Burned series

Part 1 – I’ve Been Burned

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

 Carl Jung

Following on from my last blog – Time to Depose the Enthroned my next two blogs are, I hope,  illustrative of the difficulties and confusion we face.

19 years ago we moved into our current family home. We had also just completed a permaculture design course. Flushed with new knowledge about Peak Oil and the Transition Town movement we decided to start living more sustainable and eco-friendly lives. 

The electric night storage heaters we inherited were old and inadequate. One was overheating so badly I burnt my hand on it. After a winter topping up with additional electric heaters we decided to dive in and follow the current eco thinking.

Oil and gas were considered a big no no.

They pollute the planet and are running out. Electricity – same issues unless you buy green electricity and even then it’s such a wasteful way to heat given the amount of energy lost in transmission. We did consider air source heat pumps. In their infancy and expensive their actual efficiency rating at that time was not that great. They also relied on electricity with the same inherent issues as above. 

So we decided to go for wood, touted as the green option. A large wood burning stove was duly installed along with radiators and a new hot water cylinder. We basked in self righteous eco glory which was rather short lived as reality soon set in. The amount of wood we needed every year to heat house and water was enormous and required a lot of effort. 

In an attempt to stay “green” we obtained a scavenging licence from the forest commission. We could then take whatever wood we could gather after the industrial harvesting machines had been into a section of forestry commission land.

That years’ wood supply shone with eco credentials. We on the other hand lay exhausted before said stove covered in scratches and bruises and bitten to death by midges. 

Ok we thought, we’ll buy the wood, but only from someone who processes forestry commission trees. All was well. We got used to humphing baskets of wood around, allocated it to teens as a job and settled into our satisfaction at a decision well made. Yes, it was work, but worthy work.

Life however offers opportunities to grow if we are willing to listen. It whispers and nudges offering the chance to change. I tend to ignore such prods until they slap me in the face. I like denial especially if means I can avoid eating humble pie, or admitting I was wrong. 

Well, it might not surprise some of you to find out burning wood is not such a simple escape from the monolith of modern ecological destruction. Oh no, in fact, it may in some circumstances be worse than the alternatives we so sanctimoniously rejected. 

I didn’t want to think about any of that so I pushed those nagging doubts aside. I told myself ,“I’m sure the forestry commission is planting lots of trees. What we use is being replaced. It’s all good.”

Sadly it turns out that unless substantially larger numbers of trees are replaced there is no way the whole thing balances out. It’s obvious when you think about it. A huge big full grown tree has taken decades to reach maturity and its level of CO2 sequestering. Therefore in order to equal that level we would have to plant enough immature trees to capture the same amount. This could be 20-30 new trees.

Even worse in now turns out that burning wood actually releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than burning coal. That’s alarming given that CO2 is now the enemy of the world and must be controlled at any cost. Therein lies the problem, the monetising of everything means we have commodified CO2.

So now I sit with this reality. Nearly two decades on older, wiser perhaps, I see that my fears about the planet meant I was easy prey for the “answers”. I wanted certainty.  It made me feel good to think I was doing good. Captured by a system that funnelled my thinking into the one-way street to net zero, I thought I was doing good.

It seems I was burned.

Part 2 – We’re all being burned.

All our wisdom is stored in the trees.

Santosh Kalwar