do is look at the devastation that has befallen the forests of the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and North America due to unrelenting pressure for wood products no matter if it be to make charcoal, just to burn as raw wood, or as building material to figure out that this kind of continued voracious appetites for raw materials can only take mankind so far before we have fouled our nest so bad it will have become unlivable for any our future generations.

[tzonoqua]

Very interesting subject, I don't really know enough about it all to comment. I read a book once called "Metals in the Service of Man", quite an old book but was very informative, and might be of interest. Another book that may be of interest was titled "The Green History of the Earth" which is about mankind's effect on the environment, quite stark reading. Apparently when we became farmers it all went out the window, if we had stayed as hunter gatherers then we could have sustained ourselves... we have gone way far past that though!!

[bigfootnampa]

Actually we had no choice about becoming farmers... no way we could sustain our growing populations as hunter-gatherers! In fact the world's populations have long lived right close to the edge of starvation and we have staved it off (for the most part) by continual advances in our farming technologies. As hunter-gatherers the indian tribes had pretty well maximized the sustainable population in North America when the Europeans arrived. The farming skills of the immigrant European population allowed them to overwhelm the indian peoples in a couple of centuries... denser populations enabled by farming was the decisive factor.

[ThomasPowers]

Sorry european diseases wiped out close to 90% of the native Americans soon after contact with Europeans. Hard to continue a culture when 90% of the folks have died. Now in general the Europeans did *not* do this on purpose as they were as clueless as everyone else about disease mechanisms. Smallpox in particular was a terrible killer, we have a Mayan/Aztec? codex showing people suffering from it.

No need for "enhanced Farming techniques" especially as most of the colonial accounts say that the Europeans were lousy farmers and almost starved to death before they learned the local methods of farming...

[r smith]

Reading about all the peak this, peak that, what will happen next talk made me think of these:
http://www.wired.com...currentPage=all

[tzonoqua]

Bentiron, that is exactly the point about the sustainability of a hunter gatherer lifestyle. That was meant in the way of "living within our means" kind of sustainable, rather than this way of the world that thinks that exponential growth forever is the right way. Of course the only way we could support more and more population was through farming... look where that's got us!! It always brings me back to grade 9 and my science teacher and the fruit flies in a jar.... Except I believe that humans are so adaptable we will always find a way to survive.

r smith, I am sure in a few thousand years those stones will be conjectured about just as they are now, and just as stonehenge is wondered about!

[DabneyWalker]

Hello friends,

The Peak to Peak Wood Program was started with a U.S. Forest Service grant and has a goal of marketing and utilizing forest products from Colorado's forests.
Program funding by the USFS and administration by the Colorado State Forest Service have assisted private and public landowners with managing their forested lands through a network of sort yards located in five participating counties.
The yards take in logs collected from forest management activities, including areas treated for mountain pine beetle.

Thanks and Regards
Dabney Walker

[ThomasPowers]

Which has absolutely noting to do with the idea of "peak wood" being discussed; which is dealing with historical shortages of wood just as today we are looking at "Peak Oil" and it's ramifications.

[VaughnT]

Unfortunately, the only way to get around the "Peak" issue is to eliminate the people. The root cause of all the environmental issues we face, according to the alarmists, is the human population that demands these things. Remove the people and the earth can return to a more "natural" state.

And while I will agree that the reliance on wood as a material resource for heating or making things simply because it grows too slowly for our needs, I strongly disagree with the "peak oil" hypothesis.

[r smith]

Unfortunately, the only way to get around the "Peak" issue is to eliminate the people. The root cause of all the environmental issues we face, according to the alarmists, is the human population that demands these things. Remove the people and the earth can return to a more "natural" state.

Rule #1 of the georgia guidstones- Maintain the world population at 500,000,000. that is 500 million people.
Who knows how many populate the earth currently? Not to mention the 6-7 million increase each month which is a united nations statistic!
http://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/worldpopulation.asp

[Frank Turley]

Perhaps war, pestilence, famine, and population sinks are part and parcel of the "natural order of things," although not nice to contemplate.

[Bob S]

Reading about all the peak this, peak that, what will happen next talk made me think of these:
http://www.wired.com...currentPage=all

good read.