Peak Wood: Nature Does Impose Limits

Civilization continued its march westward in search of wood. In the poet Hesiod’s time timber grew throughout Greece. Some 300 years later Plato reminisced how in an earlier period “there was an abundance of wood in the mountains” but “now they only afford sustenance to bees.”

So the Greeks, with their ships and bronze axes, eyed the woods of Sicily and Italy. Theophrastus, a botanist and a younger contemporary of Plato, reported that the land of the Latins contained bay, myrtle, wonderful beech, fir and silver fir. The Greeks named one forest just south of Rome “birdless,” because the trees there grew so close together that not even birds could enter.

A few miles north of Rome lay a forest, described by the historian Livy as more impenetrable than those in Germany, at that time regarded as wilderness. Two centuries later the Roman philosopher Lucretius watched “day by day the woods retreat farther and farther” from Rome, as farmers cleared the land for cultivation. Three centuries later the deforestation of much of Italy forced the Roman government to establish a fleet of fuel ships, much like oil tankers of today, to scour the Mediterranean lands west and south, especially North Africa and France, for fire wood.

Southern England’s woods also attracted the Romans because the ground there yielded iron ore and hardwoods, an excellent fuel for smelting. More than a thousand years later these same woodlands provided building material for England’s fleets and fuel for its first industrial revolution that once more produced iron for the nation.

As the English lost its woods to agriculture and industry, the country, once coveted by Rome for its trees, now searched abroad, as had the Romans years before, for necessary commodities.

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