London, 1662. The Navy Board sends an urgent question to the newly founded Royal Society: "We lack timber to build ships. What is to be done?" The man who took up that question was John Evelyn (1620–1706), a founding fellow of the Society and a scholar who loved trees. What he presented to the Society that October, and published as a book in 1664, became a classic of forestry: Sylva.
than without timber."
It was no exaggeration. In the England of that age, wood truly was dearer than gold. And how that crisis was resolved is also an anatomy of the first large-scale energy transition humankind ever underwent. Today we attempt that anatomy — because this story from four centuries ago explains the ground on which we now stand.
Demand exploded; supply was slow
In the England of that time, wood was fuel, material, and strategic commodity all at once. Cooking and heating, ironmaking, glassmaking, and above all shipbuilding. Nothing turned without it.
Then, in the sixteenth century, the demand curve went vertical. England's population doubled within a century, from roughly two million to four; London swelled from 120,000 to 200,000. Onto this came the naval arms race of the age of exploration. A single great warship consumed thousands of oaks.
And supply? Here lies the structural limit of temperate forest. In an earlier story we said that where the four seasons are distinct, a tree's cambium halts each winter and inscribes a growth ring. To rest for a good part of every year is, precisely, to grow little each year. An English oak needed something near a century to reach the girth of ship timber — an asset with a gestation period of one hundred years.
When demand doubles within a generation while supply answers only after a century's delay, a price explosion is not a risk but an inevitability.
The state intervened, and failed
Intervene the government did — and forcefully.
In the reign of Elizabeth I alone, more than thirty bills came before Parliament to address this fuel crisis. Restrictions on felling, penalties for firewood merchants, bans on timber exports. The monarchs acted directly too: James I ordered that glass be made with coal rather than wood, and both sovereigns sought to check the growth of London itself — for the larger the city, the greater its appetite for timber.
Yet these interventions largely failed. The reason is plain. They regulated price and distribution while leaving untouched the underlying driver — population growth. Against an asset whose supply carries a hundred-year gestation, suppressing demand by enforcement was a prescription that could never work.
Evelyn's prescription was different. He called not for regulation but for enlarging supply itself: not merely to stop the felling, but to replant in earnest. This anticipated the very concept of sustainable forestry by more than two centuries. Sylva became a bestseller among the landed gentry, and Evelyn is credited with the planting of more than a million trees.
What a substitute requires — why coal, of all things
And yet what actually ended the crisis was not planting but coal. Why?
Coal had long been a despised fuel. For its acrid smoke and sulphurous reek, no one who could get wood would burn it. But coal held one decisive advantage wood did not: energy density.
In an earlier story we said that denser wood carries more heat in the same volume. Coal is the extreme of that logic — plants of hundreds of millions of years ago, compressed underground until only carbon remained. Volume for volume it gave far greater fire than wood, and it travelled more efficiently too.
To this was joined one more decisive condition: the stock already lay accumulated underground. Timber must be planted and awaited for a century; coal need only be dug. It was a contest between an asset with a hundred-year gestation and one with virtually none.
But was timber truly exhausted?
Here arises the most interesting point in this story. Among economic historians today there is a reinterpretation: England's 'timber famine' was not a physical exhaustion at all.
The land was there, and had it been tended as Evelyn urged, the woods could have been renewed. There are analyses finding that at the prices recorded between 1600 and 1750, the production of fuel timber was economically sustainable. So why did people choose to dig rather than plant?
The answer is simple. Waiting had grown costlier than digging. Timber ties up land and labour for a century, while the same land put to grazing sheep returned money at once. And to turn timber into charcoal took labour upon labour — felling, carting, charring, carting again. Coal, meanwhile, kept growing cheaper as economies of scale took hold.
From this a first principle of energy transition may be drawn.
but because something else grows cheaper.
As the Stone Age did not end for want of stone, the age of wood did not end for want of trees. Only the relative prices had reversed.
What the transition brought — and Jevons's paradox
This transition soon reshaped the form of civilisation itself. In the 1700s a device appeared that converted coal's heat into mechanical power — the steam engine — and with it began the Industrial Revolution.
The numbers give a sense of the speed. Coal's share of world primary energy leapt from 1.7% in 1800 to 47.2% in 1900. Within a single century, half the world's energy had become coal.
Here another wry law enters. The nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons observed that the more efficiently coal came to be used, the more of it was consumed. Better efficiency lowers the cost per unit of service, and what grows cheaper is demanded in greater quantity. This insight, known today as Jevons's paradox, also means that efficiency gains alone cannot reduce total consumption. Over the past 250 years, fossil fuel demand has risen roughly two-thousandfold.
What the chimneys left — 800,000 years of record, and a 200-year exception
And this transition left its record in the atmosphere as well.
Drill down into the Antarctic ice and the air of the past lies trapped in bubbles, so that the composition of that ancient atmosphere can be read directly. By this record, over the past 800,000 years the concentration of carbon dioxide moved between roughly 180ppm and 300ppm. In glacial periods it fell to around 180ppm; in the warm interglacials it rose to 280–300ppm. This oscillation repeated on a cycle of about one hundred thousand years. And across those 800,000 years, the concentration never once passed 300ppm.
In the present interglacial that began with the end of the last ice age — the Holocene — the concentration settled at about 280ppm. From seven thousand years ago until the eve of industrialisation it rose only some 20ppm: a quiet plateau lasting millennia. The whole of human civilisation was built upon that steady 280ppm.
That plateau was broken at the very chimneys we have been speaking of. From roughly 280ppm before industrialisation, the concentration has today passed 420ppm.
humankind has done in two hundred.
The rate of increase over the last sixty years is about a hundred times faster than the natural rises left in the geological record. Against 800,000 years of that record, these two centuries are a plain exception.
Four centuries on, the transition runs backwards
And now the arrow is turning the other way. Then it ran from wood to coal; now it runs from coal back to wood. The wood pellet is precisely that returning tree.
What deserves notice is that the driver of this transition has the same structure as the one four centuries ago. Not exhaustion, but relative price. There is still plenty of coal underground. Only, its price has now begun to carry an 'invisible cost' — the cost of adding carbon to the air. Carbon pricing, emissions allowances, renewable obligations: such instruments are, in the end, devices for entering that cost into the ledger. And when the ledger changes, the scale tips. What summoned coal four centuries ago was a ledger; what is summoning wood back now is a ledger too.
One thing, though, must differ from that age. The real reason seventeenth-century England fell into crisis was not that it used wood, but that it used without planting. An asset with a hundred-year gestation was drawn down as if it were stock; it could only collapse.
This is why we design plantations on a short rotation, why a next tree must enter every place we cut, and why we keep what is planted greater than what is taken. To treat trees not as stock but as flow. What Evelyn said before the Royal Society in 1662 — do not merely cut, but plant again — is, across four hundred years, the first line of our business plan.
There was an age when wood was dearer than gold. Perhaps that age is not a bygone past, but the lesson we are only now relearning: how to price a tree properly.
To the Navy's 1662 inquiry about timber, John Evelyn answered with Sylva — do not merely cut, but plant again. Demand was doubling within a generation while a temperate oak needed a century to become ship timber, and this structural lag in supply produced the price explosion. The thirty-odd bills of Elizabeth I's reign failed for never touching the underlying driver, and what ended the crisis was coal: dense in energy, and with no gestation at all. Economic historians, however, read this not as physical exhaustion but as a reversal of relative prices — a fuel changes not when it runs out, but when something else grows cheaper. Coal's share leapt from 1.7% in 1800 to 47.2% in 1900, and by Jevons's paradox, efficiency gains only raised consumption. The ice cores show carbon dioxide moving between 180 and 300ppm across 800,000 years, never once passing 300ppm, and resting near 280ppm through the Holocene — yet since industrialisation it has passed 420ppm: what nature did over tens of millennia, done in two centuries. Today's reverse transition has the same structure — not that coal ran out, but that carbon's invisible cost has begun to enter the ledger. Still, the seventeenth century failed not for using wood but for not planting it; and so we treat trees not as stock but as flow.