Lester R. Brown: Author, Ecologist and Economist

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PLOWBOY: The average new home in this country cost $57,700, 1 think, in December of 1977. And it's still going up.

BROWN: I know. A few months ago, Patricia Harris?Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?called for an investigation into why the cost of housing was going up so fast I . . almost as if she thought there was a conspiracy or something at work. I could have told her one of the main reasons why prices are going up so fast, and that is that lumber is becoming scarce. Good wood is an increasingly dear commodity.

I can remember when-if a tree was blown over in a windstorm-the D.C. city government street maintenance crews would come out, saw the tree up, and haul it away somewhere to be dumped. They don't do that anymore. Nowadays, they don't even bring a truck with them! Whenever a tree blows down in Washington, the maintenance guys come with their saws, slice the tree up into firewood-sized pieces, stack the wood along the edge of the street, and forget it. Look ... you see that tree stump across the street there? That used to be a sizable tree, but it didn't have a good root system and the wind just blew it over one day. The city maintenance crew came in, cut it up, stacked the wood between that other tree there and the parking meter, and left it. The next day, the whole tree was gone ... everything (laughter). Some people have even begun to follow the city maintenance crews around now. They follow the crew to their first job in the morning, load up on firewood, and speed off!

PLOWBOY: It's surprising how many people in the U.S.-New Englanders in particular-have begun to turn to wood heat in earnest. I remember Amory Lovins saying something once about how 40% of all the houses in Vermont have been back-fitted by the owners with wood stoves in the past three or four years.

BROWN: Right. I've seen some recent estimates to the effect that the New England energy economy well?a generation from now-be largely a wood-based economy. People in that part of the country have the capability to substitute wood for oil not only in home heating, but in electrical generation.

PLOWBOY: Is this really as good an idea as it seems, though? I mean, it's one thing for a few homesteaders to get 100% of their heat from wood and for city dwellers to supplement their existing systems with wood now and then-but would it be ecologically sound for everyone in the U.S. to turn to wood heat over the next ten or twenty years?

BROWN: I think that if our entire population of 216 million people ... which, remember, is far more people than we had in this country when we were a wood-based economy 200 years ago ... if all of us turned to wood, I think the pressure on our forests would be more than they could sustain. So what we need to do is this: Some of us can go to wood heat. Some of us can put solar collectors on our roof. Some of us can invest in extra insulation. Some of us can tap hydropower, which-as I said earlier is already available. Some of us can turn waste organic materials into methane. Several cities around the country-Pompano Beach, Florida, for example-are already doing this. It's important to recognize that there isn't a single solution to the problem, but many solutions ... and many combinations of solutions. We haven't even begun to systematically think through the many ways in which we can conserve energy and develop alternative sources of energy to carry us through the years ahead.

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