For wood and charcoal to be expensive, forests don’t necessarily need to be depleted. Instead, it can be due to higher transportation costs (wood and charcoal are heavy). As the empire became less secure during and after the crisis of the 3rd century, I would expect long-distance transportation to have become less safe (due to banditry) and therefore more expensive.
Wikipedia has a page on Roman deforestation, which even uses the phrase “peak wood”—so depletion was definitely a concern (and Italy has never recovered the pre-Roman forests).
All that said, I think you’re still underestimating the costs of transport!
Overland transport—i.e. wagons, and perhaps draft animals—is prohibitively expensive for anything more than a single-day journey of up to ~10 miles. Fuel is bulky, heavy, and frankly not that valuable.
Moving bulk freight by water is much better—whether floating logs down a river canadian-style, or loading boats for riverine or ocean transport. Even so, I don’t know of any cases where fuel was transported or traded like this—and shipping enough grain into Rome was a constant and difficult problem.
Population density was much more even before the industrial revolution (smaller cities, more farmers, etc.), and it’s reasonable to explain depletion solely in terms of local fuel for local use. If timber was valuable enough to transport, it was almost always as a material rather than fuel.
For wood and charcoal to be expensive, forests don’t necessarily need to be depleted. Instead, it can be due to higher transportation costs (wood and charcoal are heavy). As the empire became less secure during and after the crisis of the 3rd century, I would expect long-distance transportation to have become less safe (due to banditry) and therefore more expensive.
Wikipedia has a page on Roman deforestation, which even uses the phrase “peak wood”—so depletion was definitely a concern (and Italy has never recovered the pre-Roman forests).
All that said, I think you’re still underestimating the costs of transport!
Overland transport—i.e. wagons, and perhaps draft animals—is prohibitively expensive for anything more than a single-day journey of up to ~10 miles. Fuel is bulky, heavy, and frankly not that valuable.
Moving bulk freight by water is much better—whether floating logs down a river canadian-style, or loading boats for riverine or ocean transport. Even so, I don’t know of any cases where fuel was transported or traded like this—and shipping enough grain into Rome was a constant and difficult problem.
Population density was much more even before the industrial revolution (smaller cities, more farmers, etc.), and it’s reasonable to explain depletion solely in terms of local fuel for local use. If timber was valuable enough to transport, it was almost always as a material rather than fuel.