The Age of Wood our most useful material and the construction of civilization
by Ennos, Roland
pub. by Scribner, NY - 2020 - -     isbn 978-1-9821-1473-2 - - - black and white photos p.176 - - few line drawings - - - 319 pages.
The author is a visiting professor of biological sciences at the Univ. of Hull, England.
The book is divided into 4 parts.
Wood and Human Evolution
Building Civilization
Wood in the Industrial Era
Facing the Consequences
This book starts out with the predecessors of human beings living in trees and how their bodies were adapted to arboreal living. He states that Lucy, the very early proto hominid skeleton found in east Africa was found to be damaged in such a way that she probably died from falling out of a tree.
He has used some of his graduate students to do experiments to see how certain things might work out, particularly with working with wood before humans had metal to work with. His approach is more experimental than observational. He sees things from a European perspective, and sometimes I think just a northern European perspective. Some of his surmises fit better in Europe than some other places in the world. Also the properties of different woods are more varied than his writing describes.
In the last part of the book Ennos discusses the management of growing wood. He is critical about how it is done in managed forests, mostly in single species plantings. He also has some interesting and surprising ideas on how wood can be broken down and used in new and novel ways. He also notes that for mechanically dried wood the kiln drying process uses more energy (and creates more greenhouse gases) than is used for creating some other building materials, which makes wood not as efficient material as may be expected.
In general this book is the work of an academic who sometimes does not get out to broadly into reality. I do not recommend this book. It has some useful information, but on the whole it is not worth the effort to read it all.
~2021-06-06~
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