They say that wood heats you three times: when you're cutting and splitting it, stacking it, and burning it in the stove. Growing up in the city, I never heard this truism, let alone appreciated it on a bodily level as I do today. As a kid, I liked being warm and would crank the thermostat in my room, causing the electric baseboard heater to work overtime to toast my little sanctuary to 75 degrees. Nobody ever explained where the energy came from or how it all worked, though I eventually learned that it was too expensive to keep indulging like that.

Only in my twenties did I start becoming aware of these basics of life — where does my food and energy actually come from? where does my waste go? Although it's better late than never, I'm embarrassed to think about how deprived I was, despite apparently being well-educated. How could there be such a glaring omission in the curriculum? Was there a grand conspiracy to keep us in the dark about how we keep the lights on? Or do we adults collectively, silently choose to look away from the uncomfortable truths that enable our lifestyles?

Thirty years ago, much of our area's electricity came from coal power, thanks to "mountaintop removal" in Southern states -- a sanitary term for vast industrial destruction of the living world. Why was I always implored to consider the proverbial "starving kids in Africa" when I hadn't cleaned my dinner plate but never shown my own country's stretching wasteland of coal mines, which powered the TV that flickered images of starving kids in Africa?

Nowadays, there's no excuse for us not to know where the power comes from. I don't have to visit a library to do extensive research. I can look at electricitymaps.com and see a real-time map and historical graphs that clearly illustrate the mixture of power sources. Right now, about 60% of the power in New England comes from natural gas, which burns much cleaner than coal but certainly carries an enormous environmental impact, from polluted water supplies, to dangerous gas leaks, and devastating resource wars.

Without getting lost in the details, politics, and propaganda of the relative benefits and costs of each power source, suffice it to say that none of them allows us to have a clear conscience as we crank the thermostats. All depend on environmental destruction, typically "somewhere else" (meaning, in distant, rural places that are easy to ignore), or else they require industrial processes and supply chains that are only affordable because of unsustainable oil and gas extraction.

Underlying debates about how to power our lives is the unspoken assumption that we must maintain (and in fact, grow) our levels of energy consumption and material comforts, forever. Challenging the assumption leads to accusations of being a Luddite or anti-human or a hypocrite for even using technology while criticizing its impact.

Setting aside the burdensome weight of the moral questions around our individual responsibility as beneficiaries and participants in destructive systems, there's another truism about our predicament that we can all understand: things that can't go on forever, won't.

Sustainability means the ability to live in a bioregion basically indefinitely, without exhausting the resources or compromising the ecology. Our distant ancestors managed to do this for hundreds of thousands of years. There are still living cultures on earth who achieve it today, though they are being pushed off their land and eradicated by a cannibalistic global system that seeks to exploit and extract from every corner of the planet. Is our culture living sustainably? The verdict is a resounding "no".

If people hope to survive through an uncertain future, we will have to confront our past choices and beliefs about this lifestyle. We will have to grow up and realize that turning the knob on a thermostat has a cost far beyond the dollar amount, and that our descendants will scarcely be able to imagine such luxuries.

We will have to appreciate the truism about being warmed three times. As I load up a handcart full of Ash rounds and pull it down the road, back home where I'll split and stack it by hand, the interconnections become clearer in my body and mind. I knew the tree when it lived, tall and proud. And I will know the tree when I load it into the stove on a crisp December morning. Although I'm under no illusions that my way is sustainable, I'm learning the necessary cost of maturity — to navigate through this world without turning away from uncomfortable realities.