YOU CAN'T GIVE THE STUFF AWAY:

How Green Is My Garden? (THOMAS C. COOPER, 10/20/07, NY Times)

IF the government wants to reduce its dependency on imported oil and, in the words of the Department of Energy, “foster the domestic biomass industry,” it has only to stop by my backyard with a pickup. The place is an unlikely but active biomass production center — especially at this season with countless autumn leaves eddying in every nook and cranny — and I’ll happily donate my production to the cause. [...]

The entire Northeast is similarly an expanding store of biomass that could provide self-sustaining, local energy on a considerable scale. In its agricultural heyday 150 years ago, our region was only 20 percent forested. Today it is 75 percent wooded, a dense, largely uninterrupted forest created by natural regeneration. A similar surplus exists across much of the country.