Here’s what I’ve been doing:
Drill a ~1cm hole into a block of wood. That’s your base.
Drive a metal rod through it that’s just a tiny bit thicker than the hole. That’s your stem.
Collect a whole bunch of dead tree branches (2-5cm thick), saw them down to about 40-60cm in length and drill a ~1cm hole sideways through the middle of each one.
Thread them through the metal rod, starting with the longest and thickest ones until you reach the top.And it conveniently flattens for storage!
Looks disgusting
Good options. But note the first link is a Cloudflare site and should be avoided. This link is more inclusive:
Why are you recommending to avoid cloudflare sites?
Cloudflare is an access-restricted walled-garden that excludes various groups of people. The people who are allowed to enter the walled-garden are deceived (by a padlock) into thinking their traffic is protected end to end, when in fact Cloudflare has visibility on all that traffic. Cloudflare has taken ~25% of the web and sees all that traffic while abusing its power to exclude people. Since slrpnk.net is a open to the public, the links that are shared should also be open to the public.
And almost invariably, whenever you check the NS records or otherwise see who’s hosting a neo-nazi website, it’s Cloudflare.
How does it exclude people? I don’t understand
By default, Cloudflare blocks access to the following groups of people:
- users whose ISP uses CGNAT to distribute a limited range of IPv4 addresses (this generally impacts poor people in impoverished regions)
- the Tor community
- VPN users
- users of public libraries, and generally networks where IP addresses are shared
- privacy enthusiasts who will not disclose ~25% of their web traffic to one single corporation in a country without privacy safeguards
- blind people who disable images in their browsers (which triggers false positives for robots, as scripts are generally not interested in images either)
- the permacomputing community and people on limited internet connections, who also disable browser images to reduce bandwidth which makes them appear as bots
- people who actually run bots – Cloudflare is outspokenly anti-robot and treats beneficial bots the same as malicious bots
When excluded people attempt to access a Cloudflare-jailed website, we get a page that simply says:
www.inhabitat.com www.inhabitat.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding. Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.It just sits there in an endless loop of brokenness. We used to get CAPTCHAs which were usually broken. CF changed their CAPTCHA service from Google reCAPTCHA to hCAPTCHA (because CF profits from your labor when you solve an hCAPTCHA). But it seems hCAPTCHA was abandoned… probably much the crowd who is wise enough to find themselves in the excluded group are also wise enough to refuse to solve CAPTCHAs. I don’t imagine that many people would tolerate solving a CAPTCHA for ~25% of the sites they encounter.
Thank you for your perspective! I appreciate the insight
Rosemary! You can have a rosemary houseplant which can be pruned into the shape of a Christmas tree. Then, you can eat its herbs and eventually bring it outside when the seasons change.
A real Christmas tree, sourced and farmed locally and buried in a landfill after the holidays, would remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Please do not do this.
Putting organic material into a landfill where it will decompose anaerobically (without oxygen) creates methane. This methane then leaks from the landfill, accelerating climate change.
There are SO many constructive things you can do with organic material. You can take a dead or dying tree, or one that is otherwise a poor fit for a particular location, and use it to make wood chips for mulching soil; biochar to sequester carbon and enrich compost when added to compost; building materials; firewood and more. All of these things sequester carbon and/or reduce climate emissions by reducing the use of fossil fuels.
Growing a healthy tree just to make some methane with it in a landfill is profane. Please don’t send any organic material to a landfill, especially not healthy trees. Leave healthy trees alone unless they’re causing trouble (such as by damaging a roof) and instead prioritize the use of dead/dying ones, or those that aren’t appropriate for their spot (e.g. shading solar panels) or climate (e.g. trees that require irrigation).
I recently had some healthy trees removed because they were threatening the house. I asked the tree service what they do with the trees. They said they bring them to the landfill. I was shocked because this was during a time when lumber costs quadrupled. I would have expected them to be able to mill it and profit further. They offer the wood to a local artistic carpenter first (at no cost), but that person cannot keep up in the slightest so most of the wood goes to the landfill. I spoke to another carpenter who said elm is too rich in minerals and thus dullens cutting tools so they rejected my offer of free wood. Ultimately it ended up in the landfill.
You’ve inspired a question: considering methane is 25× more harmful than CO₂, is it actually less harmful to burn wood in a fireplace than to bury it at the risk that methane develops and gets released? I guess that comes down to the probability of the methane escaping.
They said they bring them to the landfill.
That’s awful, creating tons and tons of methane - and they even have to pay for dumping. Just so stupid all around.
When I get some land I’ll have a standing open invitation for select local arborists to come and dump truckloads of woodchips on my land whenever they want, for free.
is it actually less harmful to burn wood in a fireplace than to bury it at the risk that methane develops and gets released?
Yes, it’s absolutely better to burn wood for heat in a modern fireplace. Doing so replaces a large amount of fossil fuels that would otherwise be burned to generate direct heat or electricity for electric heat. Although passive solar heating is by far the best method of home heating, modern fireplaces are vastly superior to anything that contribute to climate change. Since I assume your concern about fireplaces is about particulate emissions and air quality, I can happily say that modern fireplaces emit hundreds of times fewer particulates than ones from just a few decades ago. While considerable work has gone into improving fireplace design, one can’t say the same about cleaning up our energy grids and climate emissions.
The tree service made this offer: they were willing to cut the wood into fireplace-sized segments and leave it in place. It would be on me to find someone who needs firewood and deal with the splitting. I didn’t find any takers. If I had, I would not have had control over whether it goes into a proper wood burning stove w/cadallitic converter. I suppose if it could be milled into pellets that would have made it easy to dump and likely to be used in a relatively clean stove.
But I guess getting it into pellets is the tricky part. If the high-mineral wood dullens cutting tools the cost of blades/bits/rasps would have to be factored in.
The tree service was unwilling to deliver the wood to a place of my choice. Either I keep the wood or if they haul it then they will only haul it to the dump (or their partnered artistic carpetener if that person wants it).
So to be clear, are you saying cutting down pine trees and burying them is good for climate?
