to humans. Additionally, each species performs various functions within its immediate environment as it integrates and competes with its neighbours. Simply put, without plants we can’t continue to exist but they can do quite well without us. Provided we use plants responsibly and work with natural processes when harvesting them, they will continue to sustain our species and our way of life.
We Are Living in an Ever-Changing Forest
I hope to stimulate examination of the forest around us and objective questioning of much of what we currently hold as fact. Please critically question everything that I and others are telling you. I hope that you will seek other sources of information and weigh the “facts” as presented by each of us. We all see the world through the clouded lens of our own experience and too often assume we know best. The deteriorating condition of our world is proof that approach has not been good enough.
The internet has numerous scientific articles that are easily accessed. Do an online search for “black spruce” to see what information is available about that species. You will discover in your reading that our knowledge of trees and the forest is limited, but as with other subjects, we are rapidly adding to what we already understand, and in some cases altering and even rejecting what we previously thought to be fact. That is how objective science works.
We don’t know everything about the human body, even though for centuries it has been scientifically studied. Consider all of the forest-tree, other-plant, animal, and insect species that together have received only a fraction as much scientific examination and you will understand the vast amount of knowledge that is waiting to be discovered about the boreal forest.
We know that the boreal forest is constantly changing and that sometimes alteration is slow and unnoticed by the casual observer. At other times change is rapid, with hundreds of hectares harvested or even a thousand square kilometres transformed from mature forest into a large, wildfire-blackenedlandscape.
If you own a summer cottage in the bush, think back to when you first saw it or cleared the site for building. Check the photographs that you have taken over the years and observe the change in the forest. I expect it will surprise you that new trees have appeared, some have disappeared, and most have grown without your notice.
Some of us return again and again to our favourite locations in the forest and they always appear the same, but are they? Think of your favourite blueberry patch. It wasn’t always such. Probably only eight to ten years ago it was a mature forest that was burned or harvested. Two to three years after the disturbance, the blueberry plants matured, and since then crops have been variable, with one or two bumper years. Then, last summer, you realized that the developing young trees are shading out the blueberry bushes. Next year, it will be time for you to find another location.
Between high school and forestry graduation, I gained experience at most jobs involved with circa 1950s’ pulpwood harvesting and extraction. I was interested, but skeptical, when some of the oldest loggers said that they were harvesting the same ground for their second time.
In 1949, while accompanying my father as he scaled stump-piledpulpwood (wood cut up and piled where the trees were felled), I was overwhelmed by black flies. He sat me on top of a pile of logs where a breeze kept the pests at bay while he carried out his work within sight of me. In 2000 I returned to the same location with my adult son. The site had again been recently clear-cutand my son obliged me by standing beside a pile of logs near where I had sat on another pile fifty-oneyears earlier.
As a logger for a brief period in 1958, I helped clear-cuta portion of a stand that had been harvested circa 1908. During a visit to the same location in 2011, I was pleased, but no longer surprised, to see that it was ready to be harvested a third time at high commercial volume — and that on Newfoundland’s supposedly poor soils.
Since moving to Ontario, I have examined ground on the former Abitibi-Price’s private and public licensed land, where second clear-cutharvests have occurred. In 2011, I returned to a 1983 black spruce plantation on a former clear-cutwithin the Spruce River FMA. I was so impressed that I surveyed a part of the stand and determined that at only twenty-eightyears since planting it already had as much pulpwood volume per hectare as the average tract that Abitibi-Pricehad harvested in its early clear-cuts.6 For black spruce that is remarkable, especially when one realizes that we have traditionally regarded that species as taking one hundred years to mature in Ontario.
That particular stand was the subject of considerable public and professional criticism as we began taking responsibility for stand renewal. Many viewed our efforts as failures from the start and our credibility was on the line. Then and now, we all had and still have a lot to learn!
A bright and satisfying future awaits anyone interested in studying trees, their growth, their interaction with the environment, and their chemical and physical structures. Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, and several other universities across Canada offer tremendous opportunity to anyone with the academic credentials for and an interest in such studies.
Forestry Practices Governed by Law
From the early 1960s, Canadian citizens began to take a more active interest in the way we manage our forests. It was discovered that not all was as we wanted and we became more proactive.
As a practising industrial forester, I took the brunt of many citizens’ disgust with what was perceived as the irresponsible behaviour the forestry industry had displayed in its forest-managementpractices. Gradually, through the 1970s and 1980s, that disgust fed the creation of powerful citizen lobbies led by passionate activists and it found its way into our schools and other public institutions.
I remember loggers emotionally appealing to me to do something on their behalf to “get the truth out there.” Their children were being bullied by their classmates and many were ashamed of their parents’ jobs. Those were frustrating, maddening times, and it was difficult for forest workers to keep their cool and remain objective.
Until recently, industrial foresters have had an almost impossible job getting our perspective into the public arena. Those of us who attempted to get our story out were often not skilled at working with the media and consequently often looked incompetent, antagonistic, and even deceitful. Let me try to explain how things stand today.
Since 2010, some of the best known and progressive environmental action and lobby groups have taken a different approach. Groups such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Boreal Initiative, Forest Ethics, and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), among others, decided to look for common ground and work with the forest industry on agreed objectives. Together they have formed the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, which currently includes a total of six environmental groups and eighteen forest industry companies as members.7
Greenpeace remains a notable exception and has chosen to continue its confrontational methods. Significantly absent as partners to the agreement are the First Nations, who say their treaty rights are being ignored.8Hopefully, in the not too distant future, all parties will come together to work on the common cause of sustaining the boreal forest. It’s time to face up to the reality that there will never be total agreement on all issues, and the best way to realize improvement is to work together on those issues that we can agree on.
Forest management in Ontario and across Canada is guided by policy developed under the collective wishes of citizens expressed through our elected representatives and the legislation and regulations passed by provincial parliaments. All foresters practising in Ontario are accountable for their professional actions.
When I arrived in Ontario, my employer required that I join the Ontario Professional Foresters Association (OPFA) and become a registered professional forester (RPF). In order to become a member, I had to pass an exam as evidence of my knowledge of past and current Ontario forest policy.
The OPFA was created by the Professional Foresters Association Acton April 3, 1957.9 That act, requested by a core of dedicated foresters, gave them a rallying base from which to collectively increase their forestry competency and standards of practice. Since October 16, 2000, the practice of forestry has been subject to the Professional Foresters Act, 2000, which recognizes professional forestry as an independent self-regulatingprofession.10All RPFs