Middlebury College: Sporting Wood

Middlebury College, home of my beloved Bread Loaf School of English, recently took a giant step towards carbon neutrality by opening an advanced wood-burning power plant, one of the first of it's kind in the US.  The plant is a fairly progressive innovation, yet one so fittingly New England in its basic concept, that Middlebury seems to be the perfect candidate for the development.  The college is at once the epitome of traditional Northeast liberal arts quaintness, yet also a leader in ecological thinking and conservation; who better to try this oddly retro concept?

Advanced wood-burning plants, which have already begun to take hold in Northern Europe, combust wood chips at extreme temperatures to convert all the carbon in the wood to flammable gas, which in turn fuels the continued ignition, leaving little smoke or residue.  While traditional wood fires, whose smoking chimneys are a Vermont winter staple, are in actuality horribly polluting, this advanced combustion method greatly reduces both CO2 and ash.  Because the CO2 released is effectively offset by the CO2 the trees soak up during their lives, the carbon foot print for the process is fairly small, depending on how the wood was harvested and transported.  It's not a perfect power sources, but it certainly seems to have its upsides. 

I admit to a healthy level of skepticism over the process, and can see several problems immediately.  It's difficult to find clear data on an amount of wood burned to power produced ratio, but this issue is key to the method's viability: do you have to denude an entire hillside to get a week's worth of power?  New England was once almost entirely clear cut, and few people, I hope, would like to see the region returned to that condition.  For that matter, I would hate to see all that land, particularly in Maine, that is so close to being surrendered to permanent preservation suddenly looked again but the hungry and destructive timber barons. I worry that advanced wood combustion might be the next corn ethanol, a idea that looks good initially but soon proves to be an environmental paper tiger.    

But, I also must admit, if handled properly, advanced wood combustion might be a handy solution to several problems.  First and foremost, it would reduce our carbon foot print, which is an absolute and immediate necessity that we're nowhere near dealing with effectively.  To that end, the process would begin to get us off foreign oil, hopefully allowing some of our more egregious political sins to be forgiven.  Finally, the method could foster job growth in otherwise poverty stricken areas.  The backwoods of the North East are rough areas, and a revitalized timber industry could provide sorely needed employment and livelihood.  Of course, I support the movement only if handled correctly.  The wood must all be fairly local, and farmed in a sustainable way.  We need no further causes to tear down the old growth forests of the world, and shipping lumber from Canada or further afield largely defeats the purpose.  It's also important to handle timber management in an ecologically sound way.  the rain-forests of Indonesia are swiftly being torched and leveled to make room for oil palm plantations, largely in service of the bio-fuels industry.  We must not be so blinded by greed that we raze our environment in the same way.

But, if scientifically guided, locally produced, and ethically managed, a revitalized timber industry could prove a boon, at least for a region such as the Northeast.  Certainly, I'd much rather have the Great North Woods returned to their pristine and untrammeled original state, but, more and more, the cause of conservation is an issue of triage.  If the forest must be developed to some extent in the pursuit of reducing global warming, so be it.  It's all a game of attrition like it or not, and we move not so much towards any sort of victory as simply further away from defeat.  So I applaud Middlebury for taking this important measure, and I can't wait to get back there this summer, and hopefully take a tour of the plant if I can.  I absolutely love the smell of wood smoke, I admit, but hopefully, the smell of no smoke at all will be even sweeter.