Is a treehugger still a tree hugger if he burns wood?

I'm a card-carrying tree-hugger (Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, Ice Age Trail-builder and donor).
I own two dwarf bunnies, wear sandals whenever I can, and might have inhaled once or twice
over twenty years ago.

I also enjoy harvesting dead trees or deadfalls or the stunted, crowded, dying, leaning, a little-
bit-in-my-way trees. One good thing about trees is that new ones keep coming up in the forest.
Another good thing is that the harvested wood keeps my family's home very warm. When we
build trail in Wisconsin, there is almost always a big bonfire at the end of the day. I don't think
there's any particular aversion to creating wood heat amongst most treehuggers.

There's a big push right now on TV and movies, even the re-write of classic novels. Zombies are cool, even funny or cute. Maybe to some its a laughing matter. But those of us who have seen the darker side of nature, those of us who bear witness to the HUNGER, we share a sobering dread. By shading ourselves in th shadow of real danger we have begun to trifle with monsters.

People think trees are cute, cuddly, wouldn't/couldn't hurt a fly. Oh, how wrong they are. I worked for the town growing up, and once in a while I got to dig graves. Let me tell you, trees are the enemy. There is nothing more vicious, more blood-thirsty or relentless than a tree. You may be smarter, but they've got more time. The scent of your rotting flesh is a siren call, irresistible to the wandering tendrils of oak, ash or pine. They have no remorse, never sleep, know no fear, can't tell good from bad, and worst of all: They are patient. They can wait. They can wait for decades, even centuries for you to be laid in the ground. Then its a matter of time before you will hear a noise on your box. A slight, wispy touch at first, but soon a relentless droning will shatter wood, even crack stone on their way to the feast. They will get you. I've seen some things. Horrible things.

Trees are the enemy. They want to eat you. If you see a tree, cut it down before it gets you. Then, burn the body. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Yup, burning the wood will release the same CO2 as if the tree were to decay, but don't leave out the fact that downed trees and standing dead are great habitat for critters. But, I'd guess the amount of material removed for wood burning leaving plenty of those types of trees in the forest to serve as habitat, so I think we aren't doing a whole lot of harm. Like the rest of nature, we need to strive for a balance. I cut a LOT of wood, but I'm also a professor of biology (I teach Wildlife Conservation and Management, Vertebrate Zoology, Mammalogy, etc.), and I like to appreciate trees for all their practical uses, ecological functions, and for their own beauty. I think we should all do the same - stepping off soapbox now! Cheers!

I have no guilty conscience. Common sense tells me burning wood is more environmentally sound than using electricity from a coal fired plant 500 miles away, or natural gas piped from a similar distance.

However I don't think you can say it's carbon neutral unless you cut with a hand saw and haul with a horse and cart.

I'm sure the foundry that made the steel that made my stove wasn't carbon neutral. Stove, chainsaw, wheelbarrow, the list is long.

Yeah, but when you compare them to the carbon footprint of using oil, propane, NG, or electricity, I guarantee you that wood comes out ahead.

And as far as habitat goes, there are definitely sustainable ways to harvest wood. For example, the tree service I bought my wood from only cuts down residental trees- very little habitation going on there. It's not like I'm hacking my way through the Wasatch National Forest with some crazy wood-eating machine from Fern Gully and killing the little woodland fairies. Scrounging from craigslist is the same, it's trees that would have been cut down anyway and would have just gone to the dump to rot. So then you've got the carbon from the trees being cut down, trucked to the dump, and then the tree's carbon being released, plus whatever carbon it takes for me to heat my house. If I go and get it or the tree service brings it to my house (which is closer than the dump from pretty much anywhere in my town) the only extra CO is what you need to run the chainsaw (pretty negligble). And then minus the effects of heating my home some other way- it works out favorably.

~Rose

davmor said:

My wife said that the only thing I think trees are good for are either firewood, or my other passion making furniture. She is not far off. :cheese: Dave.

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Then that would make you either naive or an idiot. I'm guessing the latter.

davmor said:

My wife said that the only thing I think trees are good for are either firewood, or my other passion making furniture. She is not far off. :cheese: Dave.

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Then that would make you either naive or an idiot. I'm guessing the latter.

Dune said:

You can be a rabid wood burner and still not kill trees. Most if not all the wood I burn is from A. Deadwood, B. storm falls, C. The dump, E. tree services F. People who were going to take them down regardless.

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Agreed, and all the beef I eat is from cows that were already doomed.

I replace many more trees than I consume. Can't say the same for cows.

I'm proud of my (gray) hippie roots.

Got a studder there bub???? The idea is a good one, but the order needs adjusting. Personally, because of my age, I would have to live the rest of my life without burning to make up for a lifetime of errors. That's furniture first and burn the scraps.....

skids said:

davmor said:

My wife said that the only thing I think trees are good for are either firewood, or my other passion making furniture. She is not far off. :cheese: Dave.

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Then that would make you either naive or an idiot. I'm guessing the latter.

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argus66 said:

if this makes me a hippie so be it but a hippie that will kick your ass.

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Right on! lol

skids said:

davmor said:

My wife said that the only thing I think trees are good for are either firewood, or my other passion making furniture. She is not far off. :cheese: Dave.

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Then that would make you either naive or an idiot. I'm guessing the latter.

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It's called humor. I am guessing you don't have a sense of it.

It would take about 10 acres in my area to sustain enough wood to heat my home. Maybe more, maybe less, but odds are I'd need that much with the amount of sunlight and water we get. At that rate my town would have to be 100,000 acres big to heat every home.

Wood is great but one trip on an airplane can set me back years in the carbon game. I think the best thing to do is not to burn in the first place, being either wood, coal or oil.

skids said:

davmor said:

My wife said that the only thing I think trees are good for are either firewood, or my other passion making furniture. She is not far off. :cheese: Dave.

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Then that would make you either naive or an idiot. I'm guessing the latter.

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I'm guessing someone has upped their game from tree-hugger to tree-humper. Take an old lineman's advice: I'd watch out for splinters on the ride down.

bring it.....

I'll hug a tree because I love it when it warms my home.

There's about 100 acres of wooded land behind my home that belongs to a builder. I love the woods because of the beauty and serenity it brings. I would hate to see him strip it bare and put in homes, but I didn't mind too much when he sent in a logger followed by a firewood guy to reap some benefit from his property. It was sad to see the tree-top canopy opened up, creating a lot of new growth at the ground level, but that's how it works. When he attempted to get a permit to build, all the abutting neighbors fought him. Though I wouldn't want to see the woods go, I value property rights far more. I don't want anybody telling me what I can and cannot do with my property, so I supported his freedom even though from a purely selfish perspective I hoped the town would stop him, or the water-quality fanatics would purchase the land. The crashing real estate market has shut things down for now.

Our forests here in the Northeast are pretty much a mess already. Loggers are doing us a favor when they thin them out. I'm not talking about clear-cutting (although that does have a benefit for some species as well) but even in my tiny world there are trees that simply won't make it if I don't do a little triage with the chainsaw.

The watershed abutting my house is 5000 acres. They began selective logging last Summer, and the areas that were cut have already begun to grow like crazy. They left a majority of the dead wood, took mostly the mature saw-grade logs and left enough for a partial canopy. In my own uneducated opinion I think they're doing an excellent job. I'm lookng forward to the increased deer traffic, and the wild blueberriers/rasberries that will fill in afterwards. Of course, people who use my backyard (ok, its not really ALL mine) for a place to walk their dogs are up in arms over the destruction, as if this select foresting will detract from the doggie toilet trail. Everyone I've met/talked to about it has a negative opinion, regarding it as a blighted landscape whereas I can only gleem longingly at the storm trees (litterally hundreds of cords) within 10' of where I could park my truck.

btuser said:

It would take about 10 acres in my area to sustain enough wood to heat my home. Maybe more, maybe less, but odds are I'd need that much with the amount of sunlight and water we get. At that rate my town would have to be 100,000 acres big to heat every home.

Wood is great but one trip on an airplane can set me back years in the carbon game. I think the best thing to do is not to burn in the first place, being either wood, coal or oil.

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Check out your town's dump. There will be enough trees there to make you cry. THOUSANDS of trees get thrown in landfills in most big cities. Residential trees need to be taken down, new developments cut them down, and most often, they're too busy to try and process them into something useful.

~Rose

Dune said:

skids said:

davmor said:

My wife said that the only thing I think trees are good for are either firewood, or my other passion making furniture. She is not far off. :cheese: Dave.

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Then that would make you either naive or an idiot. I'm guessing the latter.

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It's called humor. I am guessing you don't have a sense of it.

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BOOM HEADSHOT

I guess the only real solution is to all move to the tropics and run round in our undies with no need for heat. Then we could all be tree huggers as we hug them banana and coconut trees to climb them in search of a meal.

NH_Wood said:

Yup, burning the wood will release the same CO2 as if the tree were to decay,

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I've read/heard this claim enough times to suspect it is, like many truisms, not true. Indeed, it is not:

http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/news/473

"Large amounts of carbon are stored in the trees and an even greater amount—80% of the total carbon in the boreal forest—is actually in the soils, stored as dead organic matter that results from decomposition." Simply put, not all the CO2 stored in a tree is released by biological decomposition. All of the CO2 is released by burning it, though. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink

Burning wood for heat is said to be carbon neutral in virtue of the fact that the CO2 released is CO2 that was stored over the lilfe of the tree. True enough, but this is also true of fossil fuels -- the only difference is the time scale of the initial carbon sequestration.

It is also valuable to distinguish between a practice being 'carbon neutral' and a practice being mitigated by 'carbon offsetting'. Simply because a practice is mitigated by carbon offsetting (which is what I take to be happening when I cut a tree for fuel and allow another tree or trees to grow up in its place) does not make it carbon neutral. If this is carbon neutral, then so is burning fuel oil, NG or LPG as long as one plants trees. That is to say: if carbon offsets make a practice carbon neutral, then the whole issue of carbon neutrality reduces to carbon offsetting, and so (from the point of view of carbon neutrality), any fuel-use practice is as good as any other, so long as you plant enough trees.

Interesting question, Fast4wood.

I'm a treehugging wood burner and an animal loving hunter. Only in the last 40 years or so have we as a society begun to look at these things as mutually exclusive. Go back a bit further (around the turn of the century) and read Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and Aldo Leopold and you'll see why they are not.

RoseRedHoofbeats said:

Check out your town's dump. There will be enough trees there to make you cry. THOUSANDS of trees get thrown in landfills in most big cities. Residential trees need to be taken down, new developments cut them down, and most often, they're too busy to try and process them into something useful.

~Rose

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This is so true. I've brought home perfect, cut logs from the dump, including from apple trees, oak and other fine wood for burning. I can't imagine throwing wood away like trash, but people do. Fortunately, at our town dump it's separated into yard debris so at least it doesn't go into the landfill. I'm not sure how they process it.

I'm sorry - I seem to double post every time and I don't know why. If anyone could tell me how to delete a post, I'd appreciate it. Thx

I don't know.. I don't know how to define "tree hugger".

Last night I had friends over and we sat around the stove, burning wood from my property, eating venison stew made from a deer taken on my property, with veggies grown in my garden. Part of that seems to be "tree hugger", but every tree hugger I have ever met thought they should try to explain to me how "meat is murder" etc etc and how could I kill, let alone eat "Bambi"? I usually point out "with a 30-30 and my teeth", but, sometimes I just let it go and laugh.

I don't want to see the planet destroyed, or resources squandered, but by the same measure, I am not going to tell anyone what's right or wrong for them. (something I have seen from both sides of the fence) I ride a bicycle from time to time, even for short errands, but my "daily driver" is an Expedition.

I guess I am conflicted. Hug a tree, burn a tree, eat a tree...