[Reverend Blair]

There isn't enough wood to provide fuel for heating and cooking for everybody in the long run though, Brent. Start adding up 8-10 cords per house per year. and things don't last very long at all. In some parts of Africa, gathering wood for cooking (and they don't get a lot of sub-zero weather) has denuded whole areas and promoted erosion.<br /> <br /> I have no doubt that what you are doing is sustainable, just as cutting wood for personal use off a personal wood lot is sustainable. It doesn't work for large cities and big populations though. It doesn't even work for decorative urban fireplaces.<br /> <br /> I never heard Rex Murphy's comments, so I have no context for them. You can generally tell when Murphy is wrong by simply checking to see if he's talking though. If his mouth's open, he's saying something that doesn't stand up to even mild scrutiny. <br /> <br /> Oil is, if looked at purely from a standpoint of producing BTUs, far more efficient and sustainable from wood. It is definitely not cleaner or more environmentally friendly though.

[Rural]

We must recognize that the city folk do not understand the ways and life of the country folk any better than we (rural dwellers) understand the urban folk. All too often in encouraging “sustainable” living I fail to take into account that the options available to me, which includes heating with wood, is simply not available to the majority of folk. I practice sustainable forestry on my 30acre woodlot and have more wood than I care to drag out each year, a couple of dozen cull trees sees me in all the firewood I need and enough saw wood to keep me busy in the wood shop during the winter. It is said that one acre will typically produce ½ to 1 cord per year so I am not even keeping up at this point!<br /> <br /> Some say that it takes about 2 acres to offset a persons carbon use (don’t know if that’s just breathing or includes other things, I suspect just breathing!) so with a little left over I am glad to send a little oxygen your way! For those who do not realize it, the CO2 produced by burning wood is “recaptured” by the forest within the time it took to grow that tree, so it’s a 50 to 75 year cycle. Oil however is a million or so year cycle and thus not “sustainable”.<br /> <br /> There are things that offset this non-use of oil though, the gas guzzling pick up truck seen in rural driveways is not a luxury but a necessity for many of us. We cannot hop the bus to go to work or get groceries, the tractor and chainsaws use up more gas whilst working in the bush, we run several small engines to help maintain the place, chippers, mowers, tillers, for some folk ATVs, non of which an apartment dweller needs!<br /> <br /> So the way I look at it we must each do our bit to keep our “consumption” to a reasonable level and that includes consumer goods, energy of all types and services that consume resources. It is not always easy to see the wood for the trees, especially when you live in the concrete jungle. <img align=absmiddle src='images/smilies/smile.gif' alt='Smile'><br />

[Reverend Blair]

It's true about rural and urban people not really understanding each other's reality, Urban. If you want to get really entertained, or maybe just confused, try having a foot in each. Neither way of life is sustainable, but most of the people living it can't see that.<br /> <br /> The more I think about sustainability though, the more I think about a thing I read a few years back about population. The guy who wrote it did all the math and figured out that the earth could sustain a population of 650 million people. I've read other things that suggested populations of a few billion and populations of less than 300 million, but the 650 million guy seemed to really have his ducks in a row. I wish I had links, but that was at least one computer ago.<br /> <br /> Here we are at somewhere over six billion people, headed for nine billion though. Then they, whoever they might be, think that the population will level out. I think a crash is more likely. I've seen coyotes and foxes go through it...they over-populate like mad, then die off or move on when they deplete the resources.<br /> <br /> We've done the same in the past, but we've almost always had a place to go. There's no place to go this time. We've made the whole planet into Easter Island.

[Brent Swain]

I think we are a little too gentle when we congratulate people for having their third child. We should be calling them irresponsible.<br /> Patrick Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society hit the nail on the head when he said "Greenpeace are far too cowardly to point a finger at overpopulation as the main cause of environmental degradation." Ditto with politicoes.<br /> Brent