Media Clipping — Saturday, November 17, 2001, The Halifax Herald

Time to face up to the tragedy of our forests

By Ralph Surette

ANOTHER BIG report on the forest has come out, and it answers your question about the meaning of the clearcuts and bulldozer gashes you increasingly see from the highways: "We are currently witnessing the disappearance of the natural site-evolved species, structure and age characteristics of the once dominant Acadian forest."

Trees over 80 years old now cover only one per cent of the province, says the report by GPI Atlantic. It's a mounting disaster about which we are officially in denial, and of which we have yet to grasp the full consequences.

Warnings about the degradation of the Nova Scotia forest have been heard for a long time, but in recent years, they've taken on a more anxious tone. The last one, by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy in 1997, warned many sawmills would start closing in the Maritimes soon and paper mills would start cutting back around 2010 because of shortages of wood.

The GPI study, however, is the most useful yet. For one thing, it demolishes the assumptions that have led up to this sorry pass and that still hold sway. That is, that everything's fine as long as production and jobs hold up and we count the depletion of the forest as economic gain, as we did with the cod until it collapsed, which is "bad accounting, like a factory owner selling off his machinery and counting it as profit."

Because the trees are getting smaller, and thus less valuable, there's been a significant loss of value per unit of wood cut, which GPI figures may be as much as $260 million a year for the past 40 years. That's not counting a long list of other losses in a degraded forest: species diversity, resistance to insects and disease, recreation and tourism value, wildlife habitat, watershed protection, and so on.

The report makes recommendations that have been heard before with little impact, because the dominant mentality saw it as tree-hugger stuff - incentives for selection harvesting and forest restoration, reducing clearcutting, protecting more areas, an emphasis on value rather than quantity, and others. However, with industrial forestry degrading the wilderness into a low-value wood factory and creating physical and ecological wreckage, the time has clearly come to take a new tack.

Perhaps more usefully, the GPI report provides a rundown of sustainable models, here and elsewhere, that actually work. For example, at Windhorse Farms, near New Germany, the cutting is selective and done to mimic natural disturbances, leaving holes in the canopy, and minimizing damage done by logging roads. Employing seven people, owner Jim Drescher claims ecoforestry employs five times more people per unit of wood than standard industrial practices.

A spectacular claim. If true, surely something that should be pursued as part of public policy - otherwise we're fools for forgoing the maximum revenue of our forest. There are many other examples - a whole other reality that can't come to light because of the domination of big machines, gigantic cuts and supportive forest bureaucracies.

The time is here for a revolution in thinking. The Nova Scotia government has come around to supporting silviculture - which amounts to diddling with the industrial model - but should be basing all future policy on promoting sustainable forestry and "best practices," making the link between "ecology and timber values," as the report states.

One complicating factor in Nova Scotia is the large number of small holdings. Only 28 per cent is Crown land, with the rest divided between large companies and small owners (less than 400 hectares). The general mentality among the small holders is to cash in now, even if it means cutting the six-inch tree for pulp that would, given room to grow, become a valuable log in a decade or two. However, even if the small owner wanted to get his lot cut sustainably, in most places there's no one who can do it. There are only operators with big machines - usually complaining they have to work day and night to pay for the machine.

We need a deep cultural change here. It must start within the profoundly resistant Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources, where I recommend that they start by reading this report closely.

Copyright © 2001, Ralph Surette