After gritting my teeth and not replying I wanted to state some facts: We have a ten-plus acre wood lot that we let nature have its way. It is great habitat for wildlife and undisturbed plant growth. The little we use this resource is for a walk in nature, gathering mushrooms and wild onions (ramps). Knowing that this is left natural is worth the yearly cost in taxes. I have observed the great number of limbs that fall each year and this would be a part of the wood for this wood gas use. We heat our home with wood that is in another wood lot closer to our home and easier to cart to the house. So when someone tries to tell me that burning wood creates more carbon than the tree absorbed to create it that is wrong! We live in a region of hardwood forests, each year the trees pull carbon out of the air, minerals, and water from the soil to produce wood and leaves. Right now the forest floor has a covering of several inches of leaves. Leaves that are carbon and minerals. They will compost into the soil, effectively sequestering that carbon into the earth. If a tree dies or the annual fall of branches is not removed they too compost into the soil, or become the nutrients for the mushroom we gather. HOW CAN burning a tree release more carbon than it took to create it?
What has even greater carbon sequestration on a per-area basis is not the forests, but the grasslands of our pasture. It is never plowed, grows local native grass species, never chemically fertilized or treated. This pasture is managed for feeding animals and building the soil. We use a grazing plan that some call “mob stock grazing”, the idea is to daily move animals to smaller areas to encourage them to eat a third and trample two-thirds as mulch to build the soil. This along with first grazing cattle, then poultry in movable pens. The cows eat and trample the taller grasses, leaving their manure behind. By moving them each day they have a clean, healthy feed, no parasite build-up, and after grazing the pasture has time to rest and regrow. The poultry in pens follows to spread the manure, eat insects, and the shorter growth the cows can not eat. The sheer volume of grass that grows each year far exceeds the growth of trees or bushes. More than half of the growth, (carbon) is returned to the soil.
Cutting back carbon emissions is a smaller part of helping the environment as opposed to changing the way we live and in particular, how we produce the food we daily eat. Living in rural lands rather than urban and suburban areas is the solution to the environmental impact humans have. In this country according to census data, 80% of the population live on 3% of the land area. This suburban and urban lifestyle is nearly 100% dependent on outside resources. The carbon dioxide that fuels our pasture and forest comes from some urban areas. But we are taxed to provide this for the city dwellers.
