Biomass Masterclass w/ Mark Nelson

For almost the whole of human history, wood was the main act. It was the fuel that cooked food and smelted iron, the material that framed every house and hull, and the first bulk commodity ever moved at scale over long distances. In this episode Chris Keefer talks with energy analyst Mark Nelson about a material we almost entirely take for granted, starting with a fact hiding in plain sight: the grasping hands, binocular vision, and colour sight that define us were all built by an ancestry lived in the trees. From there the conversation turns to why wood, of all the products of photosynthesis, became civilization's battery, storing a century of sunlight in a form that can be felled and hauled away.

That storage came with a hard ceiling, because the energy available to any pre-industrial society was set by its land area multiplied by how fast the sun could regrow a forest. Chris and Mark trace that single constraint through the iron furnaces that each needed a forest standing behind them to the oak fleets that turned a Baltic chokepoint into the 19th century equivalent of the Straits of Hormuz.

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