Why Can’t Modern Europeans treat this winter like medieval Europeans?
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Laws and investments.
Medieval people survived the cold by making fire inside their homes, today you have to fulfill regulations to do that (I.E. you need a proper fireplace and chimney). Just adding those to an existing home can be expensive, and at least in my area they are pretty much sold out.
In medieval times population was much lower, so it was viable to just heat every home with wood. If you tried that now we’d run out of forests quickly, and dense cities would be dark in the smoke
It could be done, however due to sheer numbers it would be a catastrophic strain on the environment. Can you imagine if 700+ million people just started cutting down trees in order to heat their home all winter? That coupled with the fact that most homes are not equipped with any heat source outside of the natural gas/electric furnace they were built with.
Medieval Europeans did a lot of dying in the winter. Old people, very young people…
A lot of the winter survival tricks are either not viable or no longer worth it. The solutions of today are better, it’s just a matter of getting enough consensus, in most cases.
Modern apartments don’t have fireplaces and chimneys to safely have fires to warm your house. The people of Germany and Ukraine didn’t spend all summer and fall cutting down trees and storing firewood for the winter. Medieval Europe’s economy basically completely shut down in the winter.
You can if you live on a farm and have a fireplace or a wood-buring stove. However,
* there are more people today than in medieval times;
* they are packed into cities;
* those dwellings do not typically permit the burning of coal or wood for heat (they use modern gas-fired forced air and steam heating systems, most of which also require electricity to operate);
* the wood consumption for the population would require significant deforestation, even if everyone had a wood-buring stove (which they do not);
So, you can’t use medieval heating methods (burning wood) in densly packed cities whose dwellings aren’t designed to burn wood for heat.
Pretty hard to fetch branches in the woods at the back when –
1. There is no wood, since you live in a city and cutting down park trees would get you arrested.
2. You don’t have a fireplace to begin with, so you can’t legally and safely warm yourself with a fire.
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