Dear Editor,
You’ve heard the saying, “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” When a person’s livelihood depends on felling and shipping forestry products there is often a tendency to overlook the . . .
collateral changes to the ecosystem.
When a forest is clear-cut and replaced by plantation of one species of tree, the result is not a forest, but a crop, based upon a 30-year prediction as to what the market will require. Such predictions are often wildly inaccurate. Take, for instance, the planting of Scotch Pines which took place around the Pontiac in the early 1970s. They have proven to be fairly useless. They don’t grow tall and straight, they are subject to insect and porcupine predation, they are no good for lumber and they won’t burn.
There are many sites where former low-grade farmland was planted with those trees and so removed from agriculture and from diverse forestry as well. I inherited such a property but I was lucky enough to catch the last gasp of the pulp mill in Litchfield and so what I had seen as a nuisance became a short-lived forestry product. We’re not often so lucky and so we get stuck with an area growing trees that have no monetary return, and also don’t contribute to the biodiversity of the area.
A forest is home to many species of trees, shrubs, bushes, as well as animals of all sizes and shapes, from microbes to moose. The interactions of all those plants and animals is incomprehensibly complex and when one component or another is removed, the balance is shifted in ways that may or may not be beneficial in the long run.
When a logger extracts a narrow range of types of trees it shifts the balance of that section of forest. In a diverse forest, replacement seed stock is readily available, Nature will try a bit of this and a bit of that and will soon find a new balance for that forest. But if a forest is replaced by a single-species plantation, it’s like putting all your eggs in one basket, as the saying goes. Betting that the future, at least 30 years away, is going to comprise the same climate and markets is a fool’s bet. This is why it is good business to leave some areas of forest unharvested, those trees are not, as some would say, just standing around waiting to be cut. They’re hard at work, making the ecosystem of the present and future.
Robert Wills
Shawville and Thorne, Que.
