Agreed. I heated all this winter completely with wood. I use a dab of kerosene for lamps and a small kerosene heater and that was a bit less than a 4 gal container of K-10...

I used zero electric or propane or N gas to heat with. Don't even have a method or applicances to heat with elec or gas of any type.

And I used somewhat less than a full cord. I went into winter with just a very small pile so I hauled and cut and split as the temperatures required it.

I stopped burning the wood heater a week ago. I never use it but about 7 hours a day at the most and rarely overnite.

I live alone but if my wife or any of my children were here they would definitely NOT be able to cope with what I described above. They would flee immediately!

As to the varieties of wood in the forests of Ky and most particularily Western Ky. I believe a huge amount of the stats are incorrect.

For a long time sawmills and pulp mills and also chip mills have been harvesting our timberlands with a vengeance. They literally strip the land. They 'take no hostages'. They don't care one bit what it looks like afterwards, nor do they REPLANT. Thats a laugh.

And for many years the hardwoods like Oak,Pecan, Walnut, Persimmon and Hickory have been decimated. There is basically none of pecan and walnut left. Then they came (Japanese) and took all the paulownia.

What is left that most people look at and oggle is just sweet gum and soft maple,some hard maple. They grow fast like weeds. They produce little heat.

Enough oak and hickory have been cut such that repopulating is not going to happen much IMO.
Besides these are slow growing trees. At least oak is. Hickory somewhat faster. Hickory can be a real bitch to split. Really tough.

Oak is good to split. White oak the best and red next. I used mostly downed oak and hickory this winter.

IMO here, and I think this holds true for much of the SE but not sure about the Smokies....we have far less good hardwoods than I believe is stated to exist.

Note new house construction. Do you see real plywood anymore as sheathing? No you see OSB...chipboard. Made by chipping wood of many types and glueing it together. Real good plywood is now rather expensive. This means we are using junk wood and other wood and in large quantities to build all the consturction.

At too dimension lumber? 2x4's and up...I see trash. Very poor grades. Lots of knots and gum pits and bark on them...The quality since what I used in my log house back in 1990 has rapidly diminished.

So my view is that when other heating sources are depelted or become too expensive that many will resort to stealing others wood. Out scavenging for dead limbs and such. Just at they do now in third world countries.

But here the populace his very heavily armed. At least more so in the lest populated areas. They will surely not stand idly by as scavengers raid their means of survival.

It will get very bad. Very bad. This report indicates to me that for this reason alone those ideas of Kunstlers about the revival of
the small villages is not going to happen. No fuel to cut,none to transport and therefore not going to survive.

Thanks for the report and essay. This is really where the buck stops at. Literally.

As others are prone to say....
Nuff Said?

As we watch all those petroleum resources dwindle and shut down we are dreaming about the future. Pure dreamstuff.

Airdale