Can’t see the forest…..
In 1450, Europe suffered its first major energy crisis.
It ran out of wood.
For more than 2,000 years Europeans had depended upon the seemingly endless forests of Europe to provide them with all they needed for heat, cooking, illumination and construction. But by 1450, most of the major forests or Europe had been cut down and were gone.
Looking at Europe today you are faced with a flat, rolling, verdant landscape; fields and meadows or farmland. The forests made so famous by Grimm or Robin Hood – deep and dark, are nowhere to be found.
The loss of the forests was a real crisis. How would people keep warm in the winter? How would they cook their food? From what would they build their homes?
For societies that had grown used to finding all they needed in the forest, it must have seemed the apocalypse had arrived. And indeed, for most people, it had.
Along the banks of the Tyne River in Northern England, thousands of years of erosion had exposed layers of native coal. Coal had been known since the time of the Romans, but was used only for jewellery or religious rites and nothing more.
There were a few who had tried burning coal, but it was found so noxious that King Edward I outlawed it being burnt in London and its environs.
Could coal replace wood?
“Nothing focuses one’s attention so wellâ€, wrote Churchill, “ as the prospect of being hanged in the morningâ€.
Facing utter ruin, Europeans gave coal a shot.
The use of coal unleashed a whole new world for Europe.
It contained far more BTUs per kilo than wood.
Because it could burn at higher temperatures it allowed the smelting of steel, the building of furnaces, the construction of boilers and steam engines and ultimately unleashed the energy for the industrial revolution and the world we live in today.
In the world of journalism, we are facing a similar crisis.
Like the 15th Century peasants, the world we had grown used to is rapidly disappearing before us. Newspapers are going out of business. Television is under threat from the Internet. The news business is contracting. In the United State, once impregnable bastions of journalism like The Tribune Company, The New York Times Company, or Charter Communcations are near bankrupt or have already filed.
It is a crisis of epic proportions.
But moments of crisis can also be moments of opportunity.
If…
If you have the courage and the foresight not to keep scavenging for more wood, but rather to accept the fact that the wood era is over, and that there are new and perhaps better sources of material to heat your homes and light your life.
The notion of cutting down trees (a forest based economy), making the pulp into paper, printing the day’s news on that paper and putting it in the hands of millions of people every day was comforting, but extremely expensive.
The arrival of the Internet meant that suddenly, without paper, ink, presses, trucks or anything else, you could now deliver the same news to a potential audience of 2 billion people globally every day.
For free.
The forest is gone.
It is not coming back.
But that does not mean that we as journalists have no future. On the contrary, if we have the courage to embrace the new technology of creating and distributing content digitally and online – in text and video; a bright and far more interesting future beckons.
As coal power fired the industrial revolution, so digital power will fire an intellectual revolution.
But for those of us who have, until now, spent our lives as woodcutters, we must have the courage and the foresight to leave the forest, and the trees, behind, and embrace the new age.
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Be sure to visit DNA2009 in Brussels this year.
