GOT WOOD?

Blog number eighty-five                                  10 April 2007

I took a Biblical Archeology class one summer and one of the things we learned was that during the many wars in Palestine during Biblical times, whole cities were burned by the enemy piling up wood next to the walls of the cities and setting the piles on fire.  Since the houses and shops were built right next to the walls, the heat from the wood fire would set the buildings on fire and burn the entire city.

Now that sounds like maybe an interesting story, but think.  Where did all that wood come from?  Remember, these cities were burned maybe ten or twenty times.  Must have been large forests in Palestine back in the ages before they got dark.  Forests, where now is desert except where farms have been planted.

I learned that due to improper soil conservation, the rich land on the hills in Italy ran into the sea and now, in order to have the dirt to grow crops, the people have to go down and pick up the soil and carry it back up the mountains, up the hills.

I watched a documentary on India a few years back.  The people in the village had to go way far away to find wood that they could carry on their backs to their houses in order to have fuel for cooking.  Whole families would carry dinner with them so they could eat before they started back with their load.

One old lady told of spending an hour or so gathering wood from the forest when she was a child, but now the pickings were so slim that they had to spend all day at it.  Every year they had to travel farther and farther just to get wood for cooking.

One interesting thing in this documentary concerned a Peace Corps volunteer - a young man, who was living with this one family.  They were building a methane "factory" using excrement as the source of the methane.  The young man had a book on how to build one, but he had never done it before.  When they produced their first methane, he about went crazy.  I can imagine that all the time they were working on it, he never really believed it would work and he would disappoint his hosts.  he ran all around the "pond." yelling and waving his arms.  That was one happy fella.

I couldn't help imagining the family, used to traveling miles for a back-load of kindling that, stretched, would last maybe three or four days, now being able to simply turn a switch and start cooking.  They didn't say, but I can imagine that other families started building their own methane factories.