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Wood energy, or heat and power derived from trees, currently accounts for 27% of the United States’ renewable energy budget, and the United States Department of Energy projects that it will make up 9% of our total energy consumption by 2030. Proponents of wood energy often champion the technology as a climate mitigation mechanism, a source of domestic fuel, and a rural development strategy that localizes energy production and control over forest resources. Yet uncertainties around the ecological implications and social benefits of wood energy generation trouble this narrative. The aim of this dissertation, therefore, is to elucidate how wood energy production might contribute to the vitality of rural communities and ecosystems. I use a conceptual framework that unites political ecology, diverse economic theories, and renewable energy, which is a union that offers a rich foundation for theorizing wood energy’s capacity to create ethical community economies, transformative energy politics, and flourishing ecologies. I also draw on qualitative fieldwork conducted in central Vermont and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—both centers of wood energy activity in the United States. More specifically, interviews, site visits to places of woody biomass extraction and wood energy generation, participant observation experiences, discourse analysis, and ecological data analysis are the primary sources of empirical data in this research.Here I demonstrate, first, how a myriad of diverse wood energy economies in central Vermont and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan are creating spaces of ethical community development. I therefore argue that progressive politics around natural resource extraction and consumption can emerge in economies that are not particularly radical, elite, or marginal with respect to the conventional economy. Second, I show that the most noncapitalist and most localized wood energy economies may not foster widespread socioeconomic wellbeing in rural communities, and that noncapitalist economic practices are more entwined with and reliant on alternative capitalist and capitalist economic practices than the diverse economies literature currently theorizes. Third, I initiate a more robust conversation between the diverse economies literature and ecology. My research reveals that wood chip production—which, on one hand, fuels community wood energy economies—also adversely affects many nonhuman forest species and biophysical processes. In other words, an economy that is socially progressive may be ecologically regressive. And finally, the first body chapter arguably makes the most practical contributions to United States wood energy discourse. In it, I compare the wood energy landscapes of central Vermont and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, ultimately suggesting that wood energy policies must recognize how geographic context, project ownership, and economic scale deeply influence the socioecological impacts of wood energy production.

Southeastern Ohio, officially designated a part of Appalachia, was heavily dependent on coal mining from the mid-1800s until the 1970s. But despite the region’s history of resource extraction, its forest has largely returned. Interestingly, almost all of this reforestation occurred on private land owned by thousands of individuals. These private forest owners are often viewed as inadequate stewards of the land, and interest groups are constantly pushing governance strategies that would remake the forest to suit their own agendas. Thus, a struggle over this newly-mature forest, its resources, and its future has begun. Here I attempt first to show how local forests owners are actually knowledgeable, active, economically-savvy, and organized scientists navigating a complicated, power-laden space filled with stereotypes and competing interests. Second, I discuss the connections between soils, trees, nutrients, animals, interest groups, landowners, and economies on this landscape and argue that ecological and human processes are knotted too tightly together to ever be untangled. Finally, through linking human and non-human processes, I explore the possibilities of how southeast Ohio's forests could look years from now. Many of these possibilities are so drastically dissimilar from both each other and today's forest that they would certainly have significant repercussions on local landscapes, ecosystems, and livelihoods.