Media Clipping — Wednesday December 12, 2001, The Daily News, Halifax

Critic: ‘no science’ in forestry report

By Stephen Bornais

Executive director Ron Colman unveils the GPI Atlantic report last month at a news conference. Daily News File photo

A recent report offering solutions for what’s wrong with Nova Scotia’s forests wasn’t worth killing the trees needed to print it, says a Halifax forest researcher.

Eldon Gunn, a professor of industrial engineering at Dalhousie University, said GPI Atlantic’s report is a moral argument dressed up to look like science.

"I don’t like to see science used as club, but then, there is no science (in the report)," he said yesterday.

GPI Atlantic released a draft version of its Forest Reports in November, concluding that years of poor management have devalued the province’s forest and threaten to bring on a northern cod-like collapse.

GPI Atlantic is a Halifax-based nonprofit research group developing a new measure of economic wellbeing. Its proposed "genuine progress index" takes into account a wider range of variables than does the Gross Domestic Product, the standard now used to measure economic performance.

Gunn, a forest researcher for 23 years, is also chairman of the Nova Forest Alliance, an organization that brings together industry, woodland owners, environmental activists and tourism interests. He is preparing a detailed critique of GPI Atlantic’s report.

GPI’s report envisions a primordial, pre-contact forest, stuffed with lofty hardwoods and towering softwoods, that likely never existed, Gunn said.

"Landscape myths are not helpful," he said.

He said GPI dismissed the alliance’s work developing a multicriteria system of forest management.

"None of that (work) is in the GPI report. It’s all, ’it’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad,’" he said.

GPI Atlantic executive director Ron Colman said while the two-volume report has been revised since its release, he remains confident in both the conclusions and the methodologies used to reach them.

"One of the reasons the report is so big is that we make the methodologies very transparent, and for every calculation we’ve made, we explain how we got there," he said.

One of the central findings of the GPI report is that over the last 40 years Nova Scotia’s forest has become a lot younger.

Gunn said there is a very good reason for this, but GPI chose to ignore it, preferring to blame rapacious forest companies.

In the mid-1970s, the province decided not to use insecticides to combat a widespread spruce budworm infestation. The result was the destruction of millions of hectares of forest.

The trees that grew back are still in their late teens, pushing the average age of the province’s forest down. An entirely predictable, and predicted, result, Gunn said.

"We planned (today’s forest) with an explicit decision. It was not bad management," he said.

But Colman said the report finds the age diversity was being lost in the province’s forests well before budworm attacks. The infestation in the 1970s was made more severe because the forest was too weak to adequately defend itself.

"We looked at six forest inventories going back to 1958, and you can see the rate of decline is pretty steady," Colman said.

Copyright © 2001, The Daily News