Evergreen:
The Trees That Shaped America
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Having been in the cooperage business for at least thirty years, I thought I knew a bit about trees and forests. But a new book opened my eyes.
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Specifically, Evergreen: The Trees That Shaped America by Trent Preszler. Published in 2025, it noted how trees, or rather forests of trees, impacted and shaped civilizations.
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​​​​​​I was both awed by one of the book’s insights and scratching my head with a ‘why didn’t I think of that’ particularly to Preszler’s analysis of the demise of the Roman Empire. To wit: “Timber shortages, compounded by endless warfare, sealed Rome’s demise. Beneath the common narrative that Rome fell due to political collapse lies a simpler truth: They ran out of wood.” (Chapter 3 Tragedy of the Commons, page 144 of 768 in Kobo eBook)
Wood was for the Romans what our oil is today. It was used to build the large villas and fancy furniture for the elite. There was an insatiable use wood to fire kilns and ovens to produce metal tools and weapons - “A single bronze or iron forge could burn through five thousand pine logs daily…” (p. 138 of 768). They used wood fires for evaporating water to yield salt. And the large Roman bathhouses needed 10 tons per day to keep their fires lit for water and hot air. (For comparison, in the winter, it takes us three months to burn through 2 tons of firewood in our fireplace.)
Prior to the discussion of the Romans, he describes some of the historical uses, or mostly overuses, of wood: the ancient Egyptians raping the meagre forests along the Nile to aid them in moving the millions of stones for their pyramids; the cutting of the Lebanon cedars for Jerusalem temples; and the building of Venice atop a vast forest of pilings.
“When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, southern Europe was mostly deforested, its vibrant landscapes reduced to barren hills and eroded soils.” (P. 143 of 768).
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Nor was the early United States spared. Immense amounts of wood were used for railroad ties and for fuel for the early steam engines for the railroads and ferry boats. Houses, instead of being built with stone as in Europe, were quickly assembled using 2 x 4s, billions of them. California’s majestic redwoods were almost decimated for housing framing, decking and shingles, for wooden wine and water tanks, for railroad ties, and for pilings due to their rot-resistance. And once chain saws and powered sawmills became common, much of what was considered ‘limitless’ forests in the Pacific northwest, the Midwest, and the southern pine reserves were razed causing serious environmental destruction that’s only now being addressed.
Will our overuse of oil, for fuel and plastics and causing global warming, do the same for our civilization as for the Romans?