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What lessons from the multiple experiences of Peak Wood can today’s society learn for addressing global peak oil?
By John Perlin

Today’s assault on the Amazon and other rainforests continues the same sad story. The lure of present profit has driven this relentless war against the world’s trees throughout time and all continents. As liberal economists in the 17th century showed, a landowner could expect a profit of a little more than 3 shillings per acre by preserving his woods, whereas by converting it to pasture brought three times that much. It therefore made perfect pecuniary sense to clear the land.

Despite such accounting, Frederick Engels, the social scientist and communist theorist, saw residual issues beyond immediate gain when it came to deforestation.

“What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind?” he asked in his Dialectics of Nature. Read Full article