I recently heard a radio vignette by the talented NPR science correspondence Robert Krulwich concerning the work of a Dr Nalini Nadkarni of The Evergreen State College in Washington. Dr. Nadkarni calculated, using data from NASA satellites, that there were approximately 61 trees for every person on planet Earth. She concluded that this was a good number.

But let me quote her husband’s reply:

…when Nadkarni sat down with her husband, Jack, a microbiologist at Evergreen State, to tell him the good news [61 trees per person], he was less impressed with the ratio of trees to people. “He looked at me in his quiet, slow sort of way and said, ‘Well, you know, I don’t know. We use that much in a couple of seasons of our wood stove, and the amount of paper that comes off the printer and the lumber that made our home — so maybe it’s not so many.”

According to the article, Dr. Nadkarni is now trying to determine how many trees each of us consume and how the tree to person ratio changing. This is complicated question with no simple answers.

I am not a environmental scientist (yet), but what is clear is that we use a lot of wood for lumber, paper, and other products. It is well-documented that the vastness, age, and diversity of forests are decreasing. Populations are also increasing and using more wood, so my guess is that this number is decreasing.

But this matter?

In Jared Diamond’s book: Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed deforestation is a key ingredient of the catastrophic collapses of great civilizations such as the Maya, the Easter Islanders, and the Greenland Vikings. Deforestation is generally not considered the overt reason for the collapse of civilizations, but it is considered a significant factor with subtle downstream effects. The largest effect is that it lead to a loss of agricultural productivity through soil erosion, leading to starvation, social instability, war, and genocide.

Surely we are more advanced and this couldn’t happen to us? These were just primitive societies? Right?

Wrong!

These were sophisticated societies that eventually met catastrophic ends resulting in part from deforestation. Consider that in our grandparent’s lifetime there was the great dustbowl of the 1930s, resulting from soil erosion, which blew dust from Texas all the way to Buffalo and further north. It caused extensive damage, ruined livelihoods, and triggered mass migrations of desperate rural people seeking work in the cities. Here are all the elements of societal collapse that the Maya experienced: loss of agriculture, mass migration of desperate people to already crowded cities. Fortunately, unlike for the Maya, the weather and the government cooperated and were able to produce a recovery. However, in modern-day countries like Rawanda in Africa, starvation, resulting from deforestation and soil erosion is considered a key ingredient in inciting one ethnic group to massacre another.

A more subtle effect of deforestation may be that we are losing important carbon sinks? Since they do not sequester carbon, carbon dioxide levels increase and so does global warming. Hurricane Katrina cannot be directly linked to the greenhouse effect, however the global warming scenario predicts that we will experience more intense Katrina-like storms and abnormal weather everywhere. It is hard to imagine that a loss of a forest elsewhere in the world could lead to the complete implosion of society like occurred in New Orleans. Maya never saw it coming and neither did we.

But back to the trees and more positive things. We do have the advantage of science and hindsight. Wood is a great material – fully renewable and biodegradable – but needs to be used judiciously. Supporting this idea, the ReUse harvests forests of wood without ever cutting down a tree or contributing to a change in the person to tree ratio. In fact, since last year they have added over 375 trees to the neighborhood around Northampton St with help from ReTree WNY.

How can you harvest wood without cutting down trees?

Well, my friend, Buffalo, and most American urban areas literally contain vast forests of old-growth trees (still sequestering carbon too) in old buildings and infrastructure. These trees were 200-300 years old when they were cut 100 years ago, and produced a superior wood to anything available today.

By my estimates an average Buffalo foursquare contains 40 tons of wood. The ReUse recovers conservatively 60% of it, or 24 tons. It is commonly assumed that there are approximately1000 board feet (bf) of lumber per 7.5 tons of wood. Thus an average house contains (round down) 5000 bf and 3000 bf which is recovered by the ReUse deconstruction. From Doyle’s rule tables, an average a 3 foot diameter at breast height (DBH) tree with a 32-foot long usable trunk contains approximately 1000 bf of lumber. Thus an average house contains approximately 5 old-growth trees of that size. The ReUse recovers 3 of them.The City of Buffalo is conservatively estimated to have 20,000 abandoned houses, most in need of demolition. Using my quick math above, that equates to 100,000 trees, 3 foot in diameter and 32 feet usable trunk. If this wood is recovered (at 60% recovery) and reused it means 60,000 trees of those same dimensions would be saved by re-using wood. Since trees in a forest have a size distribution and are generally smaller today the numbers of trees saved would be much higher.

Now I have talked about the trees as carbon sinks, preventing soil erosion etc… but if all those arguments don’t sway you to think about the 61 trees per person then, come by the ReSource (DRESS WARMLY!) and just look at all the beautiful wood and interesting wood that is available. Some of it is planking and timbers, others is sheathing, and some is milled into wainscoting, flooring, and architectural pieces. As we are not discriminatory, the ReUse also has newer lumber, and sometimes plywood, pressure treated wood, landscaping timbers, and such recovered from more modern structures. At between 20 cents – $2 per linear foot (excluding hand hewn beams – $25 a linear foot) the price is right.

So if you are looking to help maintain the ratio (61 trees per person) come to The Resource and check out the lumber, and if you have a large project involving demolition call and see if we can recover it.

Happy Holidays.