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Posted by Bill S on February 5, 2008 at 3:16:05 pm EST
In reply to building a campfire - sometimes it's just not right posted by bheiser1 on September 11, 2007 at 7:08:52 pm EDT

While it is true that one person having a wood fire one time has a miniscule effect, it is the cumulative effect that causes the problem. If I were the only person to drive an SUV to work every day (remember, I am retired, so I don't drive to work, and when I was working, I bicycled to and from), then the resulting air pollution, CO2 addition, cost to the environment from the mining of the materials and manufacturing, and so on would be negligible. If my MP3 player (don't have one, actually) or computer were the only one in existence, the toxics generated by the tech industry could easily be taken care of by natural processes.

I don't have the current figures (and I hesitate to post statistics, considering that a certain poster will interpret them for far more than they are), but in 1985, there were 15 million visitor days in US designated wilderness areas. If all 15 million visit-days involved 2 uses of a wood fire (breakfast and supper), that's 30 million fires. I haven't measured the wood consumption of a Sierra stove, but it is pretty efficient. Suppose it were 1 board foot, which is a pretty small amount. Then 30 million board feet would have been consumed and turned into CO2. There are published studies that compare backpacking stoves to campfires, and they show that the CO2 emission of the backpacking stove is less. Plus, as I posted before, the downed wood is left to recycle into nutrients for new trees and for animals at the bottom of the food chain.

Again, the point is that it isn't the single use that's the problem. It is the cumulative effect of millions of people getting out there (and yes, the billions of 3rd World people as well).

Yeah, yeah, I love the romance of a campfire as much or more than any other woodsy type. And I recognize that just by existing, I have an impact. It's tiny compared to the cumulative effect of the 6 billion humans (the number I see bandied about these days for world population), but it is a contribution. Campfires are an occasional "guilty pleasure". Just be aware of the impacts of everything you do and try to minimize them. In the latest issue of one of the Outdoor Industry Association's magazines, there is an interesting article on environmental impact of the whole industry. They show a flow chart for a particular product we would think has hardly any impact. The steps in producing and end use plus ultimate disposal have an impact far larger than one might think before looking at the whole picture.

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