Natural Value versus Price

The previous owner of our property piled up several stacks of firewood that have been rotting away for years. There's some good, split dry wood there and some other valuable seasoned wood that needs to be split, but the rest is chewed up by fungus, rot and insects. I started cleaning up the piles this past week. It got me thinking about value versus price and how you can train yourself to think in natural value terms instead of price.

Firewood is really similar to other energy commodities like diesel fuel, gasoline, natural gas, etc... It has some energy value per unit, has different grades, and has some specific requirements for storage. If it's stored correctly it won't degrade, but if it's kept outside, eventually it'll rot or get infested with insects or rodents. Gasoline has similar issues--incorrect storage is dangerous, and also lets the gas go bad.

So both gas and firewood have intrinsic value, e.g. energy per unit, and have contingent value--basically they depend on some infrastructure to maintain their value and to be really useful. Gasoline use and storage are very standardized. Since things like diesel and natural gas, or gasoline are liquids and gasses and oxidize into mainly gas components they actually have many of the qualities of "money", especially electronic credit money.

Since firewood is a bulk good, it's really more like gold or silver money. Firewood requires a lot more handling and produces ash as a left-over. Ash is actually a very useful byproduct that can be further refined to obtain materials like potassium fertilizer (aka pot-ash). Also fires require some level of expertise and knowledge to build so they burn clean, etc... So the value of the firewood is really contingent on the infrastructure a home has to burn and process it.

Like I said above, petroleum fuels are similar, however, most people have corporation provided devices and infrastructure to handle and burn petroleum fuels, whether it's a gas can, a small engine, or a car gas tank and computer controlled combustion, or a natural gas furnace, it's all well designed and automated so a user is hardly involved in the processing or burning of the fuel. People come to think of those fuels in pure money terms, mainly because they don't have to handle them at all or manage the combustion process at all. It's a total black box.

The intrinsic value of all those fuels is in the energy that's released through combustion. Heating with firewood is extremely cheap. It's an abundant renewable resource. Governments and corporations dislike firewood for that reason. The government/corporate system wants dependents. It's certainly true that wood fires can produce obnoxious byproducts of combustion unless they're managed with some rudimentary skill and knowledge. However, an idea like "burning wood contributes to climate change" is retarded.

This example shows how the "value" of various products is really couched in terms of a larger system and the training that shapes people's behavior to participate in that system. They get monetized within the context of those systems. You can sell firewood, but I think that business is probably not really very good because of the many contingencies associated with using wood as a fuel. It's really from an era with a different type of person who had more basic knowledge. Today, people are corporate products and live entirely within that corporation system.