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Energy plans often leave me stumped

I was recently walking home from work when I looked-up to see that my walk had become a little sunnier. The trees lining the road leading to the post office had been chopped down in the name of road expansion; women were hacking the stumps to bits with axes and machetes, stumps elsewhere smoldered to make charcoal, and women walked into the distance with bundles of wood on their heads.

With those trees gone, where will people go to get wood next? This morning – when I woke to the sound of a woman pulling branches out of a tree in my backyard – I may have been given an answer.

Before catching a flight to the US recently, a friend of mine stopped by my house to ask a few questions about his destination. He had fascinating and insightful questions, including whether there are roads in the US like the wavy dirt road to Lugufu (a local refugee camp). I assured him that there are roads like that in the US, but to give him a better sense, I showed him photos I had taken back home. One was of a long, empty highway headed in the direction of Crater Lake. “There is no dust on the road,” he said, “no garbage. Is that primary forest?” “Yes,” I said. “Here, people would use a road like that to get firewood,” he told me, “they would cut down all the trees.”

One challenge is that while people need trees to stabilize watersheds and protect soils (not to mention for carbon sequestration), they also need wood to cook dinner at night. And the short-term need to put dinner on the table naturally trumps long-term concerns. Forests in the Northeastern US once shared a similar fate.

I have often pondered what will happen when the world's oil runs out, even while sitting behind the steering wheel of an idling vehicle. In a similar way, people here must see fewer trees and furl their brows at the thought that they will have to walk farther to get their wood – and know that one day those resources may be ashes, too.