To The Editor:
Thanks to The Valley Reporter for the continuing series on wood heat. Very informative and helpful, containing information we need if we are heating with wood.
There was one item of information/action which we wood heaters need to hear and do. That is, what to do with the residual from heating with wood – the ashes? The ashes need to go back to the land to keep the cycle of continual regeneration healthy. It’s a simple matter to take the ash bucket and broadcast the ashes back into the woods where they add nutrients back to the land to grow more trees and to keep the land healthy.
Back in the last century (1971), Barry Commoner wrote a book, “The Closing Circle,” which greatly inspired me in my environmental work. In that book Commoner listed the four laws of ecology:
- Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
- Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away" to which things can be thrown.
- Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, "likely to be detrimental to that system"
- There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
It is Number 2 above that informs us that ashes can’t just be thrown away to any old place, and certainly not to the landfill. They have to go somewhere. Why not put them carefully back on the land to help in the crucial process of regeneration?
Richard Czaplinski
Warren
