[gnm]

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

[Peakoil_Tarzan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gnm', 'A')re you looking to use this for total house heating? Or just domestic hot water?

[Liamj]

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.

[coyote]

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.

[cornholio]

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... )

[Cool Hand Linc]

What does this mean?


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

[Leanan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')s 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).

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Leanan', 'I')t's going to be much harder for us than it was in pioneer or colonial times.

[Leanan]

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:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n many regions...the sociopolitical complexity remaining after the empire's final disintegration was far below the level that had existed in the same area prior to its inclusion in the Imperial system. Thus Britain in the late pre-Roman Iron Age, for example, had achieved a stable and flourishing agricultural society with nascent urban centers and international trade connections, while the same area remained depopulated, impoverished, and politically chaotic for centuries following the collapse of imperial authority.