This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/permaculture by /u/habilishn on 2024-09-08 20:17:07+00:00.
I know this question is not directly related to the typical permaculture-issues discussed here, but i hope the mods allow it, because it is the permaculture people and their mindset that i want to ask.
i stubled across the map that i linked. in the description it lists the "clean" sources of heat and the dirty ones... where there is wood listed.
and to say this first: i know that burning wood generates more fine particles / emissions / pollution than other sources.
my views/understanding/assumptions:
point 1:
maybe i understand permaculture wrong but i think to be a permanent culture, part of it is that the necessities for human life can be received as local and as autonomous as possible. if humans care for a balanced nature, (basic: plant one tree for each tree cut) the use of firewood is within a pretty safe balance. also looking at co2 if i'm not mistaken, right? it's a cycle then, isn't it?
point 2:
in an apocalyptic scenario or in a perma-scenario (5000 years ago, or 5000 years ahead) many other sources of fuel might not be available - if human cultivates forest, wood will always be there.
it is hard work without nowadays chainsaws, but humanity has proven for many thousand years, that cooking with wood is "easy"/doable, even before any iron tools were available.
point 3:
by the love of the immense universe, you cannot tell me that on the path to the point to have a LPG pipe running into your house, that there hasn't been cubic miles of more pollution and destruction, you need drills, iron, ships to carry it around the world, there have been wars fought over the regions, the whole infrastructure... even "clean" sources like solar power, all the years of development, all the mining, all the materials, even if it is one of the cleanest and most autonomous sources of energy available today, it has a bloodstained history within the dirty capitalistic system of the past 200 years that was necessary for it to be developed. (T.W.Adorno: Es gibt nichts Gutes im Schlechten. = There is no good within the bad.)
and while all that... the trees were just there, waiting. we could have just cut one down and plant a new one and could have saved ourselves from all the s**t that was necessary to have a gas stove or an induction cooking plate.
So in my eyes, trying to make the big calculation, i find no way how anyone can say that any source of heat energy is cleaner, more balanced, more autonomous and more available, more perma than using wood (or dried manure in steppes) as fuel for fire.
THAT BEEING SAID....
is my point of view so wrong? why is this not considered? I respect organisations like the WHO releasing such informations and maps, but i cannot understand how they can only see the super narrow "now"-timeframe window - of cause right now a gas fire has less emissions than a wood fire. but how many emissions were necessary for that nice clean little fire?!
or is my assumption and calculation wrong? and 250 years of industrialisation is cleaner than my wood stove?