I’ve always found answers to today’s problems from past approaches, so this got me to think about a particular thing on household energy.
Is it more efficient and less damaging to cook or heat with firewood that you pick up from the forest floor, or using “modern” fuel like gas or electricity?
Ok, I am making some assumptions here. I am assuming that everyone can get access to firewood that doesn’t involve chopping down trees.
Why am I asking this? Well, I am just thinking all the things that we have to do to get fuel to our household. No, it’s not about setting an account with the energy company and paying the bills. I am talking about digging into the earth in massive scale, transporting the fuel, processing the resources and the distribution of the final product, so that we can get it by turning a knob on our stainless stove tops. I am talking about the real price that humans are paying.
Then I am looking into my grandparents’ generation and my parents were young, when they lived in an agricultural society, crop waste was a convenient source of fuel. The first thing my mom had to do when she came home from school everyday was to set up the fire in the brick stove to cook rice. If she did it late or messed it up, the whole family don’t get to eat dinner as usual. Anyways, will this be more sensible as compared to what we have already considered to be a “convenient” form of energy? Is it “convenient” only because we, the consumers, are shield from the massive process that is involved in bringing the fuel to us? Or is gathering firewood a less civilized way only because we, the end users, have to do it ourselves?
I don’t know the difference if we investigate, by per amount of energy, how much we are losing with each method. Maybe the modern way is indeed more economical and environmentally friendly. May be it’s not. I am just imagining a scenario where firewood has its own section in the grocery store, categorized by the type of crop or wood it is, and maybe people will even care if they are organic or not.
Alright, this really isn’t realistic. Crop waste are well used today anyways in multiple applications. I guess what I am getting is, we are so used to modern conveniences that we start to deny many old ways. Perhaps “retro” is good after all, beyond the aesthetic sense of course.