Burning Wood

A cold front. The stiff morning frost has receded in the dazzling sunlight. And the half-comforting, semi-stifling fetor of woodsmoke, is blowing in on the easterlies.

A fire is burning in the valley. The smoke, trapped by the colder air above it, drifts past us on the hillside, and accumulates downwind, above the village. This is bad news for all: this particulate matter is, in the words of George Monbiot “astonishingly harmful”.

So why on Earth am I glad the Scottish government have this winter stepped back from their plans to ban woodburning stoves in new-build homes?

First, let it be clear: the inseparable climate and biodiversity crises are the single most pressing issues of our times.

But our response to it is uncomplicated. It is clumsy. We jump at the visible culprits: ditch plastic straws and plastic bags, turn lights off, ban the burning of um… wood, and instead burn…um… wood, but in a nice big factory and call it biomass. And when that fails, we turn ever helplessly back into the arms of fossil capital for solutions. No energy source is perfect. Fossil fuels are an environmental catastrophe being lived out in real time and in our lifetimes – they got us in this mess and cannot be relied upon to get us out of it, however many billion we plough hopelessly into carbon capture. But renewable electricity is rarely anything like carbon neutral, and it is always deeply flawed. Try tracing the origin of the rare earth elements relied upon by the wind industry.

Likewise, burning wood is problematic for a number of well documented reasons - I’ll leave them to George. But at best, it is also traceable, small-scale and both socially and culturally important. And better – when done right - it is carbon neutral.

This is a fraught point. But, if natural regeneration is allowed to take place, trees do replace trees. They are very good at it, having evolved to do so for hundreds of millions of years. The combustion of locally sourced deadwood is capitalising on a natural process of decomposition which would otherwise release carbon back into the atmosphere, albeit more slowly. Unless the processes of decomposition are held at bay by anoxic conditions, such as in peat where stumps can be preserved for thousands of years, when a tree falls it rots.

I’m not saying all windblown trees are fair game. The increasingly recognised importance of deadwood for biodiversity, means that in many areas fallen trees should be left in peace. But there are countless scenarios where trees are felled for other reasons – thinning operations, continuous cover forestry, surgery of dangerous trees. Then – let us burn them to heat our homes and our water, as people have always done.

A proviso: scale matters, method matters, place matters. Deforestation of old growth forest for wood fuel is unforgiveable. Large-scale biomass systems are an environmental catastrophe. But the argument that all burnt wood is an opportunity cost for carbon capture is misguided, as the thinning of plantation forests is designed to maximise biomass gain, and the removal of individual trees in continuous cover forestry systems replicates natural processes, creating habitat heterogeneity.

The use of woodburning stoves in urban areas, is undoubtedly daft. Traceability of wood is lost. And, more importantly, particulate matter builds up to harmful concentrations precisely in the areas where most people live. But the condemnation of woodburning stoves as middle class, highlights the remarkable inability of urban politics to differentiate between what is middle class and what is simply rural. Is burning peat on an open fire middle class? Were the early hominids who first harnessed fire over a million years ago middle class? This seems to be a question forensic anthropologists have neglected.

The bottom line is that a blanket ban is misguided and I’m glad to see it go. If there are any lessons from climate crisis is that we must find ways to live in nature. Because there is no outside nature. And with this aim in mind, we must develop a multitude of locally scaled systems. One size cannot fit all.

A much more suitable (and neglected) target are the huge volumes of wood burnt for no apparent reason or purpose other than our human obsession with landscape tidiness. Many tree surgeons, landscape gardeners and (in my experience) even conservation organisations burn large quantities of damp wood. Wood burnt in a stove tends to be much drier, combustion purer. The concentrations of particulate matter and noxious gases released into the atmosphere by a properly designed woodburner are dwarfed by those from a smouldering pyre of damp wood.

As a lifelong fire-lover, with an enthusiasm bordering at times on pyromania, it pains me to admit it, but the bonfire is dead.

And it is a futile inferno such as this, not the many anonymous woodburners scattered across the landscape, which is plaguing me on a Borders hillside this glorious February day. Ironically, I am in fact, planting trees. Just five hundred saplings – a half day. I have high aspirations for them, helicopter parent that I am. I’m twenty-two but if I’ve done my job properly, most ought to outlive me. There are Scots pines I hope to reach true granny status, Sitka spruce which for all their limitations soak up more carbon per hectare than any native species, and sessile oaks which could (if left in peace) see the fourth millenium. But there are silver birches and aspen, which I’d be proud to have planted if they live just long enough to keep my nature-depleted generation, human, independent and warm…