Time to see not just the trees, but the forest

You want trees? We'll give you trees (voice of infomercial pitch here): "we got yer balsam fir, yer black spruce, yer white pine, aspens, maples, tamarack, a few yew. But wait - there's more! All great for making paper, furniture, even woodcrafts. Get yer trees, they're going fast."

The tone of a carnival barker seems to be what government is taking with the province's forests, especially in the central region. This is where the A.N.D. Company took possession of the land for a century to harvest wood for paper. Cutting wood for purposes other than heat goes on well before that, as there are records of sawmills in central going back to the early 19th century.

As an environmental scientist recently observed, wood fibre seems to be the order of the day in Newfoundland and Labrador.

But that kind of attitude runs the risk of endangering the whole forest.

It's too bad the provincial Department of Natural Resources, which prides itself otherwise on activities such as tree planting, controlled burns and designating only specific areas for people to cut wood for their own purposes like home heating, might not be able to see the forest for the trees. When you can't do that, you run the risk of losing an entire world - a wonderful example of a boreal forest where there's old-growth trees, endangered animals like the Newfoundland marten and numerous bird species, woodland caribou and various native kinds of rabbits and rodents. As one aboriginal saying goes, "everything is connected."

Now that AbitibiBowater is out of the picture, it's time for stakeholders, from government to the private sector and environmentalists, to guarantee that the interests of the forest aren't addressed in the fashion of old myopic ladies trying to piece together a crazy quilt.

This province's forests are pretty awe-inspiring, and must have been even more so to the British lords who founded the paper mill in Grand Falls-Windsor. After all, most of the European continent's great forests have been ravaged over the centuries by its inhabitants. For example, much of Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest is now home to shopping centres, and Germany's legendary Black Forest, once the location of many characters from Grimm's Fairy Tales, is two-thirds less than what it was. It's not surprising Lord Northcliffe chose to build the house in one of the European colony's great forests, seeing as there's not as much left in most of Europe anymore.

Forest strategy isn't just about tree planting. You can plant millions of seedlings and what you end up with is essentially the world's biggest Christmas tree farm, if you like spruce. But what you also end up with is a lack of biodiversity - important to perpetuating the richness of life on Earth as a whole. If there's a major catastrophe, biodiversity ensures something will survive. That applies to our forests, too. If you have only a few tree species, then they're prone to certain insect pests.

A good forest strategy would also rein in commercial ventures. Clear-cutting isn't a product of the tropics where people who don't care decide to hack and cut, it's happening here, too. Over the years, industrial activity has reduced old-growth forests (home of the now-endangered Newfoundland marten), cut down trees in watershed areas (bad move, as the forests in these areas "hold on to the soil", reduce prospects of flooding and help to filter impurities out of water and reduced vital tree species to the border of extinction. There was a yew species here called the Canada yew. It has practically vanished now, thanks to Abitibi and its predecessors. Like other yews, that tree has the potential to provide cancer-fighting drugs.

And think of the "pine-clad hills" of the Ode to Newfoundland. When Sir Cavendish Boyle wrote those words, there were such hills. Now all you can find are cutovers.

Reprinted from the Advertiser

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