{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "On the subject of housing in England one thing to appreciate is for quite a while there Europe faced a chronic wood shortage....", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/44773345549/", "html": "

On the subject of housing in England one thing to appreciate is for quite a while there Europe faced a chronic wood shortage. Wood used to be the primary construction material AND fuel source, and the population outraced the supply, Malthus-style.

Germany used to be covered in woodland, the British Isles too. Those stories where the mean ol’ sheriff wants to hang the poacher or cutter of wood from the king’s forest, who just wants to feed his family and keep them warm? That was the only way to keep forests from being rendered completely barren. Easter Island used to have trees.

The iconic Tudor daub and wattle house? Designed to minimize the use of wood beams while maximising their display, in an era when they meant luxury.

The colonies in New England - rocky, subpar soil tbh, though sweet lord the cornucopian seafood - were in large part set up to feed trees into the maw of the Royal Navy. Planks for hulls, huge old-growth trunks for unspliced masts, pine tar for sealing.

The iconic American log cabin, where you build a house by just cutting down a ton of trees and piling them up into solid walls, don’t even bother to saw them into planks - to a contemporary European, that really would’ve been like paving the streets with gold.

There was a reason the steam engine was invented to service the coal mines instead of vice versa.

"}