about wood

 

about wood

i read a cool essay once by buckminster fuller, about wood.  the gist of it was something about how wood, actually biomass in general, is the result of thousands of years of sunlight pounding at the earth.  but instead of just bouncing off or getting absorbed and becoming heat, a portion of that light gets grabbed by the little green things in plants.  and those little green things use the energy to make stuff, real stuff we can touch.  and over the years it builds up to the point where we have whole ecosystems with animals and big trees and stuff.  but the point is, that that’s not just some big tree… it actually represents years and years of stored energy from the sun, like a massive spring that’s been wound up tighter, season after season.  all the more with the coal and oil underground.  massive batteries that take eons to charge.  if i remember correctly, his point was something about global warming as we release eons of this stored energy in the space of a few decades.  

 

but the cool part for me is about the coiling up of the spring.  most of the world tends towards chaos, but with nothing more than this persistent source of primal energy, plants are able to weave order from the chaos around them… to intentionally take little bits of this and that from the dirt and air around them, and weave them into something super orderly… seems like almost in direct opposition to entropy.  but i don’t really understand entropy.  but that’s not the point.  the point is that when we hold a hunk of wood in our hands, that wood represents something really cool when we think of it.  the secret lives of ordinary things are always amazing, but there’s something especially cool about the secret lives of things in nature… i think it’s because the plot is never simple… never sterile.  complexity makes things interesting, but the cool thing in nature is that the complex stuff all looks really simple on the surface, so there’s an entry point for everyone.  not like algebra.