Recycling

All right. I recognize that not everyone finds satisfaction in looking at stacks of wood. But I do. That's next winter's warmth you're looking at. It took hours to cut and hours to split and more hours to stack -- but it will provide heat for several months. What's more, nearly everything you see is recycled or home-grown. The posts grew up on our land. The beams and roofing boards came from the portion of the cabin roof that I replaced a few years ago. Even the shingles were torn off of the cabin and successfully reused on the woodshed.

The wood, too, is recycled "green" energy. Most of it comes from deadfalls or dead trees that are harvested on our four acres. Some of the smaller trees were downed as part of a necessary thinning to maintain the health of those that remain to spread in the greater sunlight. A bit of the wood comes from my civic service in cleaning out the roadside ditches of limbs brought down in January's ice storm.

One can argue about whether heating with wood is environmentally desirable. To be sure, there are fuels that burn more cleanly than wood. But since we grow all of our own wood on our own land, the amount of carbon released annually from the chimney is recaptured annually in the rings of the trees growing for fuel in future years.

It occurs to me that the same argument can be made (over a long, long time scale) for oil and even coal. The carbon in oil and coal was captured from the atmosphere by plants in the very distant past. Trapping it underground has left the atmosphere "carbon deprived" (from the point of view of a dinosaur). If we were to release it all through imprudent combustion, we might make the planet less hospitable for humans, but the dinosaurs might have applauded us for taking corrective enrivonmental measures to recycle trapped carbon.