Wisdom from Engels

Peak Wood: Nature Does Impose Limits
Modern history has shown us the ebb and flow of our wood supplies - from building supplies to firewood - PEAK WOOD!
Lessons for us facing peak oil?

Frederick Engels, the social scientist and communist theorist, saw residual issues beyond immediate gain when it came to deforestation.
“What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind?” he asked in his Dialectics of Nature.
Engels then added his critique: “In relation to nature, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the first, the most tangible result. Why should one be surprised, then, that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be of quite a different character?”
Current events have proven Engels a seer. No one considered that by removing the trees and turning to fossil fuels would now threaten the planet by accelerating climate change. Nor did many stop to think that oil would peak, just as wood has done so many times before.
We should therefore take Engels quite seriously when he admonished his generation and those who came before and those to come, “Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.”

As that old TV commercial said - "Don't mess with Mother Nature" - she WILL win.