Thoreau’s renewable energy plan

I discovered this quote while rereading Men of Concord, which collects writings on friends and neighbors from Thoreau’s Journal, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. George Minott was the source of many of the best stories of hunting and the outdoors that Thoreau preserved in the Journal, and this account of Minott’s woodlot is a nice example of a sustainable energy strategy based on local resources.

December 11, 1856. Minott tells me that his and his sister’s wood-lot together contains about ten acres and has, with a very slight exception at one time, supplied all their fuel for thirty years, and he thinks would constantly continue to do so. They keep one fire all the time, and two some of the time, and burn about eight cords in a year. He knows his wood-lot and what grows in it as well as an ordinary farmer does his corn-field, for he has cut his own wood till within two or three years; knows the history of every stump on it and the age of every sapling; knows how many beech trees and black birches there are there, as another knows his pear or cherry trees. He complains that the choppers make a very long carf nowadays, doing most of the cutting on one side, to avoid changing hands so much. It is more economical, as well as more poetical, to have a wood-lot and cut and get out your own wood from year to year than to buy it at your door. Minott may say to his trees: ‘Submit to my axe. I cut your father on this very spot.’ How many sweet passages there must have been in his life there, chopping all alone in the short winter days! How many rabbits, partridges, foxes he saw! A rill runs through the lot, where he has quenched his thirst, and several times he has laid it bare. At last rheumatism has made him a prisoner, and he is compelled to let a stranger, a vandal, it may be, go into his lot with an axe. It is fit that he should be buried there.