(HOST) As more people talk about carbon footprints and turn to burning wood to heat their homes, Vermont Humanities Council executive director and commentator Peter Gilbert thinks of the science involved – and a poem by a poet who knew a lot about science.
(GILBERT) I was surprised to learn recently that burning wood to heat your home does not increase your carbon footprint. Why, I wondered?
The answer is that there’s above-ground carbon and below-ground – that is, fixed or sequestered, fossil-fuel carbon, and carbon that’s circulating through the ecosystem. The CO2 put into the atmosphere by burning wood is eventually absorbed by other, living trees. And so burning wood doesn’t increase your carbon foot-print because, over the long haul, it doesn’t increase the amount of above-ground carbon. Unless, of course, deforestation diminishes our ecosystem’s ability to absorb CO2.
Robert Frost’s poem "The Wood-Pile" refers to what happens to wood that just decomposes. The poem tells of a man’s winter walk through a frozen swamp. In the middle of the otherwise featureless landscape, the narrator in the poem comes across a cord of wood – maple, carefully measured, cut, split, and stacked. Clearly it’s been there more than a couple years. Frost writes, "The wood was gray and the bark warping off it/And the pile somewhat sunken."
The narrator concludes the poem saying,
I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
The narrator speculates that the cordwood was rotting there because the man who literally "spent himself" on the wood "turn[ed] to fresh tasks." But that energetic optimism is probably misplaced. The narrator represses, I think, the more likely explanation: the woodcutter didn’t forget the wood-pile, rather, he died. Then comes the inevitable decay – "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," as they say – for him and cordwood alike. And so this complex poem is about, among other things, human mortality.
Those concluding lines about the cord wood being left "far from a useful fireplace/To warm the frozen swamp as best it could" is largely ironic. But Frost knew a lot about science – not only botany and astronomy, but also physics, chemistry, biology, and more. And he would’ve known that decomposition produces heat – and CO2, just as a fire does. Such decay really is, as the poem says, a kind of "smokeless burning." Of course, because it happens over a long period of time, and disbursed out in the open air, that heat isn’t captured – or even noticed. But that’s what happens; after all, that’s why concentrated centers of decomposition, like compost bins and manure piles, are noticeably warm. And so Frost’s closing words about the solitary cord of gray firewood in the swamp on that gray day undergoing – the slow smokeless burning of decay – accurately describe in melancholy verse – the scientific process of decomposition.