The lack of natural resources is inherent in civilization. Therefore, the search for substitute resources or techniques to increase the efficiency of existing resources has also been a part of our history and has brought us here.

When we found out about it, it was good proof of that. wrought iron. To reach the required high temperatures, a large amount of fuel was required in the form of wood, a type of fuel with very low energy density (ie, we need a large amount to achieve a corresponding energy return).

Because of this, the consumption of wood for the production of charcoal-based iron was so widespread that in the mid-16th century, surrounded by forges that cut down trees mercilessly to feed this new industry, English communities feared that wood would soon run out. In fact, many were those who asked the king to shut down the forges forever in order to save the world from the scarcity of other wooden objects.

The mouth of the wood oven

“More wood, this war” we hear from Groucho Marx in the movie Marx Brothers in the West (he actually said “bring wood”, but the other is the phrase left to posterity). And that could be the motto of the furnaces for forging, because they were greedy and insatiable consumers of wood, they destroyed entire forests.

In fact, only one furnace a year. 12.000 tons of wood. An extraordinary consumption that highlights how inefficient wood is as an energy source. In fact, as Lewis Dartnell explains in his book Open in apocalypseIf we consume 14,000 kWh for a year using fossil fuels instead of wood as an energy source to light our apartment, we will need 3 tons of wood (1.7 tons for coal).

In other words, it takes about a quarter hectare of woodland to illuminate a single floor for a year:

This assumes that it is possible to convert 100 percent of the energy contained in a log into electricity that will flow through my outlets. In fact, the (multistage) process of burning fuel to generate electricity is inherently inefficient, and even modern power plants can only convert 30-50 percent of the energy stored in their fuel into electricity.

Not even wood was used for forging iron, but wood coalIt is a more compact and portable type of wood that burns at a higher temperature than the wood it comes from as it loses all its moisture and only carbon fuel remains. The production of ceramics, bricks, glass and, of course, metals, which actually require a lot of heat energy, could not be developed without the help of coal.

Thus, the calorific power of charcoal varies between 29,000 and 35,000 kJ/kg, and the calorific power of wood varies between 12,000 and 21,000 kJ/kg. In other words: since iron melts at 1,535ºC, the smelting of this metal was necessarily linked to large-scale coal production (coal reaches 900ºC, but a bellows supply of compressed air can raise the temperature up to 2,000ºC).

objects made of iron

Although fuel consumption was gradually reduced by improving the shape of the furnaces and increasing the height of the chimneys (European blast furnaces probably originated in the lower Rhine valley shortly before 1400), the advent of the first iron objects skyrocketed fuel demand to unsuspected levels.

The woods needed by the furnaces remained until the advent of much more efficient smelting furnaces, which consumed one-tenth the energy of their medieval counterparts in the late 19th century. started to cause concern. And as environmental scientist Vaclav Smil explains in his book. energy and civilizationThe consumption of charcoal for iron production in England at the beginning of the 18th century required the cutting of 1,100 km2 of orchards annually:

As long as wood consumption continued, communities surrounded by mills and traditional forges had a hard time. As early as 1548, the distraught Sussexes wondered how many villages would disappear if the furnaces kept working: they would not have wood to build houses, watermills, wheels, barrels, docks, and hundreds of other things.

The greed for iron was consuming the world from other things made of wood, so many felt that many forges had to be closed. However, the protests were fruitless. Although a single furnace was capable of consuming a four-kilometer radius of forest per year, furnaces proliferated everywhere and wreaked havoc.

The inevitable environmental cost of making nails, axes, horseshoes, chain mail, spears, weapons, and cannonballs was deforestation. Even America’s abundant forests became unsustainable for ever-increasing production, but the 17th century energy crisis in Britain was disastrous.

Also, a crisis exacerbated by the strong demand for wood for forest products. navy building, it was in full bloom at that time. Much of what we would consider forested today, such as Cantabria, was completely depleted of forests to make ships (the Invincible Armada was born from there, so between the 16th and 18th centuries the Royal Armada was the major agent of transformation of the original landscape, leaving bare land). Mountains that are bald today, like Ventoux in Provence, suffered the same fate. Elizabeth’s England had to turn to North American colonies such as Virginia to meet her demands.

Look for alternatives: move forward or backward

The greed for iron added to shipbuilding would extinguish not only forests but also houses, wheels, barrels, and hundreds of other wooden things. What was the solution? Of course, it wasn’t about stopping consumption and going back to a time when iron was no longer needed, but it was about finding alternatives: from more efficient furnaces to other energy sources more efficient than fossil fuels such as wood or charcoal.

Because the depletion of natural resources is not just a matter of actual physical depletion, but rather an unbearable burden that can be caused by an increase in cost. For example, between 1840 and 1880, guano nitrogen made a huge difference in European agriculture by acting as a kind of magic fertilizer, but when enough guano became too expensive to obtain, there was a strong incentive to seek alternatives (in this case, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, invented a system for making large quantities of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer.)

Aluminum was one of the rarest metals for humans for most of their history. Until the 19th century, it was actually considered the most precious metal in the world due to its scarcity. Until in 1886 the American chemist Charles Martin Hall as well as the French Paul Héroult discovered the process of obtaining it in large quantities: electrolysis.

There’s a reason Ventoux is bald.

As Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler explain in their book Abundancescarce resources turn into abundance thanks to innovation, new ideas; It occurs in greater amounts when there are strong incentives for it. In short, there is much that mythologizes Europe’s “natural” past. Sustainability was far from being taken into account. And the per capita pollution of our ancestors would put us to shame. Faced with the threat of wood shortages, they switched to more intense energy sources and released enough wood to start growing more trees than were cut.

Due to this period of reforestation, partly because we no longer need them on an industrial level, the area covered with forests increased by more than a third across Europe from 1900 to 2010, according to the findings of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Waningen in the Netherlands. According to Richard Fuchs, a researcher at the University of Waningen and lead author of the study, the main reason for this reforestation is that we are less dependent on wood:

At that time, around 1900 and much earlier, wood was needed for almost everything: for furniture, to support mines, for train tracks, for construction, in battlefields, as fuel, for ships… there was no forest.

Wood was important, but now we’ve made it less important and let other resources become more important. Because, of course, as Diamandis and Kotler write: “Technology is a mechanism to free up resources. It can transform what was once scarce into abundance.”