Firewood Cutting as a Way of Life and Theory of Change

Firewood warms us twice, as the old saying goes.  Firewood can also inform us at least twice.

Compassionate cutting of firewood — sensitive to the lives we take for our warmth — can be an ecologically gentle and economically easy way to heat our homes. It’s how I heat my home.  Spending much of my life in cabins (my own on a piece of land protected by conservation easement in Split Rock Wildway in the Adirondack Park; and back-country cabins farther afield), I’ve formed an ethic for firewood gathering and cutting. I’ve learned some biology, and also learned about the nature of change through firewood cutting.

I mostly cut firewood from dead trees along or near roads, areas already impacted by human disturbances.  I use hand tools — axes and bow-saws, chiefly — thus generally limit myself to trees less than eight inches in diameter.  Larger trees are just too slow to cut without a skillfully and regularly sharpened crosscut saw (a valuable tool hard to find these days, and the sharpening of which is a skill few have anymore) or chainsaw.  The Forever Wild conservation easement on my land, held by Northeast Wilderness Trust, does not allow chainsaws, and I would not dare employ them anyway.

Thin, dead, standing hardwood trees (flagpole trees) make excellent firewood.  Moreover, smaller trees generally have less wildlife habitat value than do larger trees. Cut down a tree or snag a foot or more in diameter, and quite likely you are taking away homes from at least a few animals.  This is less the case with smaller trees.  Even with small dead trees, though, I always look carefully for cavities (little homes) before I cut, to be sure I’m not dislodging woodpeckers or owls or nuthatches or chickadees or bluebirds or wood ducks or squirrels or chipmunks or voles or raccoons or fishers…  Needless to say, if I see a tree cavity that looks likely to be home for someone, I spare that snag.

Of course, too, I realize that we take life with everything we consume.  In this case, even the smallest snag or down-tree is no doubt home for many little creatures, from arthropod-scale down to bacteria. Still, I believe we take many fewer lives if we choose our firewood carefully.

These days, I own a mid-size open-bed pickup truck — an indulgence I justified for firewood work — and I commonly fill the back with small trees and branches that road crews have felled.  This I especially do along Eddy Foundation lands in Split Rock Wildway, where I have permission to gather even if the tree is beyond the road right-of-way.

As I’ve gathered and cut firewood through the decades, I’ve also come to see this physical work as a metaphor for how we might accomplish beneficial changes in the world.  My “theory of change,” to borrow a modern activist term, is that to make gains — like protecting enough wildlife habitat that we ensure safe homes for all native species — we must tirelessly apply pressure on governing forces, through actions ranging from letter-writing to civil disobedience. My older, wiser colleague, Brock Evans, legendary parks & wilderness advocate, has called this “relentless pressure, relentlessly applied.” Generally, our gains will be modest and incremental.  Once in a while, however, after some sort of tectonic shift, we’ll make a rapid and big gain. Splitting a tough log is like this. You can pound and pound and feel like you are getting nowhere, till suddenly the log splits and you have firewood. So also with sawing, you go back and forth many times with but small gains, till you cross a threshold and the log quickly divides.

I imagine North Country readers muttering, “He’s saying nothing original. This is little more than Stephen Jay Gould’s Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, stripped of all majesty and reduced to plebian chores.” I accept that charge and freely admit that my notion of firewood cutting as a metaphor borrows shamelessly from Gould’s theory of evolution and from various other bold thinkers’ concepts of thresholds and turning points.

I imagine our work to protect Split Rock Wildway going so.  We’ve been piecing together protected areas through the decades, slowly enough that the added integrity of the wildlife corridor is barely noticeable.  Someday, though, wildway advocates will be able to triumphantly declare that Split Rock Wildway is complete — enough land has been protected to assure long-term habitat connectivity between Lake Champlain and the High Peaks.

I hope when that happy news emerges, I’m sitting in my rocking chair beside the wood stove, an old man but still able to slowly cut firewood, reading about how persistent advocates have succeeded in getting protected areas of land and water up to the 50% threshold (“Half Earth,” as EO Wilson urged) for life on Earth.  Then can I repair happily to my grave (which I dug many years ago, literally and figuratively) at Spirit Sanctuary conservation burial ground, my friends to send me off with a farewell fire of wood locally, tenderly cut.