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January/February 2011 issue	Table of Contents Boreal Forest Agreement On the bio-pathway British Columbia Darkwoods Canadian trees, British forests Medicines in the Congo Effects of urban trees The social side of wildfires Bringing back the fish Big trees feed the forest The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations In habitat Book Reviews Mosaic ----------------------------------------------- Past issues

Huddled as we are on a band of land abutting our southernmost frontier, most Canadians would have to travel pretty far northward to experience the boreal forest. In fact, a the expanse of the boreal forest and the places where most Canadians live are almost mutually exclusive.

But that certainly doesn’t make the boreal forest irrelevant to our lives. Quite the opposite. Wood and paper products surround us. You’re holding one. With its gross domestic product valued at $20.3 billion, forestry is the third largest natural resources sector in the Canadian economy, after energy and minerals. As for its ecological significance, the boreal forest cranks out oxygen and stores more than 200 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to a quarter-century’s worth of emissions from fossil-fuel combustion.

Boreal Canada is almost six million square kilometres, comprising one-third of one of the world’s largest ecosystems, almost two-thirds of Canada’s total land area and more than three-quarters of our forests and woodlands. Its predominantly coniferous trees blanket vast tracts of biodiverse backcountry punctuated by lakes, rivers and wetlands, from St. John’s to Whitehorse and from Timmins to Inuvik.

For the past two decades, those tracts have been virtual battlefields in a war between environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, ForestEthics and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, and forest-industry giants, such as AbitibiBowater Inc., Kruger Inc. and Weyerhaeuser Company Limited. There were points when the rhetoric and accusations reached ear-piercing levels. But no longer. On May 18, 2010, those players, along with six other environmental groups and 18 other corporate members of the Forest Products Association of Canada, called a truce and signed the benchmark Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. This collaboration, as the agreement states, sets “a globally and nationally significant precedent for boreal forest conservation and forest sector competitiveness.”

Our feature on the Boreal Forest Agreement is the centrepiece of this forest-themed issue, which was inspired by the United Nations’ declaration of 2011 as International Year of Forests. Written by Canadian Geographic’s previous editor-in-chief Rick Boychuk, it explores how the agreement came to be and its implications for the years ahead — for the industry, for environmentalists, for First Nations and other communities and for the ecosystem itself.

Another writer whose work appears in this issue also recently reached unprecedented heights, but not in a chopper. Saskatoon-based journalist Allan Casey, who writes about Canadian tree planters in the United Kingdom, received the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction for his book Lakeland: Journeys into the Soul of Canada (Greystone Books), which looks at the state of 10 increasingly vulnerable Canadian lakes. His Canadian Geographic feature stories about Okanagan Lake (July/Aug 2008) and Lake Winnipeg (Nov/Dec 2006), assigned by Boychuk and supported by an RCGS grant, became chapters in the book. Bravo, Allan!

— Eric Harris

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