There's plenty of wood for all uses. If you drive the back country, you'll see quite a few tree farms.
> Puerto Rico
The shortages there are the ones government utilities are supposed to provide. A lot of people, however, made money providing various solar power systems. Anyone who can pay for it can get power.
It used to be part of the general American experience to eat chestnuts in fall/early winter. Hence the line "Chestnuts roasting over an open fire" which I quoted earlier.
The chestnut shortage caused that tradition to all but disappear.
The shortage wasn't caused by government setting the price. It wasn't caused by "Tragedy of the Commons".
You don't even think there is a shortage because we've adjusted. It appears to be that if people can survive without it, perhaps by using an alternative, then there cannot be a shortage of something.
Which is not what "shortage" means, at least for those who don't subscribe to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
(If that is what shortage means, there can never be a shortage of toilet paper because there are other ways to clean one's butt - or you can get used to having a dirty butt.)
Let's go back to the passenger pigeon. If we apply your logic then of course there's no shortage of passenger pigeon meat because really people are getting their food from other sources. Yes?
I'll note that you even acknowledge that the absence of passenger pigeon meat was not - contrary to your first assertion - based on government price fixing ("The only time there's a shortage in a free market is when the government fixes the price.") Instead, you say the problem is that it wasn't part of a free market at all.
So, what's the solution? Is is possible, within a free market system, to have saved the passenger pigeons? How does one "own" a migratory species which requires vast numbers in order to breed? And how does that ownership seem any different than price fixing by a monopoly owner, a.k.a., government prohibitions? And how does it factor in ecosystem changes caused by the presence/absence of that species?
How do you explain that as a "Tragedy of the Commons" scenario?
Your example of "shortage promptly disappears" does not explain the situation in Puerto Rico.