> But as cities grew rapidly and demanded ever more fuel, choppers quickly deforested surrounding areas. Firewood became scarce and expensive. By 1744, Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote. Johann David Schoepf, a German physician and botanist who traveled through America during and after the Revolutionary War, fretted that all this wood-burning would not “leave for [American] grandchildren a bit of wood over which to hang the tea-kettle.”
It's interesting to note that coal was the solution to a prior generation's ecological problem, and now it's the source of our generation's problems.
At the turn of the century, horses were considered a massive public health problem, because there were just so much horse feces and dead horses lying on the streets in major cities.
> On average a horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day, so you can imagine the sheer scale of the problem. The manure on London’s streets also attracted huge numbers of flies which then spread typhoid fever and other diseases. Each horse also produced around 2 pints of urine per day and to make things worse, the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years. Horse carcasses therefore also had to be removed from the streets. The bodies were often left to putrefy so the corpses could be more easily sawn into pieces for removal. The streets of London were beginning to poison its people. But this wasn’t just a British crisis: New York had a population of 100,000 horses producing around 2.5m pounds of manure a day. This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
Of course, now particularly in the US we see many downsides from having nearly totally shifted to a car-only culture. But that seems to have been preferable to managing the logistics of millions of pounds of horse manure.
>> the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years.
Wow. Just googling horse lifespan gives range of 25-30 years. Those horses must have been massively abused (or have huge disease problems) to die so quickly.
You'd think they'd have taken better care of them, since I imagine they weren't cheap. But I guess it's probably an example of market incentives creating perverse results quite different from what the propaganda would tell you.
You're the one saying that they didn't manage properly the forests, I don't know if they did or not but what I know is that when the population increase at some point forests cannot provide enough wood for everybody..
Especially since, as stated in the article, the fireplace of the time were inefficient..
The point isn't that coppicing et. al. produces infinite wood, it's that it's a better way to manage forests than just chopping down all the fucking trees, eh?
Coal has never been the solution to an ecological problem.
It's interesting to note that coal was the solution to a prior generation's ecological problem, and now it's the source of our generation's problems.