Review: The Age of Wood by Roland Ennos

The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization by Roland Ennos

Three stars: nonfiction, history, wood, things you never considered about the infrastructure of the world around you.

This was a nice little book that was less interesting (to me) than it should have been. It’s very readable. I finished it. Yet, I felt dissatisfied and I’m not sure why. On reflection, I already knew some of the material. It will most likely be completely new to you, dear reader.

I like trees. A lot. I’ve been slowly transforming our 1/4-acre property in town into a permaculturist’s paradise. I’ve slowly grown an Eastern Deciduous Woodland in the center of my backyard, along with dense borders most of the way around the property, while still leaving room for vegetable gardens, flower beds, clothesline space, toolshed, and compost bin area. I belong to my local tree-hugging group. We specialize in planting trees in the Township of Derry. We’ve planted a lot of them.

Trees matter a great deal to me and we should all plant more of them. I could walk around the Township of Derry and easily show you where to plant 10,000 more street trees without breaking a sweat. Add in the alleys in the township and I’ll point out where another 10,000 trees could go.

Those grassy sloped lawns bare of anything interesting? They might as well be grass-phalt for all the good they do providing habitat for critters and preventing stormwater damage. Grass-phalt may be a new word for some my readers. It’s a portmanteau word combining grass and asphalt. Asphalt doesn’t allow rainwater to soak into the soil, watering plants and replenishing the aquifer. Closely mown grass is better but a grassy slope doesn’t absorb rainwater like a meadow does. Or a forest.

An asphalt parking lot doesn’t provide habitat for anything other than cars. A closely mown grass lawn provides more habitat, but not much. It all depends on how high the grass is permitted to grow and how heavily drenched it is with pesticides and herbicides.

I thought The Age of Wood would be fascinating and it is, most of the time. I certainly didn’t expect a discussion about our primate ancestors and how forest living may have allowed us to descend from the trees. I had never considered how many wood tools must have been made, long before stone ones were invented. It makes perfect sense. It’s a lot easier to pick up a nicely-shaped branch, ready to use as a club, than it is to search a riverbed for stone and then chip the stone into something more useful.

And let us not forget that the stone would be even more useful if it were attached somehow to the nicely-shaped branch. We have very few detailed fossil records on how our distant ancestors came up with this grand technological innovation and then implemented it. As any archeologist will tell you, stone survives. Organic material like wood rots and leaves virtually no trace of itself. So do the grass stems or strips of leather used to bind branch and stone together. Is it any wonder that we think our ancestors used more stone and metal than wood?

Yet wood is all around us, in most places on the globe, so it stands to reason that we’d use more wood than anything else. It grows on its own!

When I started writing my Steppes of Mars series as Odessa Moon, I began considering what kind of civilization you could build when you’ve got no fossil fuels and metals are at a premium. It would involve a lot of wood. Or bamboo. When I visit museums, I now pay close attention to those dioramas and recreations of our pioneer ancestors. Virtually everything you see is made of wood. Metal, scarce and expensive, is used only where something wooden can’t be used.

This is why in ye olden days, it wasn’t uncommon to burn an unneeded house down to retrieve the nails. They’d get pounded straight and used again. You can grow trees. You can’t grow nails.

Mr. Ennos goes into detail on all the phases of wood over time. He covers wood and evolution, building civilization, wood in the industrial era (far more wood is used than you’d think), and finally, consequences. What have we done to ourselves, to our trees, and to our planet? If we mend our relationship with trees, will we be on a better footing to manage our world and ourselves?

It’s a truism that being around trees makes us feel better. Hospital patients who’ve got rooms with views of trees tend to recover quicker than patients who get to stare at brick walls. Being outside is good for us.

There wasn’t one single thing I could disagree with in Mr. Ennos’ s writing. Yet it did not catch fire for me. It’s disheartening because trees are near and dear to my heart.

You may be different, dear reader. Unless you spend a lot of time with trees, almost everything The Age of Wood covers will be new and exciting to you.

The big place where the book fell down for me was its lack of illustrations. There are some, dotted here and there in the text. There’s also a black and white photograph insert in the middle which is nice.

These few illustrations are wildly inadequate. Time after time, Mr. Ennos discusses some facet of trees or their usage. He carefully describes an object or procedure when a diagram would have been so much easier to understand. As an example, how many of you have seen a coppice? Or a pollard? I knew what he was talking about. Not everyone would and a series of illustrations of the life cycle of a hazel or alder coppice would have been genuinely useful.

So would an illustration of a pollarded tree. Too many of us have only seen butchered trees. We don’t understand how pollarding can be done well, without torturing the tree into a slow and agonizing death.

The Age of Wood is a worthwhile introduction to trees and their usage. If you write historicals, it could be even more useful. The book will help you envision the past more accurately, a past made of wood. A future will be made of wood too.

Sadly Mr. Ennos doesn’t maintain a web presence.However, if you’d like to purchase your own copy of The Age of Wood, here’s the link.