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The argument that there is a "surplus" of woody forest material because of modern fire supression is really only valid for the dry forests east of the Cascades.  There's a lot of argument about the roll of fire West of the mountains where the vast majority of Oregon's forest biomass is located, but the trend is away from the notion that natural fire cycles were the norm.  There is some evidence that the giant, stand replacing fires of the past were an anomaly, that very small, very infrequent fires were the rule in the ancient forests before white settlement.    Again, there is no, or very little "waste" in natural systems.  There is no vast pool of untapped energy out there in the forest.  It's mostly spoken for already by the great myriad of organisms that make the existance of the trees possible in the first place.  We usurp those claims at our great peril.

posted 3 years, 12 months ago
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There's a part of this that even the greenest of us seem forget.  There is no such thing as wood "waste", or crop "residue".   Carbohydrate is the currency of life.  Every calorie of carbohydrate that we use  to satisfy our energry needs is a calorie that would otherwise have been used for the metabolic energy of some other living thing.  With all biomass schemes, we are mucking about at the very base of the food chain, ultimately risking the productivity of the entire system.  A writer above mentioned the clean swept German forests.  The cliff notes version of that story is that deprived of the organic input it depends on, the forest soils are dying.  The cold truth is that human appetite for energy is large enough for this to happen everywhere.  It's a wise thing to eat low on the food chain, but  in general, it's a stupid place to get our transportation and industrial energy.

posted 3 years, 12 months ago
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