There’s no mistake. The calculations come from the number crunchers at the Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway, who often receive astonished feedback at the sheer amount of wood Norwegians go through. In fact, the average annual consumption of a modern Norwegian is 20 percent greater than that of the Parisian of 1850. It might be easier to grasp if we imagine that to transport the timber that makes up a load of 1.5 million metric tons, we would need about two thousand freight trains, with each train hauling twelve cars. It still sounds like an incredible amount, but one-third of our country is covered in forest and, if we take a bird’s-eye view of things, that pile of wood stretching to Africa is a mere drop in the bucket. In fact our annual consumption of wood is just 12 percent of the mean annual growth, and less than 0.5 percent of the volume of standing trees in Norway.

Here is a good place to expand our horizons a little and note that we Scandinavians, with our skis and our thick winter jackets, are not in fact the world record–holders in the consumption of wood, nor does that prize go to the fur-clad Russians of Siberia; it belongs, rather, to the inhabitants of tiny Bhutan, whose average annual consumption is a staggering 2,000 pounds (about 900 kilograms) per capita. Ninety percent of all the energy used in heating and cooking comes from wood, and in the villages of the Bhutanese countryside the consumption is 2,750 pounds (about 1,250 kilograms) per inhabitant. The Bhutanese chop down the equivalent of the annual growth, so consumption at this level is both an environmental and a social problem, since the country teeters constantly on the verge of a wood shortage.

In former times, large parts of Europe also experienced crises arising from a similarly fraught state of affairs. A few centuries ago the amount of wood used in smithies, in building houses, and in shipbuilding was so great that vast expanses of the continent were completely deforested, and shortage of wood became a chronic problem in many lands. Even Sweden suffered. Dwelling places in those days were heated by open fireplaces that had to be kept going night and day, imposing on the occupants what we might nowadays call an open-plan interior, in which all members of the household had access to the central fire.

Open fireplaces do not give off much heat and require enormous quantities of wood. In 1550 it took more than thirty-three thousand loads of wood to keep the Swedish king John III and his courtiers warm during a winter spent at the castle in Vadstena. Large areas of Swedish woodland were almost clear-cut to provide fuel for the great ironworks, and by the eighteenth century the supply of wood had almost dried up. But the Swedes are a resourceful people, and the government commissioned two talented engineers to design and build a more efficient stove. In the space of a few months they had constructed the Swedish kakelugn, the famous tiled stove still in widespread use today. On the first working drawings, from 1767, it was specifically noted that the stoves had been designed “to economize on wood.”

In Norway it was only the oak forests that were clear-cut, and the population was never large enough to threaten a shortage of wood. Cast-iron stoves were the norm in both Norway and Denmark—the oldest surviving one is from 1632. Access to forests was good in Finland, and coal never became a major source of heating energy there either. Not until the coming of electricity and heating oil in the twentieth century did the consumption of wood in northern Europe start to drop, especially in the towns and cities. In Great Britain the adoption of coal was made necessary by the disappearance of the great forests. Oscar Wilde, a firewood enthusiast, observes in chapter 3 of The Picture of Dorian Gray that the advantage to an English gentleman of owning a coal mine was that the income enabled him “to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth.”

Security in a Time of Crisis

Then came the Second World War—and wood demonstrated to the full its extraordinary value in a time of crisis. In occupied Norway, the availability of coal, coke, and heating oil sank dramatically. Sales of wood in Norway in 1943 were four times what they had been in 1938, and there was a huge increase in the number of trees felled on the farms. Energy supplies in Finland were still largely based on woodburning, and during the war years the Finns created huge stocks of firewood. More than ten million metric tons were felled each year, and Hakaniemi Square, in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, was filled with wood every winter. The square was one mile long, and the stacks thirteen to sixteen feet high, so these may well have been the largest woodpiles ever built.

The war years were a timely reminder of the value of renewable energy that is locally sourced, and in the postwar years the woodburning stove played a decisive role in the rebuilding of northern Norway. In 1946 the government urged the major woodstove manufacturers to forget the more lucrative foreign markets and devote their efforts to making stoves for use up in Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county, up above the Arctic Circle. The logic was simple: If there were no stoves, then no houses would be built, and people would be unwilling to move back to revitalize the devastated region.

The return of peace also saw the return of manufactured and convenient forms of heating. Contemporary advertisements for the electric radiator are eloquent on the spirit of the times. Along with the dishwasher, the vacuum cleaner, and the linoleum floor, the radiator was a part of the modern era of convenience. Finally the family was liberated from the danger of fire, splinters in the fingers, soot clogging up the air bricks, emptying the ash pan, the constant attention required to keep the fire going, the misery of living in a cold house with a stove that went out during the night, the endless trips out to the woodshed in shirtsleeves to fetch more wood, the stream of injunctions from the chimney sweep on the subject of tiny cracks in the chimney and broken firebricks. People did not have to rise in the middle of the night to put more electricity in the radiator. It must have felt wonderfully modern to be half roused from sleep by the tiny click of the thermostat, distantly recall the bad old days when you might have had to get up and go for more wood, and now simply turn over on your pillow and go back to sleep.

It isn’t surprising that the use of firewood fell into decline during this era. The chain saw didn’t become widely available until twenty or thirty years after the war, and firewood to a very large extent meant physical labor. Nor were woodstoves as efficient as they are today. The cheaper radiators required less maintenance and could retain their warmth through the night. Houses were often poorly insulated and needed some simple source of background heat throughout the day, a task for which electricity was ideally suited. The sale of firewood sank dramatically throughout the postwar years. In the 1970s electricity and oil were so cheap that only those with access to free wood used it as a source of heat. Heating with firewood in the northern regions reached an all-time low during this period—and then it began to rise again, and it has kept on rising. Today, consumption in both Norway and Denmark is ten times what it was in 1976.

Several factors combined to encourage the return of the wood fire. Oil and electricity prices rose, clean-burning stoves made their appearance, and manufacturers started putting an emphasis on design. Shortly afterward, fears about climate change and an unstable world economy joined the list. Woodburning, with its half-forgotten virtues, emerged once again in all its simple glory. Being a carbon-neutral renewable, wood was given a clean bill of health and embraced by the environmentalists.

Another factor, emerging as if part of some completely different plan, was the way technology suddenly appeared to favor the woodcutter. All farmers had tractors now, and other people had cars and trailers. Good chain saws became available at an affordable price, and the wood processor made its appearance, its technology revolutionized and on sale at a price that put it within reach of every farmer, large or small. This sturdy contrivance, usually run from a tractor, cuts, splits, and transports wood along a small conveyor belt into sacks or onto a pallet. The wood processor makes it possible for one man alone to handle large logs and cut a generous amount of firewood quickly, and profitably. Farmers everywhere began to see the potential for income in the sale of firewood and banded together as the Association of Norwegian Firewood Producers, an organization that now has more than forty-five hundred members. They endorsed a series of quality criteria developed by the Norwegian Wood Standards Board (the board, a pioneering enterprise, is now the reference point for a number of other European countries), and the result is that access to good wood at reasonable prices is better than it has ever been.

Yet the return of the log fire can hardly be reduced to a matter of money. Many people feel that a living fire gives a rich experience. We are drawn to the fire, just as we once gathered around the flames in former times. For many there is a qualitative difference in the heat supplied by a radiator and that provided by a woodburning stove. A stove can glow with heat. Your feet won’t get warm when you turn on the inverter, and a radiator has to be on for quite some time before it will drive the chill from a cold house. Electric radiators seldom deliver more than two thousand watts, whereas even a small woodstove is easily able to generate six thousand watts, and many stoves as much as fourteen thousand watts. Scientifically speaking, there is no measurable difference between the heat generated by electricity and that produced by combustion, but the body reacts in a different way to the more intense heat from the stove, not least because modern fireplaces with glass doors radiate heat. An ordinary electric radiator or heat pump warms only the air in the room, but flames and glowing embers release electromagnetic, infrared radiation that has much the same characteristics as sunlight. Warming occurs in the skin and the body as the radiation arrives, with an immediacy and an intensity that bring a feeling of well-being and security. The indoor climate is also slightly changed. The consumption of oxygen encourages a degree of air circulation, and the stove absorbs a quantity of dust. These factors, combined with the smell of wood and a little woodsmoke, and the sight of the ever-changing play of flames, connect us with the primordial magic of the fireplace.

Something else to consider is the way the woodburning stove brings people into a very direct relationship with the weather. You are your own thermostat, you are the connecting link between the subzero temperatures outside and the relative warmth within. When you heat with wood you have to go out to the woodpile, come back in again, and start your fight against the cold. It’s bitter, and it bites, but you can do something about it. In this one small but vital arena you are in touch with the bare necessities of life, and in that moment you know the same deep sense of satisfaction that the cave dweller knew.

It may also be the case that we have become modern enough to look back and appreciate things that the generation before us did not value. Things go around. With the advent of kitchenware made out of hard plastic, the wooden bowls and utensils were consigned to the flames (those that survived are now sold everywhere as “rustic antiques”), and people were happy to see them go up in smoke. At last they were rid of that heavy, crude rubbish that was impossible to clean properly. They probably felt pretty much as we do today when we finally get rid of a sluggish old computer. The generation before ours covered the oak floors with linoleum and hid the intricate beauties of the Swiss chalet–style houses behind sheets of plywood. For us, their time has come again.

Yet heating with wood is not a nostalgic gesture on the part of the Scandinavians. It is both a source of energy and a deeply rooted part of our culture. The way a person cuts and stacks wood can tell you a great deal about him, and the woodpiles you see round about in the countryside are a reminder that wood is the connection between the forest and the home. It’s a modern and practical form of the old Romantic nationalism, as much a part of the soul of our countries as cross-country skiing, mediocre local newspapers, and elk hunting.

But this alone is not enough to explain why so many swear by a Stone Age method of heating a house that can boast a fiber-optic broadband connection. The main reason for the increased use of firewood is an entirely pragmatic one: Woodburning has been modernized and integrated with other sources of energy. Wood has a particular role to play as a sort of national insurance against the cold. One of electricity’s shortcomings is that technical problems can cause it to fail completely. Large parts of Norway experience long periods of extreme cold in the winter, with temperatures that hardly warrant a paragraph in the local newspaper until they reach minus forty degrees (a reading that is the same whether your thermometer is Celsius or Fahrenheit). In circumstances such as these, power cuts of even a few hours’ duration will precipitate a local crisis. Many communities, especially coastal ones, draw their power from a single electrical system. If this fails, then there is no better or more universal remedy at hand than a good supply of firewood to provide the heating, boil the water, and cook the meals. In January 2007, when the remote community of Steigen, in the county of Nordland, found itself without power for six days during a period of especially cold and stormy weather, it was the woodburning stove that enabled residents to ride out the storm in relative comfort.

For this reason every house in Norway exceeding a certain size is obliged by law to have an alternative source of heating, which in practice means a woodstove. The requirement comes not, as one might think, from the Building Standards Department, but from the Directorate for Civil Protection and Emergency Planning, and the explanation for this is quite simple: A woodstove and a supply of firewood will prevent the spread of panic and the possibility of having to evacuate homes. And this is not merely because wood is a source of energy; it is because wood is an extremely adaptable form of energy. It can be shared with your neighbor, it doesn’t leak, it doesn’t need cable, a match will light it, it can be stored for year after year, and even inferior-quality wood will still do the job for you. There is peculiar security in the fact that this is energy in solid and tactile form. You can carry it into your house and know that the weight of what you are carrying represents exactly the amount of heat you will be getting.

Henry David Thoreau is frequently quoted on the subject of our relationship to wood. In 1845 Thoreau went to live in the forest because life in modern American society had become too hectic for him (that’s right, in 1845). In Walden he wrote: “It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors.”

It was Thoreau too, again in Walden, who pointed out that wood warms twice over, once when you chop it, and again when you burn it. He might have added the warming effects of splitting the logs, and of stacking and carrying them, but that would not have harmonized with his philosophy.

Woodburning is part of the cultural heritage of every Norwegian, but that does not make us model exponents of the use of environmentally aware bioenergy. Like city dwellers everywhere, our urban population has accustomed itself to the idea that everything is available at all times, in all places, and at the press of a button. Whenever a cold snap comes along, firewood merchants see firsthand the desperation that comes when electrical heating isn’t enough for the job and the wood has run out. Decent, law-abiding citizens can turn into bullying line jumpers, and honest men and women into deceivers and liars, as they try to wheedle their way to a few more sacks of the precious stuff. (Many of Oslo’s wood merchants make it a practice to give priority to the elderly in a time of crisis.) As soon as the cold settles, the first two people interviewed on the radio are inevitably the press officer of some hydroelectric-power company, who informs listeners that water levels in the reservoirs are at a record low, and the wood merchant, who reports, “People have forgotten to stockpile. They don’t buy until it actually turns cold.”

Pollution

One of the great issues of the age has to be addressed here: Is it possible to burn wood and still be a good environmentalist? Woodburning stoves release a lot of carbon dioxide, as much as four pounds (2 kilograms) for every two pounds (1 kilogram) of normally dry wood, and yet heating with wood is accepted as a source of green energy by almost all experts, for this simple reason: Trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, but sooner or later release the gas again. A tree burned in a stove releases the same amount of carbon dioxide as it would had it been allowed to die and rot.