by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Where are we to get all the slow-growing hardwood trees from for all the wood-burning stoves that we are encouraged to buy, was a question or similar asked by some newspaper people the other day.
They were trying to claim that it would just not be possible to get enough firewood for all the stoves should many follow the encouragement and go and switch to the carbon neutral way of heating with firewood, as, as they stated, it takes so long for a hardwood tree to grow to maturity.
Another case of scaremongering and whatever by the media who did not even try to do some research.
What those people, and many readers of their publications, of that I am also sure, do not understand is how woodland management for firewood works.
Firewood, in ordinary forest operations comes from everything from a tree that is not going into the market for furniture and such, and firewood is also grown specially in coppice woods, on a short rotation basis.
This means that hardwood tree species are planted that are suitable for coppicing and the trees are then cut to almost ground level after 10 to 15 years of growing (not 50 or 100 years) and can then be harvested again, from the same root stock, every seven to ten years, and in fact the stock will then produce more than just one trunk.
Coppicing was the predominate way of producing firewood and still would be the way today.
In addition to that who actually says that the wood stoves require the use of hardwoods?
In Scandinavia and Eastern Europe the predominate tree species that ends up in the stoves is pine and spruce and fir, a softwood. The same tree species, the latter two at least, that are the Christmas tree.
The stoves from those countries, especially the makers from Norway and Sweden, are highly fuel efficient with dry softwood that they can do all day with a few fillings.
Such stoves also would make it possible to use the ten million plus metric tonnes of building lumber that annually is wasted and ends up in landfill sites. Much better if that would be used to heat homes and with the right kind of wood-burning stove that stuff can do just that.
Presently, in Britain, thousands of tonnes of wood is left to rot away in forests, woods and parks, often under the false notion of creating valuable habitat for wildlife of one kind or another, mostly lichen and fungi only, though, and tree pathogens.
This practice of habitat piles, now condemned, basically, by the Forestry Commission, and any forester with sense, not only harms trees in that the piles of wood harbor diseases they also are a danger to the Planet.
The process of decay sets free the carbon stored in the wood – though that would also happen during burning – and in addition to that the forty times more dangerous greenhouse gas methane. So, rather than helping the environment with the so-called habitat piles this practice does serious damage and that one several levels.
This same wood, on the other hand, before it is left to rot, dealt with in the proper way and logged up, could heat many a home.
When it comes to the amount of wood needed; a proper wood stove as those designed and made in Scandinavia, for instance, while not cheap, use very little wood. They are extremely efficient and the calculation of those that have a go, so to speak, as to “where to get the needed wood from, etc.” have not, I am sure, even looked that that factor.
The return to the “clean forest practice” would provide masses of wood, both hardwood and softwood, for the burning in wood-burning stoves so, I do not think that there is a reason to panic and to create panic.
© 2010
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