Understanding early American wood use: a brief thread.

#envhist

1/ https://twitter.com/Robert_Suits/status/1336449869519728642

Looking at the Sankey animation, the first thing that stands out is the massive, massive use of fuel wood in colonial America (~90% of total energy use). Per person, they were burning ~*five times* what contemporary Europeans might use. Why?

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There are essentially two threads to follow here: abundance (Americans had a crazy amount of wood to burn!) and inefficiency (Americans needed to burn a lot for the same general outcomes!).

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It is well-established in environmental history that violent settler colonialism led directly to a massive stockpile of timber. The seizure of land and genocide of indigenous peoples erased a vibrant agricultural society spanning North America.

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Indigenous peoples are well-documented as practicing extensive land clearance, maintaining both cropland and relatively clear hunting grounds. European settlement suppressed all these activities, leading to widespread forest growth.

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(It is sometimes hypothesized that this forest growth took up enough carbon from the atmosphere to contribute to "the Little Ice Age," a period of widespread cooling across the Northern Hemisphere. Recent scientific studies suggest this is unlikely.)

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Either way, the end result was an incredible abundance of timber, spanning from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

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European settlers burned this with *gusto*. Contemporary letters stressed that even the poorest of settlers could maintain hearths like princes or kings. If anyone commented on wood, it was that there was *too much* that needed to be cleared.

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Overall, between 1500 and 1900, Euro-American settlers burned *seven cubic miles* of firewood!

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Why? American settlers complained about leaky houses and frigid winters. Such complaints... are not new. But there is some evidence that these were based in fact.

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North American winters *are* generally more extreme in temperature than Western European winters, a gift of our continental climate. Early European explorers and settlers frequently remarked on the fact that they needed to burn more fuel to stay warm.

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(That said, note that American energy use was still higher than contemporaries in Sweden and Russia, indicating abundance played a much bigger role than need!)

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And these earliest American settlers, often located far from the coast, might have poorly-maintained houses. When more efficient stoves were invented, they took a long time to reach inland markets, prolonging the dominance of wood fuel in America.

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And continuing indigenous land seizures meant this profligate wood-burning could be maintained through most of the nineteenth century.

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Indeed, wood-burning America makes it clear that industrialization and coal are not perfectly overlapping. Wood was so plentiful in early America that many steam engines burned wood, not coal. Most trains remained wood-burning until 1880!

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What eventually put paid to wood as the heating fuel of choice? Cost, access, comfort, and a lot of household labor.

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Settlement pushed woodlands further away from the large cities of the Northeast, driving up prices even as canals and railroads made coal and the stoves required to burn it more accessible.

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Americans turned to coal-burning stoves as the rail network made those stoves and coal accessible. But it wasn't a simple matter of striking a match -- lighting coal required specialized equipment and knowledge.

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This energy transition therefore required a huge amount of infrastructure, but also marketing and household labor to teach people how to USE coal.

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Key takeaways: 1) the household was at the CENTER of this energy transition; most early coal was used in the home; 2) a railroad network was key to shipping coal and stoves to rural customers.

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But it's also important to notice how much of that early energy use was governed by dynamics of settler colonialism -- dispossession was at the heart of early American abundance.

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Further readings...

On indigenous dispossession, agriculture, and forests:
William Cronon, Changes in the Land
Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, "On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene"
Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus

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(see also this excellent blog post: https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/the-deforestation-and-colonization-of-the-united-states/)

On heavy wood use and huge colonial fires:
Schurr and Netschert, Energy in the American Economy, 1850-1975

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On the coldness of the Americas:
Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America

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On the household transition from wood to coal:
Chris Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America
Jones, “The Materiality of Energy.” Canadian Journal of History 53 (3), Winter, 2018: 378-394.
Sean Adams, Home Fires, How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century

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