October’s mock “forest funeral” march in Halifax must have left many people fearful that our forests and their wildlife are doomed. As a retired professional Nova Scotia extension forester and former university lecturer with no ties to industry, I want to ease their fears.
Our forests, after 400 years of use and abuse, are doing remarkably well. The one being mourned was not so much today’s forest, which now covers 80 per cent of the province, as much as it was the ancient Acadian forest, now reduced to a few isolated enclaves.
For decades, activists, apparently ignorant of our land-use history, have bemoaned this loss.
Lately they’ve gotten more strident, using Trumpian name-calling and rhetoric — while ignoring real-time issues like our looming spruce budworm epidemic and the likely expansion of biomass harvesting.
No doubt the October mourners were sincere. But surely their leaders, veteran biologists like Bob Bancroft and Prof. Soren Bondrup-Nielsen, know you can’t reverse four centuries of forest exploitation with street theatre and the stroke of a premier’s pen.
Two points I will concede. Yes, we long ago lost our native wolf, marten and caribou, and nearly lost the beaver (saved by Lands and Forests /Department of Natural Resources in the 1940s) and the fisher. But the real culprits were bounty-hunting, forest fires and over-trapping — not clearcutting.
But post-1960s industrial harvesting has
What activists overlook is that clearfelling started nearly 200 years before we ever had a pulp-and-paper industry. In the late 1780s, actually. That’s when successive waves of landless refugees started, with official blessing, converting our woodlands to cropland and pasture — farms that 70 years later were mostly abandoned.
We’re still living with the legacy of what happened next. Hard to believe, but forests “remember.” I call it “the Echo Effect.” Vacated ground, thanks to our mild, moist climate, rapidly regenerates here. (Ask any highway worker trying to keep rights-of way treeless.)
But Mother Nature’s new forest differs from the old. In place of massive shade-loving beech, maple and hemlock, she sent in sun-loving pin cherry, birch and aspen. These, in turn, fostered longer-lived white spruce, balsam fir and, in our western counties, white pine. Later, these over-topped their nurse trees and shaded them out.
The result? Wide swaths of shade-tolerant, multi-species Acadian trees got replaced by even-aged, same-size softwood stands — a pulpwood forest. Called forest succession, it’s perfectly normal.
But here’s the catch. Pulpwood forests, being close in age, shallow-rooted and storm-prone, are best harvested at one go. This avoids wind-throw and tangled, wasted wood.
However, once you clear-cut — mow down trees like grass — you’re stuck with repeated “mowing.” Our farmhouse, when we bought it in 1969, sat in a weedy hayfield. After a few mowings, the grass took over and the lawn has held its own ever since.
In the same way, we’ve been training the woods to feed our post-modern addiction to cheap paper. North Americans are the planet’s biggest paper users — and laziest paper recyclers. And while online news is hurting newsprint sales, online shopping’s huge demand for cardboard packaging is taking up the slack.
Until we change that mindset, clearcutting will continue.
Meanwhile, because the public demands it, forest managers must try to restore high-value Acadian species. It won’t be easy. From 1974 on, I tried that on our 25-hectare woodlot near Truro. The lot had been logged piecemeal for a century or more, and swamp maple and aspen had invaded.
Yet some Acadian species remained: young yellow birch, some hemlock, a few beech and some fine red spruce. All these I encouraged by felling the competition — all except aspen, whose leaf-fall sweetens acid soil and whose winter buds feed grouse.
But old-growth managers, unlike farmers and fibre foresters, must think in centuries. Yellow birch regenerates scantily until about age 70. Red spruce breeds sooner but can take 150 years to mature, and hemlock takes twice as long.
At that rate I’d need 300 years — 10 human generations! Never mind that since the 1900s, my beech — everyone’s beech — still harboured the Asian canker that decimated our once-abundant stands.
Long story short, hurricane Juan derailed my project in 2003. Ten years’ harvest in one night. Now the lot is mostly young, healthy growth.
Why is forestry still such a hot-button issue? Because people care. That’s good — but to act wisely they need the truth, not placard slogans. The truth is, for better or worse, we (and the budworm) have skewed our woodlands toward even-aged natural monocultures. Until we accept that fact, we’ll get nowhere.
So enough with romantic visions of cathedral groves. Did you know our ancestors loathed those gloomy, cougar-haunted woods? Here’s Gaelic bard John McLean of Barneys River, Pictou County venting his 1819 Song of America:
“There’s little you’ll see but tall forests shutting out the sky from you.
“Before I make a clearing and raise crops and tear the tyrannous forest up from its roots, I’ll be worn out. ”
Even the native Mi’kmaq shunned old growth. Pileated woodpeckers, flying squirrels and pretty salamanders make poor eating. What they needed from the forest were grassy openings where berries and foliage drew edible game. Unable to fell flinty maple and beech with stone axes, they made judicial use of fire.
Explaining all this to your average politician, few of whom know a beech from a birch, won’t be easy. Short-term stewards at best, they’ll take easy votes over hard-nosed advice every time.
To all you forest mourners, I say: By all means, march — but march for something more attainable and truly restorative, like a ban on biomass harvesting.