Site Discussions

We have a newly-cleared property and just figured out who these guys were. Ours are large, which is why it took me a few tries to identify them. I was overestimating their size on the bird ID. sites. They are bold and seem to look you right in the eye.

Dave -  I read the Petrenko and Friedland paper you referred me to.  I am an engineer by trade and spend much time in test pits analyzing soil.  I also spend at least as much time managing my sugar woods.  All I can say is that the paper is mighty thin gruel to base energy policy on.  It is a limited sampling on one particular not overly common soil type. 

The authors actually state that their results are not statistically significant.  They focus solely on the carbon contained in about 2 feet of soil immediately below the organic soil layer.  They did not even include the carbon in the root fragments within this band.  They sifted them out and threw them away.  They did not look at what went on below this layer.  They certainly did not look at the carbon in the biomass growing in the forest itself.  They made a tacit assumption that the depth of the organic layer itself did not change over time.  In short, they didn’t account for most of the carbon stored in the system they are studying.

The paper is a fine academic exercise, but it is in no way useful in establishing forest/energy policy.  It is way too limited in scope.

We have a small woodlot, 163 acres, and all of our firewood comes off our land, always as a side benefit of doing a selective timber cut, prescribed by our forester, or in onesies and twosies that have fallen down on their own. We’ve also done some patch cuts, 2- or 3-acre clearcuts for wildlife habitat management, leaving dead trees and large slash and trunks in place, and these have dramatically increased, among other things, the number of songbirds on the land. (This certainly benefits “the environment,” irrespective of its effect on carbon storage.)

The selective cuts leave the forest as a whole essentially unchanged, preserving or enhancing the age diversity in the original stand, while releasing healthier stems that promise to be commercially valuable in the future. Every cut also produces several semi loads of chips for one of the regional biomass power plants. The soil is deeply affected only on the skidder trails, most of which were there already.

We burn about six cords a year. Somehow I just cannot believe that the way we have managed our woodlot does not promote carbon storage in the forest to at least the tune of six cords per year. And I expect that a significant proportion of the firewood burned here in Vermont is produced in the same way.

Carbon accounting in forest management is a tricky business, partly because the science is still being explored and partly because, as Mr. Mance points out, wood is used in so many different ways. So I don’t think one can really make a broad statement about whether burning firewood is renewable in the carbon storage sense or not. The devil is in the details. This was part of the message, I think, in the Brave Little State podcast—which was provocative, and that’s a good thing. But I don’t think, all-in-all, that it treated the subject of carbon storage with the sophistication it requires.

We have two come for the cat food. They sleep under the summer house. We’ve had single digit weather and I’m very concerned. I have not seen them in days. I’m hoping to see them soon.

Thanks for your discussion. I like your title “again.” We just have to keep calling out the bad information going round and round. In their effort to be fair I think VPR/BLS gave a littler too much respect to some false equivalencies. We cover carbon, particulates, and how working forests protect against permanent loss to development in our follow-on podcast: https://www.sustainableheating.org/podcast-the-pros-and-cons-of-heating-with-wood/

Thank you so much for this very informative article.  We look forward to hosting many more butterflies this year, as we are continuing to expand our Monarch Way Station,  planting more common and swamp milkweed, and have planted several species specific native plants to attract the butterflies.
Bj Plant and Randall Balog, Sr.

Burning wood is a great example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good. Some carbon is released, as is true with every form of energy production. But the benefits - biological, economic, social aesthetic - are profound. Thanks, Dave, for giving us such a thoughtful assessment.

Great article! When science and the use of statistics get distorted to support any agenda then we are cheated out of finding a true answer to the problem in question.

I am a retired owner of a forest products company and was taught in forestry school that science should be pure because opinion is not.

Thanks Dave. So pleased we still have intelligence to challenge academia.

The thing that breaks my heart about all this is, having lived with oil heat and wood heat, I would give an appendage to be able to go back to pushing a button and having the house warm. I hate heating with wood. It’s dirty, exhausting, body-straining, creates complex storage problems, and gives me six months of sinusitis. Yeah, the science indicates that burning wood is better than fossil fuels. I’m not going to argue with that. I just think it’s a tragedy that humankind spent so many generations trying to come up with a better way to create warmth and power, only to find it has a long-term negative effect on a global scale. What a BUMMER!

Mr. Mance,

Thank you for a thoughtful response that leaves the door open for further learning and discussion.  Wouldn’t it be nice if that happened more often?

I wish to point out one thing: With regard to carbon dioxide, I’m not sure that burning wood is always better than burning coal, gas, and oil if that wood is being burned to produce power.  The original VPR piece was about heating with wood, so I suspect that’s what you had in mind.  The distinction between heat and power is important given that heating with wood is 3 times more efficient than making power with wood. From purely a carbon standpoint, the news about biomass power often bleeds into biomass heating to negative effect even though the two are very different uses of wood.

Thanks for hearing me out.

Well said, Dave. Especially the point comparing wood harvesting to fossil fuel extraction which always results in adding more carbon to the equation that could have remained locked up.

An old growth forest actually has less carbon-consuming capability than, for example, a recently clear cut forest. Research shows that stomata densities ( where CO2 enters the leaf to be converted to carbohydrate during photosynthesis) are much higher in a dense stand of new growth following a clearcut than in an old growth forest.

Thanks for this added perspective. As I listened to the VPR piece, I wondered about the issue along the lines discussed here, but did not take the time (and perhaps lacked the perspective) to frame the question this articulately.

The skunk stink is hard to bear and embarrassing when we have company. We cannot find an opening where a skunk could get under the house, but one got under there. How can we lure it out? It is January.

VC 2040 ...when the cast damper is closed should there be any flame going up?  As I understand the operation all the exhaust should exit through the cat.  My stove continues to have flames going up. How does your stove operate?

Is there a list of the 100 snail species in NH?  F&G doesn’t list them.

I think ‘quiet parlor of fishes’ is from Walden. Can search for it in Google Books.

The wording appears in Walden, in the chapter “The Ponds in Winter”. 

Nope. All the maples should run at roughly the same time.