Brutal waste

I meant to post this sometime ago when I first saw the story.

Winnipeg struggles to deal with Dutch Elm disease but I am interested to know if any other people see this sort of brutal waste in their region.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/burning-question-over-dead-wood-88717362.html

Those are metric tonnes and yes. This is from one city of 650000 people.

I do not know current numbers of homes in our province that heat with wood or pellets but I do know that in a day and age when society talks of carbon footprints and energy usage seeing this sort of waste is terrible. It is especially tough to swallow in our province when we are constantly working to cut electricity usage so our government owned utility can sell more power to its outside clients. Add to this the factor that we have a growing percentage of our population who struggle with heating energy costs in a norther climate.

While I am not a doomsday prophet I would suggest that there may come a day when our human reliance on centralized energy sources (electricity, oil, NG, etc, etc) will cause a world of regret.

Biomass use for heating should be a much higher priority for climates such as the one we live in.

It was not that many generations ago that wood was the primary heat source for the entire population.

Rant over..... for now

The culling and destruction of Elms affected by Dutch Elm Disease has been going on for many years here in Manitoba. It is a rotten condition that does ravage a beautiful tree. Winnipeg and Manitoba have some of the highest urban concentrations of Elms in North America. The sad thing is that in many cases the replacement trees planted were Ash so when EAB makes its way here we will see the same problem all over again and millions of board feet and BTU's will end up in landfills.

There are actually crews whose task is to "patrol" wood lots across the province and to cut and burn the diseased trees on the spot.

We are hearing reports of inspectors knocking on doors and asking to see people's wood piles then when elm firewood is found.... Taking it away and destroying it.

All this while tree service and arborist friends tell me that it is a losing battle and a make work project.

Nice to see that someone already snagged the photo and is using it elsewhere on the site