Nature's Evil

Before we harnessed fossil fuels, each European city needed a tract of forest a hundred times larger than its own area. Heated with wood and often built out of wood, growing cities pushed the forests ever further away. A city could replace wood with stone and clay, peat and coal. But clay had to be fired, stone had to be transported, river banks and mine shafts had to be reinforced, and wood was still needed for all these purposes. But the greater part was burnt where it stood, to provide land suitable for planting crops. The woods around Madrid were exhausted – from the seventeenth century onwards, this city had been heated with charcoal, which provides more heat per unit of weight than firewood. Every year thousands of tons of charcoal were produced by burning even more wood and delivered by oxen from provinces up to 50 kilometres away. Less than 7 per cent of the British Isles was covered in woodland, falling to a minimum during the First World War. Even in the departments of northern France, no more than 15 per cent of the territory was covered in forests. Firewood was brought to Paris from up to 200 kilometres away, along canals and the Seine. Each Parisian needed, on average, 2 tons of firewood per year, equivalent to harvesting 1 acre of woodland. If forests were felled and not replanted, then the radius of delivery increased annually. In contrast to that of Paris, the London price of firewood remained stable thanks to the abundance of coal. But the timbering of mines required good quality logs, and they had to be frequently replaced; only a few species – particularly chestnut – did not immediately rot in the mines. Metal smelting needed even more firewood. Charcoal produced a hotter fire than wood, but it needed high-quality wood such as oak. Smelting furnaces were built next to the mines, but these were often in the mountains, and charcoal had to be taken up there on carts. A journey of between 5 and 8 kilometres was viable, but once all the timber within this radius had been felled the mine had to be shut even if there was still ore to be mined. The irony was that timber, not ore, defined the economic geography of the Iron Age.

In the imperial period, the Europeans were as anxious about the disappearance of the old forests as they were delighted about newly discovered ones. Felling and burning woodland, they harnessed enormous expanses of territory from Rome to St Petersburg, and from the Amazon to Siberia. Starting from the west of Europe, the further a traveller went, the more forests he saw. In Prussia about 40 per cent of the land was forested, and the woods in Poland and European Russia still seemed boundless. Discovering new islands and continents, expeditions found woods instead of gold. But you can’t depend on what you destroy; you can’t have your cake and eat it. Our parks – places for relaxation and sites of nostalgia – are great monuments to the vanished forests. The places where we work bear no resemblance to bosky glades, but the places where we choose to relax still look like forests.

Notes

1   Smil, Energy in World History . 2   White, ‘Energy and the evolution of culture’. 3   Van Gijn, Flint in Focus ; Lech and Werra, ‘On artefacts from the prehistoric mining fields’. 4   Shipman, The Invaders . 5   Adler et al., ‘Ahead of the game’. 6   Morris, The Measure of Civilization . 7   Williams, Deforesting the Earth , p. 92. 8   Hennius, ‘Viking age tar production and outland exploitation’. 9   Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea . 10  Williams, Deforesting the Earth , pp. 196–201; de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis . 11  Fedotova and Korchmina, ‘Cattle pasturing as a traditional form of forest use’. 12  Thomas, Man and the Natural World , p. 209. 13  Braudel, The Mediterranean , Vol. 1, p. 62. 14  De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis ; Lupanova, Istorija zakreposhchenija .

TWO

Grain’s Way

It is only recently that farming has become sufficiently productive for some people to create surpluses that others can use. The creation of the first agrarian states in Mesopotamia occurred within the most recent 5 per cent of the history of human kind. The era of petrofarming has lasted for less than a quarter of 1 per cent.

The bog civilisation