War for the woods (Page 5 of 5)
Environmentalists on one side, the forestry industry on the other. How did two groups with different aims call a truce and sign the historic Boreal Forest Agreement?
By Rick Boychuk with photography by Tobin Grimshaw
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| Aggressive greening of Canadian forestry resulted in an industry with greenhouse-gas emissions 10 times lower than Kyoto targets. (Photo: Tobin Grimshaw) |
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The changes in the forest industry’s practices were
accompanied by increasing contact between the leading
environmentalists and company executives. Lazar saw the contacts in strategic terms and described the process he
initiated after he was hired by FPAC eight years ago as a step-by-
step effort that began with talks with Ducks Unlimited,
an organization “more prone to cozy up to business.” At each
step, he was looking for “conversations characterized by
honesty and good faith.”
On the environmental side, many were frustrated by the
lack of action on the part of governments to address the
plight of the caribou. So despite the success of campaigns
against the retailers, the signature species featured in many
environmental fundraising mailings was still losing ground.
To Sumner, it was time to move from emotional appeals
to the hard work of applying what science was telling her
about the carbon cycle and caribou-habitat needs. And
Johnson, who had worked with the industry, believed that
to get government to take action, a new and more collaborative
approach was necessary.
“The more noise and tension in a policy-making decision,
the less thoughtful the response,” says Johnson. “This agreement can lower the rhetoric, the positioning, the advertising.”
Both the environmentalists and the forestry officials who
signed on to the Boreal Agreement are careful to point out
that they don’t have the final say about what happens in the
woods. Final authority rests with federal, provincial
and territorial governments, and they have other players to
consult, principally First Nations with claims to many of the
forest tenures that have been allocated to the forest industry.
Still, many environmentalist leaders hope the Boreal
Agreement can serve as a road map for the way forward. And
they have successes they can claim. As Lazar says, 90 percent
of the global forest industry operates with no certification
standards for sustainable practices, “whereas 100 percent of
[FPAC] members” produce forest goods that are certified.
They are doing so in good measure because Canadian
environmentalists made certification an issue.
The Boreal Agreement recognizes the importance
of allowing the industry to grow, to preserve mills and jobs
and to achieve ambitious climate-change targets while enhancing the biological health of Canada’s great boreal
forest. It replaces campaigns with the hard work of face-toface
exchanges. People such as Sumner learn how mills
operate, get to know the communities dependent on them
and understand how forest-management plans are developed,
and forestry officials such as Thorne learn the physics of the
carbon cycle. And if that doesn’t seem like such a radical
change, think of the millions of dollars climate-change
campaigners are still spending on ads that demonize the oil
sands industry and the tens of millions the industry is
pumping into efforts to restore its reputation.
Not so long ago, the forest industry was doing the same
thing, trying to rehabilitate its reputation with billboards, says
Sumner over lunch with Thorne after the helicopter survey.
“That can work for a period, but the best solutions come
out of having conversations. When you’re in a community
and meeting people who may lose their jobs because of the changes you are proposing, it’s hard to maintain your moral
indignation. That’s why the Boreal Agreement is not just
about saving caribou. It’s about people and communities and
a viable forest industry.”
Thorne’s first priority is to maintain and properly manage
an uninterrupted supply of trees for the mill in Cochrane, a
town of 5,500 whose fortunes are closely tied to the health of
the forest industry. But he’s proud of his company’s commit -
ment to sustainable harvesting. For him, the crucial challenge
is not whether the industry is prepared for change but whether
consumers here and abroad are willing to treat sustainably
harvested wood products as they do fair-trade coffee, and open
their wallets to help preserve the health of Canada’s forests
and all the threatened creatures that inhabit it.
Rick Boychuk, former editor of Canadian Geographic, is based
in Ottawa. Photographer Tobin Grimshaw lives in Toronto.
Related content and resources:
Photo Club
Follow author and photographer Bruce Kirkby onto the 550 square kilometres of remote valleys, mountains and lakes that make up the
Darkwoods land purchase.
January/February 2011 issue
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