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State Of Denial: Scarring The Boreal
By TOM KNUDSON
THE SACRAMENTO BEE
Published: May 27, 2003, 06:43:40 AM PDT
Ten years after the historic battle to protect spotted owls and old-growth forests, California's woods are quiet, almost churchlike.
The chain saws and logging trucks that once shattered the symphony of bird song and muted the music of mountain streams have disappeared from many places -- stilled by environmental lawsuits, public opinion and increasingly strict regulations about timber harvesting.
Since 1990, 62 lumber mills in California have closed. The volume of timber cut from national forests has dropped 80 percent. At no time in state history have California forest ecosystems enjoyed such sweeping protection.
Yet there is a flip side to the turnabout, one that opens a passageway to more environmental trauma: The logging never really stopped; it just moved to Canada.
In throttling the harvest of wood from its own back yard, while continuing to devour forest products, California is not merely turning to America's largest trading partner, Canada, to fill the gap. It is buying wood from a nation where up to 90 percent is harvested through clearcutting -- the controversial mowing down of entire stands of forest -- and where two-thirds of the cutting occurs in old-growth stands.
And it is buying wood from a country where logging is moving more deeply into one of the planet's most important ecosystems: the boreal forest.
Circling the globe like a jade and emerald crown, the boreal, named for Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is home to a mythic array of wildlife, including timber wolves, woodland caribou and -- in Russia -- Siberian tigers. It also plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate, helping protect it from global warming.
But in Canada's boreal zone, which sweeps across the country in a wide arc from Newfoundland to the Yukon, logging is proceeding so rapidly that some scientists fear that the forest's vital ecological functions may be in danger.
Already, some species of wildlife are in decline and native cultures, for whom the boreal is both pantry and medicine chest, are struggling to maintain their way of life.
"This is a classic example of not taking a holistic view," said Richard Thomas, an environmental consultant in Edmonton, Alberta. "You (Americans) do the cosmetic stuff at home. You minimize your ecological footprint in your own back yard. And here in Canada, you get away with murder. It's out of sight and out of mind."
California's hunger for Canadian forest products is part of a larger national appetite. In 2001, a record 18.5 billion board feet of Canadian softwood lumber was imported to the United States -- enough two-by-fours, plywood, doorjambs, siding and other products to build a city the size of San Diego.
Lots of Canadian paper was shipped south, too: 26.8 billion pounds. That is roughly equal to the weight of every man, woman and child in the United States. Most arrived in two forms: newsprint (13.2 billion pounds), and printing and writing paper (9.4 billion pounds).
Track that wood and paper back to Canada and you are in for a jolt.
A sheet of Canadian siding from a Northern California Home Depot store, for example, will lead you to Lesser Slave Lake in Alberta, where the forest is so shredded by cutting that only thin wisps of trees remain -- old-growth confetti.
"The boreal is under attack," said Dave Donahue, 59, a gray-bearded trapper who lives near the lake with his wife and oldest son. "This is not progress. This is mass destruction."
Donahue moved to Alberta in 1972 after watching his native New Brunswick forests fall to logging.
"It's heartbreaking," he added. "I'm a firm believer that God gave us the responsibility to be stewards of the land. This is not about stewardship. This is about greed."
Last spring, as outrage welled inside him, Donahue wrote an essay titled "Americans Wake Up," hoping it might appear in the pages of an environmental newsletter in the United States. It never did.
"Americans are not even vaguely aware of what is happening here in Canada," he wrote. "Every tree that is of any value is cut by means of clearcut logging and any tree that is of no use is knocked down and left to rot. The lungs of Mother Earth are being RIPPED out. Wild animals are being destroyed at a fantastic rate."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pick up a newspaper at any Northern California convenience store and you find roots that reach deep into majestic stands of old-growth forest in northeast British Columbia. Trees in that Rocky Mountain region feed a mill owned by the world's largest newsprint maker, Abitibi Consolidated Ltd., which sells paper to several U.S. dailies, including The Bee.
From its mill in MacKenzie, British Columbia, Abitibi harvests pine, spruce and balsam across a vast wilderness that not only is home to some of the continent's most impressive species of wildlife, including grizzly bears, but also is inhabited by the indigenous Kaska Dena people, many of whom still survive by hunting wild game.
Although conflicts between indigenous people and timber and paper companies are common in Canada, Abitibi and the Kaska Dena are working together to develop environmentally sensitive kinds of logging. Abitibi has even helped the Kaska Dena form their own logging com- pany.
Asked why, Abitibi forester Wayne Lewis said: "They live here. We respect that. They should be a part of the process."
Dave Porter, chairman of the Kaska Dena council, praised the company's efforts, but added, "There is still a long way to go."
Fifteen hundred miles east, Steve Fobister -- a former grand chief of the Ojibwa nation -- kicks the dust in a gaping clearcut in Ontario.
Staring at a moonscape of stumps and bare ground stretching for more than 10 square miles, Fobister said: "This is selfish. This is devastation."
Nearby, someone has spray-painted "PROPAGANDA" across a timber company sign about reforestation.
That someone, Fobister said, is him.
"You can't even hear a bird in a clearcut. You can't even find an insect. Everything is dead."
In Montreal, Abitibi spokesman Marc Osborne defended the company's logging. "We adhere to sustainability," he said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rich in forest resources, Can-ada has been cutting trees for years. But as demand for wood has jumped worldwide, the nation has stepped up its level of cutting: from 1.6 million acres in 1970 to 2.5 million acres in 2001.
In recent years, that increase has ignited a trade dispute with the United States, which now assesses a stiff 27 percent duty on Canadian lumber imports.
The environmental side of Canadian logging, which is largely overseen by its provinces, has drawn less attention.
A spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, which leases provincial land
to timber companies, said
Canadian-style logging is healthy because it mimics the natural rejuvenating force of forest fires.
"A clearcut is not the end of the forest," said Joe Churcher, ministry forest policy officer. "It's the beginning."
And many in the industry said concerns about cutting are overblown.
"We're certainly not running out of trees," said Ed Greenberg, spokesman for the Alberta Forest Products Association, a trade group. "We're as concerned about the environment as anybody."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To environmentalists in the United States, the spotted owl in the 1990s became a symbol of the vanishing of old-growth forests and -- through the U.S. Endangered Species Act -- a legal tool to halt and slow timber cutting. To many Canadians, it was a business opportunity.
As the harvest of wood from federal forests in California, Oregon and Washington plunged by 4.8 billion board feet during the 1990s, Canadian imports to the United States shot up 6.2 billion board feet.
At the same time, wood consumption in the United States catapulted to a record: 68.3 billion board feet in 1999. Per
capita wood consumption in the United States is 2.5 times higher than in other developed nations -- and 3.4 times the world average. Americans also use more paper than anyone else in the world, about 718 pounds per person per year.
Wood consumption figures for states aren't available, but experts said California, partly because of its size and growth, devours the biggest share of lumber -- an estimated 10 billion board feet a year. That is nearly 15 percent of the national total, the equivalent of 70 two-by-fours for every person in the state. About 20 percent comes from Canada, up from 6 percent in the 1980s.
The numbers make some Canadians uneasy. "If we brought everybody in the world up to California's standard of living, we would need four or five Earths," said Thomas, the Alberta environmental consultant.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Controversy is no stranger to Canada's forests. Until recently, however, outcry has focused on the rich rain forests of British Columbia, the nation's largest timber producer.
As more of those coastal forests are set aside for conservation, the battleground is moving inland, to the boreal forest.
The first thing you notice about the boreal is its size. Thirteen times larger than Cali- fornia, Canada's boreal is
the world's largest contiguous wooded wilderness and part of the planet's largest ecosystem. Yet it is a landscape few know well.
Punished by long, cold winters, Canada's boreal can't compete with the dazzling diversity of species that endear environmentalists to the tropics. Its spindly stands of spruce, pine, larch and aspen are no match for the coastal redwoods that crane necks and inspire awe on the California coast.
Yet the boreal has its own
magic. In the brief, frantic summers, its silvery panorama of lakes, ponds and puddles quivers with 40 percent of North America's nesting waterfowl. Its thick canopy is home to more than 1 billion nesting migratory warblers. Endangered whooping cranes raise their chicks there.
Much of the year, though, the boreal is barren and brooding -- haunted by the howling of wolves and the restless rasping of wind across snow and ice.
Its greatest gift may be climatologic. Like all forests, the boreal helps the planet breathe, filtering out and storing more carbon -- the primary spark for global warming -- than any other forest.
As threats to Canada's boreal grow, its obscurity is lifting. Last June, National Geographic devoted a story to the region. And environmentalists have launched a campaign to scale back logging and set aside large tracts as wilderness, arguing that the health of the planet is at stake.
"If you care about wild forests, if you care about migratory songbirds, waterfowl and combating climate change, then you need to care about Canada's boreal
forest," said Stewart Elgie, executive director of the Canadian Boreal Trust, an Ottawa environmental group.
Canada's timber firms say such concerns are exaggerated and that environmentalists are merely revving up another moneymaking, alarmist campaign.
"You've got to justify your existence somewhere," said Rick Alguire, woodlands manager at Tolko Industries Ltd., which makes siding and sheathing in High Prairie, Alberta. "The bor-eal is the next big target. We are a target. Every mill in Canada is a target."
Target or not, some companies are moving away from large clearcuts to a quiltlike mosaic of smaller cuts that more closely resemble the natural progression of fire.
"Are there impacts? Of course there are. We've never denied that," said Kirk Andries, director of external affairs at Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, or Al-Pac, which harvests trees for pulp -- ground wood fiber -- the primary building block for paper products.
But he said Al-Pac has in- vested in "a staggering amount of science" to make sure those impacts are kept to a minimum and the boreal remains healthy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is one thing environmentalists and loggers agree on: Opening the boreal to logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other activities at the same time is not ideal.
Al-Pac is a good example. Under a long-term "forest management agreement" with Alberta's government, it is entitled to log trees across a nearly 15 million-acre swath of the boreal. Much of that land also is leased to oil and gas companies. One area may hold as much oil -- in deposits called tar or oil sands -- as Saudi Arabia, and is being feverishly tapped.
"I'm comfortable with our own activities," Andries said. "But when you start layering stuff -- energy, agriculture, forestry -- on the landscape, you wonder, 'Gee, maybe this needs a little more thought.'"
There also are concerns about accountability. Across the bor-eal, government environmental monitoring often is limited and sometimes left to industry.
Charles Caccia, who served as environment minister under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s, said the reports cannot be trusted.
"There is no established manner to verify the data," said Caccia, now a member of Parliament. "In the absence of a reliable inventory, we do not know -- and cannot claim -- that we are on a sustainable path."
Starting in 1996, a Canadian Senate subcommittee spent 2 1/2 years examining boreal conflicts. Its report is a stark account of overcutting and mismanagement.
"There is a sense of urgency that, at least in some parts of the boreal forest, time is running out for saving some vital functions, such as wildlife habitat, watershed protection and carbon sinks," the subcommittee reported.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One place the subcommittee stopped was Winnipeg, Mani- toba, not far from a part of the boreal Randall Bird knows well: his "trap line" -- 10 square miles near his native Ojibwa village of Hollow Water.
Bird, now in his 50s, has worked the area since he was a boy -- laying out traps each fall, checking them by snowshoe and snowmobile, sleeping wrapped in fur blankets in remote cabins. Each year, he harvested a pile of pelts -- from beaver to lynx, weasel to wolf -- now worth $10,000 to $15,000 Canadian ($6,500 to $9,750 U.S.).
Then, in the late 1990s, the Pine Falls Paper Co. began clearcutting in the area.
At a recent cut, a few patches of aspen remained, but large stands of black spruce and jack pine, from which newsprint is made, had been leveled. It looked as if a bomb had exploded.
"Everything's gone," Bird said.
Bird inherited the trap line from his father, who inherited it from his father. He had long planned to pass it on to his sons. Now, Bird said, it isn't worth it.
"You won't get anything now. Fishers, martens -- those animals like trees. They have no place to go now because it's all open," he said.
Last summer, Bird joined fellow tribal elders inside a large tepee. They sat in a circle and smoked a sacred pipe as Garry Raven, a traditional healer, prayed for help.
The logging industry "has killed off our rabbits, our porcupine, our otter and lynx," Raven told the Creator. "Most of the forest roads are blocked off. There are big gates on them so you can't get in."
Pine Falls Paper has since been sold to another company, Tembec, which plans more logging on lands where Ojibwa trap and gather herbs. Tembec official Bob Yatkowsky said the cutting can be done without hurting the land and that he is proceeding cautiously.
"You don't want to end up with standoffs and roadblocks," he said.
Others have less patience. Asked about Ojibwa concerns, John Bulmer -- a former Pine Falls mill superintendent -- said: "That's all fine and dandy. But what are we going to live on in the meantime? We can't live on nuts and berries. We can't turn the clock back."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tembec's newsprint is not made from just trees. A lot of recycled newspaper is mixed in, too. Over the years, the amount of newspaper born again as newsprint has grown dramatically.
But newspaper companies generally prefer to publish on newsprint with some virgin wood fiber because the paper is whiter and photographs reproduce better.
Environmentalists say that leaves plenty of room for damage. And while most U.S. newspapers, The Bee included, routinely write about forest conservation and editorialize on its behalf, seldom do they examine the environmental price of newsprint.
"The amazing lack of coverage is no coincidence," said Todd Paglia, campaign coordinator at Forest Ethics, a San Francisco environmental group. "When their own bottom line is on the line, newspapers tend to shy away from coverage that would reveal their complicity."
The subject of newsprint was on the mind of U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth in October 2001 when he addressed the Newspaper Association of America, which represents the nation's newspaper publishers.
A transcript of Bosworth's speech contains the following passage:
"Newsprint comes from wood, and wood comes from forests. Just to produce The Washington Post takes the equivalent of three or four square miles of clearcut forest per year. Multiply that by all the newspapers and magazines in the nation and you get some idea of the demands on our natural resources."
Tom Croteau, a senior vice president for the association, said Bosworth's statement was misleading.
"It suggests that all newspapers and magazines are printed on paper that has been manufactured from forests that were clearcut," Croteau said. "And that's not true."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A March 1998 report by Alberta's provincial government found a landscape shredded by logging, and crisscrossed by 45,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines and 88,000 miles of access roads.
Alberta's boreal is experiencing "a massive increase in industrial activity -- timber, hydrocarbon and mineral extraction -- unprecedented in scale," it says.
Consultant Thomas, who wrote the report, said such fragmentation is happening across Canada and beyond.
"These problems are international in scope," he said. "The boreal is much more important to the global community left standing than exploited, simply because of its carbon storage.
"Messing around with the bor-eal the way we are, it's eventually going to affect everybody on the planet."
By TOM KNUDSON
THE SACRAMENTO BEE
Published: May 27, 2003, 06:43:40 AM PDT
Ten years after the historic battle to protect spotted owls and old-growth forests, California's woods are quiet, almost churchlike.
The chain saws and logging trucks that once shattered the symphony of bird song and muted the music of mountain streams have disappeared from many places -- stilled by environmental lawsuits, public opinion and increasingly strict regulations about timber harvesting.
Since 1990, 62 lumber mills in California have closed. The volume of timber cut from national forests has dropped 80 percent. At no time in state history have California forest ecosystems enjoyed such sweeping protection.
Yet there is a flip side to the turnabout, one that opens a passageway to more environmental trauma: The logging never really stopped; it just moved to Canada.
In throttling the harvest of wood from its own back yard, while continuing to devour forest products, California is not merely turning to America's largest trading partner, Canada, to fill the gap. It is buying wood from a nation where up to 90 percent is harvested through clearcutting -- the controversial mowing down of entire stands of forest -- and where two-thirds of the cutting occurs in old-growth stands.
And it is buying wood from a country where logging is moving more deeply into one of the planet's most important ecosystems: the boreal forest.
Circling the globe like a jade and emerald crown, the boreal, named for Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is home to a mythic array of wildlife, including timber wolves, woodland caribou and -- in Russia -- Siberian tigers. It also plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate, helping protect it from global warming.
But in Canada's boreal zone, which sweeps across the country in a wide arc from Newfoundland to the Yukon, logging is proceeding so rapidly that some scientists fear that the forest's vital ecological functions may be in danger.
Already, some species of wildlife are in decline and native cultures, for whom the boreal is both pantry and medicine chest, are struggling to maintain their way of life.
"This is a classic example of not taking a holistic view," said Richard Thomas, an environmental consultant in Edmonton, Alberta. "You (Americans) do the cosmetic stuff at home. You minimize your ecological footprint in your own back yard. And here in Canada, you get away with murder. It's out of sight and out of mind."
California's hunger for Canadian forest products is part of a larger national appetite. In 2001, a record 18.5 billion board feet of Canadian softwood lumber was imported to the United States -- enough two-by-fours, plywood, doorjambs, siding and other products to build a city the size of San Diego.
Lots of Canadian paper was shipped south, too: 26.8 billion pounds. That is roughly equal to the weight of every man, woman and child in the United States. Most arrived in two forms: newsprint (13.2 billion pounds), and printing and writing paper (9.4 billion pounds).
Track that wood and paper back to Canada and you are in for a jolt.
A sheet of Canadian siding from a Northern California Home Depot store, for example, will lead you to Lesser Slave Lake in Alberta, where the forest is so shredded by cutting that only thin wisps of trees remain -- old-growth confetti.
"The boreal is under attack," said Dave Donahue, 59, a gray-bearded trapper who lives near the lake with his wife and oldest son. "This is not progress. This is mass destruction."
Donahue moved to Alberta in 1972 after watching his native New Brunswick forests fall to logging.
"It's heartbreaking," he added. "I'm a firm believer that God gave us the responsibility to be stewards of the land. This is not about stewardship. This is about greed."
Last spring, as outrage welled inside him, Donahue wrote an essay titled "Americans Wake Up," hoping it might appear in the pages of an environmental newsletter in the United States. It never did.
"Americans are not even vaguely aware of what is happening here in Canada," he wrote. "Every tree that is of any value is cut by means of clearcut logging and any tree that is of no use is knocked down and left to rot. The lungs of Mother Earth are being RIPPED out. Wild animals are being destroyed at a fantastic rate."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pick up a newspaper at any Northern California convenience store and you find roots that reach deep into majestic stands of old-growth forest in northeast British Columbia. Trees in that Rocky Mountain region feed a mill owned by the world's largest newsprint maker, Abitibi Consolidated Ltd., which sells paper to several U.S. dailies, including The Bee.
From its mill in MacKenzie, British Columbia, Abitibi harvests pine, spruce and balsam across a vast wilderness that not only is home to some of the continent's most impressive species of wildlife, including grizzly bears, but also is inhabited by the indigenous Kaska Dena people, many of whom still survive by hunting wild game.
Although conflicts between indigenous people and timber and paper companies are common in Canada, Abitibi and the Kaska Dena are working together to develop environmentally sensitive kinds of logging. Abitibi has even helped the Kaska Dena form their own logging com- pany.
Asked why, Abitibi forester Wayne Lewis said: "They live here. We respect that. They should be a part of the process."
Dave Porter, chairman of the Kaska Dena council, praised the company's efforts, but added, "There is still a long way to go."
Fifteen hundred miles east, Steve Fobister -- a former grand chief of the Ojibwa nation -- kicks the dust in a gaping clearcut in Ontario.
Staring at a moonscape of stumps and bare ground stretching for more than 10 square miles, Fobister said: "This is selfish. This is devastation."
Nearby, someone has spray-painted "PROPAGANDA" across a timber company sign about reforestation.
That someone, Fobister said, is him.
"You can't even hear a bird in a clearcut. You can't even find an insect. Everything is dead."
In Montreal, Abitibi spokesman Marc Osborne defended the company's logging. "We adhere to sustainability," he said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rich in forest resources, Can-ada has been cutting trees for years. But as demand for wood has jumped worldwide, the nation has stepped up its level of cutting: from 1.6 million acres in 1970 to 2.5 million acres in 2001.
In recent years, that increase has ignited a trade dispute with the United States, which now assesses a stiff 27 percent duty on Canadian lumber imports.
The environmental side of Canadian logging, which is largely overseen by its provinces, has drawn less attention.
A spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, which leases provincial land
to timber companies, said
Canadian-style logging is healthy because it mimics the natural rejuvenating force of forest fires.
"A clearcut is not the end of the forest," said Joe Churcher, ministry forest policy officer. "It's the beginning."
And many in the industry said concerns about cutting are overblown.
"We're certainly not running out of trees," said Ed Greenberg, spokesman for the Alberta Forest Products Association, a trade group. "We're as concerned about the environment as anybody."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To environmentalists in the United States, the spotted owl in the 1990s became a symbol of the vanishing of old-growth forests and -- through the U.S. Endangered Species Act -- a legal tool to halt and slow timber cutting. To many Canadians, it was a business opportunity.
As the harvest of wood from federal forests in California, Oregon and Washington plunged by 4.8 billion board feet during the 1990s, Canadian imports to the United States shot up 6.2 billion board feet.
At the same time, wood consumption in the United States catapulted to a record: 68.3 billion board feet in 1999. Per
capita wood consumption in the United States is 2.5 times higher than in other developed nations -- and 3.4 times the world average. Americans also use more paper than anyone else in the world, about 718 pounds per person per year.
Wood consumption figures for states aren't available, but experts said California, partly because of its size and growth, devours the biggest share of lumber -- an estimated 10 billion board feet a year. That is nearly 15 percent of the national total, the equivalent of 70 two-by-fours for every person in the state. About 20 percent comes from Canada, up from 6 percent in the 1980s.
The numbers make some Canadians uneasy. "If we brought everybody in the world up to California's standard of living, we would need four or five Earths," said Thomas, the Alberta environmental consultant.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Controversy is no stranger to Canada's forests. Until recently, however, outcry has focused on the rich rain forests of British Columbia, the nation's largest timber producer.
As more of those coastal forests are set aside for conservation, the battleground is moving inland, to the boreal forest.
The first thing you notice about the boreal is its size. Thirteen times larger than Cali- fornia, Canada's boreal is
the world's largest contiguous wooded wilderness and part of the planet's largest ecosystem. Yet it is a landscape few know well.
Punished by long, cold winters, Canada's boreal can't compete with the dazzling diversity of species that endear environmentalists to the tropics. Its spindly stands of spruce, pine, larch and aspen are no match for the coastal redwoods that crane necks and inspire awe on the California coast.
Yet the boreal has its own
magic. In the brief, frantic summers, its silvery panorama of lakes, ponds and puddles quivers with 40 percent of North America's nesting waterfowl. Its thick canopy is home to more than 1 billion nesting migratory warblers. Endangered whooping cranes raise their chicks there.
Much of the year, though, the boreal is barren and brooding -- haunted by the howling of wolves and the restless rasping of wind across snow and ice.
Its greatest gift may be climatologic. Like all forests, the boreal helps the planet breathe, filtering out and storing more carbon -- the primary spark for global warming -- than any other forest.
As threats to Canada's boreal grow, its obscurity is lifting. Last June, National Geographic devoted a story to the region. And environmentalists have launched a campaign to scale back logging and set aside large tracts as wilderness, arguing that the health of the planet is at stake.
"If you care about wild forests, if you care about migratory songbirds, waterfowl and combating climate change, then you need to care about Canada's boreal
forest," said Stewart Elgie, executive director of the Canadian Boreal Trust, an Ottawa environmental group.
Canada's timber firms say such concerns are exaggerated and that environmentalists are merely revving up another moneymaking, alarmist campaign.
"You've got to justify your existence somewhere," said Rick Alguire, woodlands manager at Tolko Industries Ltd., which makes siding and sheathing in High Prairie, Alberta. "The bor-eal is the next big target. We are a target. Every mill in Canada is a target."
Target or not, some companies are moving away from large clearcuts to a quiltlike mosaic of smaller cuts that more closely resemble the natural progression of fire.
"Are there impacts? Of course there are. We've never denied that," said Kirk Andries, director of external affairs at Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, or Al-Pac, which harvests trees for pulp -- ground wood fiber -- the primary building block for paper products.
But he said Al-Pac has in- vested in "a staggering amount of science" to make sure those impacts are kept to a minimum and the boreal remains healthy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is one thing environmentalists and loggers agree on: Opening the boreal to logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other activities at the same time is not ideal.
Al-Pac is a good example. Under a long-term "forest management agreement" with Alberta's government, it is entitled to log trees across a nearly 15 million-acre swath of the boreal. Much of that land also is leased to oil and gas companies. One area may hold as much oil -- in deposits called tar or oil sands -- as Saudi Arabia, and is being feverishly tapped.
"I'm comfortable with our own activities," Andries said. "But when you start layering stuff -- energy, agriculture, forestry -- on the landscape, you wonder, 'Gee, maybe this needs a little more thought.'"
There also are concerns about accountability. Across the bor-eal, government environmental monitoring often is limited and sometimes left to industry.
Charles Caccia, who served as environment minister under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s, said the reports cannot be trusted.
"There is no established manner to verify the data," said Caccia, now a member of Parliament. "In the absence of a reliable inventory, we do not know -- and cannot claim -- that we are on a sustainable path."
Starting in 1996, a Canadian Senate subcommittee spent 2 1/2 years examining boreal conflicts. Its report is a stark account of overcutting and mismanagement.
"There is a sense of urgency that, at least in some parts of the boreal forest, time is running out for saving some vital functions, such as wildlife habitat, watershed protection and carbon sinks," the subcommittee reported.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One place the subcommittee stopped was Winnipeg, Mani- toba, not far from a part of the boreal Randall Bird knows well: his "trap line" -- 10 square miles near his native Ojibwa village of Hollow Water.
Bird, now in his 50s, has worked the area since he was a boy -- laying out traps each fall, checking them by snowshoe and snowmobile, sleeping wrapped in fur blankets in remote cabins. Each year, he harvested a pile of pelts -- from beaver to lynx, weasel to wolf -- now worth $10,000 to $15,000 Canadian ($6,500 to $9,750 U.S.).
Then, in the late 1990s, the Pine Falls Paper Co. began clearcutting in the area.
At a recent cut, a few patches of aspen remained, but large stands of black spruce and jack pine, from which newsprint is made, had been leveled. It looked as if a bomb had exploded.
"Everything's gone," Bird said.
Bird inherited the trap line from his father, who inherited it from his father. He had long planned to pass it on to his sons. Now, Bird said, it isn't worth it.
"You won't get anything now. Fishers, martens -- those animals like trees. They have no place to go now because it's all open," he said.
Last summer, Bird joined fellow tribal elders inside a large tepee. They sat in a circle and smoked a sacred pipe as Garry Raven, a traditional healer, prayed for help.
The logging industry "has killed off our rabbits, our porcupine, our otter and lynx," Raven told the Creator. "Most of the forest roads are blocked off. There are big gates on them so you can't get in."
Pine Falls Paper has since been sold to another company, Tembec, which plans more logging on lands where Ojibwa trap and gather herbs. Tembec official Bob Yatkowsky said the cutting can be done without hurting the land and that he is proceeding cautiously.
"You don't want to end up with standoffs and roadblocks," he said.
Others have less patience. Asked about Ojibwa concerns, John Bulmer -- a former Pine Falls mill superintendent -- said: "That's all fine and dandy. But what are we going to live on in the meantime? We can't live on nuts and berries. We can't turn the clock back."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tembec's newsprint is not made from just trees. A lot of recycled newspaper is mixed in, too. Over the years, the amount of newspaper born again as newsprint has grown dramatically.
But newspaper companies generally prefer to publish on newsprint with some virgin wood fiber because the paper is whiter and photographs reproduce better.
Environmentalists say that leaves plenty of room for damage. And while most U.S. newspapers, The Bee included, routinely write about forest conservation and editorialize on its behalf, seldom do they examine the environmental price of newsprint.
"The amazing lack of coverage is no coincidence," said Todd Paglia, campaign coordinator at Forest Ethics, a San Francisco environmental group. "When their own bottom line is on the line, newspapers tend to shy away from coverage that would reveal their complicity."
The subject of newsprint was on the mind of U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth in October 2001 when he addressed the Newspaper Association of America, which represents the nation's newspaper publishers.
A transcript of Bosworth's speech contains the following passage:
"Newsprint comes from wood, and wood comes from forests. Just to produce The Washington Post takes the equivalent of three or four square miles of clearcut forest per year. Multiply that by all the newspapers and magazines in the nation and you get some idea of the demands on our natural resources."
Tom Croteau, a senior vice president for the association, said Bosworth's statement was misleading.
"It suggests that all newspapers and magazines are printed on paper that has been manufactured from forests that were clearcut," Croteau said. "And that's not true."
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A March 1998 report by Alberta's provincial government found a landscape shredded by logging, and crisscrossed by 45,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines and 88,000 miles of access roads.
Alberta's boreal is experiencing "a massive increase in industrial activity -- timber, hydrocarbon and mineral extraction -- unprecedented in scale," it says.
Consultant Thomas, who wrote the report, said such fragmentation is happening across Canada and beyond.
"These problems are international in scope," he said. "The boreal is much more important to the global community left standing than exploited, simply because of its carbon storage.
"Messing around with the bor-eal the way we are, it's eventually going to affect everybody on the planet."
