The Forest’s Edge

Diversity of species is anathema to the managers of the new forest. Monoculture is king. It is precisely what happened on the vast prairie, where rich and diverse grasslands were replaced with fields of grain. The landowner’s system of fallowing fields on alternate years allowed for massive evaporation from the bare earth. The moisture rising from the subsoils brought with it salts from the ancient seas that once covered the land, and when the moisture evaporated, it left the salt behind. Vast areas of the Great Plains are pocked with crystal deserts where nothing grows.

My experiences in the bush took place from the forties through the seventies, and not much has improved since. Eight years ago I took a plane from Vancouver up to Smithers. It was winter, and as I passed over the mountains and the great plateau of the western Cariboo I gazed down on what looked like huge meadows. I thought it strange that there would be so many and all of them of an unnatural size and shape. It took a moment to realize that the whole of the forest I had hiked and packed through had been carved to pieces by clear-cuts. The land had been turned into a farm for trees. There was no continuous forest anywhere, just isolated blocks of trees waiting their turn to be logged and turned into lumber and paper for the markets of the United States and Asia.

Had anyone asked me years ago if I loved the forest, I would have said yes. Yet I knew the forest was being betrayed all around me and I said little or nothing. I was young and married with a family and to say anything, to complain of bad forest practices, would have been to put my family at risk. In spite of it all, I fished for salmon and trout, hunted moose and deer, shot and killed garbage bears, and walked and wandered the remaining forests with immense joy and pleasure. To me back then, the wilderness was endless and the works of men only the smallest part of its destruction.

I’m not proud of what I did as a boy and as a young man, and I’m not proud of the men who ran the companies and the men I knew who worked for the Forest Service. All of them turned a blind eye in the name of profit.

The forest I had played and worked in as a child and as a young man was the fir and hemlock forest of south-central British Columbia. I’ve told you about it because what happened there yesterday is now happening in the north, in Canada’s boreal forest, today. This forest is only different because of its location and the species that inhabit it. Some creatures live there year round; others transit from Central and South America, the bayous of Louisiana and Mississippi, and the few remaining marshes of Texas.

The boreal forest is a broad, green swath of forest 200 to 1,000 kilometres wide, sweeping from west to east, south of the northern tundra and taiga. It starts in Alaska and the Yukon. It crosses the northeastern corner of British Columbia and spreads across the bottom of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, passing through the top half of Alberta and Saskatchewan and the bottom half of Manitoba. It sweeps through the southern two-thirds of Ontario, across the top of the Great Lakes and on through Quebec and southern Labrador to the northern half of Newfoundland. The same forest writhes across Siberia, Russia, Scandinavia, and northern Scotland. This forest, called the boreal ecoregion, comprises one-third of the world’s total forest area. It is the earth’s largest natural ecosystem, greater than the Amazon rainforest and far greater than the rainforests of Africa and Southeast Asia. It is the world’s largest carbon sink, a huge breathing lung that takes in carbon dioxide and replaces it with oxygen. It is the life of our planet.

Those are the facts. When I was a boy, I loved facts about people, places, and things. Facts were absolute and true and could not be contradicted. Science had told me so and I grew up in the heyday of post-war science. Knowing facts made me feel I was in control of things. My Canada was a known and absolute thing, and that alone made me feel somewhat safe in a life over which I had no control.

In the middle of the last century, my country had been largely weighed and measured or was in the process of being so. I had read Bruce Hutchinson’s The Unknown Country back in 1952. He told me Canada didn’t have to be unknown anymore. I believed him and in a few years I went out to find it. Then Northrop Frye asked me in the sixties, where is here? It was so human of him. He spoke metaphorically, his question was a literary one. He was concerned about ideas and imagination, not facts.

I’ve been a writer for half a century. I put words down on paper and I send those words out to be published as articles or poems in magazines or as books. My life is endlessly involved with the paper that comes from our forests. The fibre I write upon was once a tree. I am as intimately involved in the pulp and paper industry as anyone I know. That vast tracts of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec are being farmed every day in order to provide the paper I write upon doesn’t stop me from writing, and it doesn’t stop me from going down to the store and buying another carton of paper for my printer.

How can I be a responsible and compassionate man and still take part, however peripherally, in the destruction of the forests I have loved all my life?