Seeing both the forest and the trees

 

I have been meaning to compare and contrast these two books for awhile now. It is interesting how two authors with impeccable credentials and love for the Boreal Forest can see it from completely different points of view.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger looks at it from the bio-chemical level and Malcolm Squires from the macro-economic. She is an academic and he is an industry forester. There is no right or wrong here, in my opinion. They are both right. 

Arboretum goes into fascinating detail how each species of tree and shrub in the Boreal provides a life-sustaining function to the entire planet. This is the largest forest ecosystem in the world. It goes completely around the globe at the northern latitudes. 

Few of us realize how trees filter the atmosphere, removing toxins and particulates. They do the same with water. If there is one thing most of know about plant medicine it is that willow bark contains salicylic acid which is a pain reliever. Think acetasalicylic acid -- ASA -- Aspirin. Well, other trees, such as alders, have this too. They all grow along creeks and marshes. As streams flow around these tree roots this chemical is released into the water and helps purify it. 

Trees such as pines and firs release aerosols into the air. That is how we can smell them, of course. Did you also know that these aerosols have healthy effects on us? Just by breathing in cedar and fir scents we help prevent diseases such as cancers. It makes me feel good knowing I have 65 acres of cedars and firs wrapped around our house here in Nolalu.

Needless to say, Beresford-Kroeger doesn't want to see the Boreal Forest cut down. She starts her book by telling how she was at a forestry conference in Northern Ontario where to her horror it was being discussed how to log off half the Boreal Forest! She might be a fine scientist but she is a poor journalist since she doesn't say where or when this conference was held. Well, there is only one forestry school in Ontario and that is Lakehead University right here in Thunder Bay so that must be where she was. It took some digging but I finally found on the Internet that the conference was in 2003. 

This explains why I don't remember this event. I was the environmental reporter for the daily newspaper here and also worked awhile in the forest industry from 1979 to 1992. But by 2003 I was back in the tourism business at Bow Narrows Camp in Red Lake. If this had occurred while I was here I would have been all over it. I live and breathe this stuff.

I'm sure Dynamic Forest author Malcolm Squires was at this same function. He was a senior forester for Abitibi-Price which had several pulp and paper mills in Thunder Bay and others elsewhere in Northern Ontario.

Knowing what I do about the forest industry I would guess that 50 per cent of the Boreal Forest in Ontario had already been logged by 2003. Did Beresford-Krueger misunderstand that they were talking about logging the remaining half? I don't know but this is where Squires book comes in although it is unrelated to the conference.

Squires spent his life cutting and regenerating the Boreal Forest. The title of his book Dynamic Forest is a clue to his perspective. The Boreal Forest changes if you cut it. It also changes if you don't cut it. It is continually changing. How can that be?

To understand the Boreal Forest you must first know that tree species are soil-specific. Guys like Squires can look at high-resolution aerial photographs and know what the soil is just from the species of trees growing there. Where is the best place to build a road? Right where there is a continuous stretch of jackpine. This will be a sand esker, a ridge of sand and gravel created when a glacier paused in its retreat at the end of the last ice age. Jackpine have taproots and therefore can go deep-diving in the sand for water. A good example of a road built along an esker is Hwy. 105 -- the Red Lake Road -- from Perrault Falls north to Red Lake.

A mature jackpine forest is just beautiful for camping. The trees are spaced probably 20 feet apart. About the only ground vegetation is blueberries. The trees are probably 80 to 120 years old. It is picture postcard perfect. But these well-drained soils also dry-out the quickest.  One lightning bolt and the whole place can burn down. This happens all the time. Eventually the fire goes out, of course. The forest is still standing there, now just blackened posts. The jackpine cones will have opened with the heat and now sprinkle seeds all around. The forest is renewed but for decades to come it will be impassable to humans as the burned trees fall to the ground. The blueberries love the extra sunlight and black bears love the extra blueberries. Woodpeckers, especially the black-backed woodpecker, appreciate the standing dead trees and their insects. The mature forest would have been great for woodland caribou since the trees would have been draped with lichens, their favourite food. After the fire there is nothing for them. Moose will increase a bit with the brushy vegetation that will temporarily increase with the extra sunlight but jackpine stands are poor moose spots. They want hardwoods.

So, speaking of hardwoods, let's look at areas with clay soils. The predominate tree species there will be quaking aspen, paper birch, white spruce and balsam fir. These areas don't get as dry as sand eskers  but eventually they burn up too. When that happens, the entire place comes back as quaking aspen. That is because the aspen send up hundreds of shoots from their roots. They are the fastest-growing trees in the Boreal. In the first year after a fire these saplings might be 10 feet tall. They shade out the birches and spruce although a few of those species will break through the canopy eventually. The fire will have wiped out balsam fir, temporarily, but this shade-tolerant tree will start spreading in from the edges of the burn or from unburned spots. If the area goes more than 100 years without burning, the aspen will have fallen over from old age and the balsams will predominate. Anyway, you can see how the Boreal Forest is anything but static. 

Logging imitates fire disturbance, to some extent. It doesn't recycle the nutrients, true, but it takes so long between harvests -- 60 to 80 years -- that it might take many centuries to see a depletion in soil fertility, if it happens at all.

Something that people like Beresford-Kroeger don't take into account is that unlike the destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest, no one here is converting the Boreal Forest into farmland. It is immediately regenerated back into more forest. In Ontario, for the past 40 years, forest companies and the Ontario Government have created agreements where the amount of cutting that can take place must match the amount of growth from regeneration. And they also try to take other user groups into account when doing their cutting. These can be First Nations, trappers, the tourist industry, regular hunters and fishermen, etc. It isn't perfect but for the most part it works pretty well.

The hardest places to regenerate are swampy areas and those with thin soils. The swamps contain the most-valuable species -- black spruce -- whose pulp is prized for its long fibers. This makes paper exceptionally strong. These trees can be more than 200 years old but might only be eight inches in diameter. How do you plant a tree in a swamp? It might have taken nature hundreds of years of blanketing the whole place with spruce seeds just to find the right spot for one to grow. You might think leaving seed trees would be the answer but these typically just blow over. I've been out of the business for a long time so maybe someone has come up with an answer by now.

When you drive through the bush of Northern Ontario it is easy to believe that it always has looked the same. The reality is it has done nothing but change. Lots of what you are seeing is second-growth after logging. It has all burned hundreds of times.

It does perform myriads of life-giving functions, just as Beresford-Kroeger explains. One of the biggest right now is extracting carbon out of the atmosphere and producing oxygen but there is much more as well. She is absolutely correct that the Boreal Forest is vital to the planet.