Trees for Energy

Abstract

Growing trees as fuel crops has been done in a variety of ways, ranging from backyard or living fence plantings of tropical shrubs to coppicing cultures of poplars and willows in temperate zones to relatively large eucalypt plantations supplying metallurgical charcoal. Degrees of attention expended on such tree culture have varied, and unlike the case of trees destined for pulpwood or lumber not much management and improvement effort has been devoted to these fuel plantings. But new proposals for large energy plantations would introduce intensive field farming techniques into the process.

It is strange how I keep remembering the name of Kōdate Forest.

Considering that it contains only one tree, it really does not deserve to be called a forest at all.

—Sei Shōnagon The Pillow Book (trans. I. Morris)

There was a time when the trees were luxuriant on the Ox Mountain. As it is on the outskirts of a great metropolis, the trees are constantly lopped by axes. Is it any wonder that they are no longer fine?

—Meng Ke Book VI, Part I (trans. D. C. Lau)