(no subject)
We think that Canada is a modern, industrialized nation, yet in terms of the way we deal with our forests we behave like a developing country. For example, durning the 1990s, the Government of Alberta's premier, Donald Getty, sought to diversify the province's economy. The government saw the province's boreal forest as an under-utilized resource and invited major transnational logging companies to exploit it. Like a typical developing country, Alberta offered massive financial incentive to foreign companies. The Getty government underwrote the cost of immense pulp mills, gauranteed access to vast tracts of land for next to no stumpage costs, failed to respond satisfactorily to the land claims of the First Nations of the territory and seemed to pay no attention to the ecological consequences of the massive clearcuts that would occur.
Most Canadians are surprised to find that their country is the target of this Third World type of resource exploitation. They shouldn't be. Canada is one of the few countries in the world with much of its original forest cover left. The boreal forest lies just south of the Arctic tundra. It's not as lush or diverse as a tropical rainforest, but it's a vast system that is just as important for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumping out oxygen. Sizer says the Canadian Government and its bureaucracy are no different from those he encountered in Brazil or Africa. "We see a very tight connection between the political system, politicians, and [thier] campaign financing, and the operations interests of the large pulp-and-paper and timber companies in [Canada]. We see very limited public access to objective information about the state of Canada's forests.'
Furthermore, Sizer says. "Canada is one of the countries with the poorest national statistics on the state of [its] forests, which is very striking when you consider that the forest industry is one of the largest industries in Canada, and that thia is a country with the expertise, the ability and the resources to collect better statistics than just about anywhere else. This is a striking situation, and I don't think it's a coincidence. In our work mapping out global forest conditions, the country where we received the most conflicting, and the most concerted pressure to ensure that we reflected this or that point of view, was Canada - more than Brazil, more than Indonesia, more than Russia. I think that says a lot.'
Of course, it's not just Canadians who have to worry about how we treat our forests. One of the special charecteristics of the boreal forest that you find in Canada and Russia is that they store vast amounts of carbon in the soil below the surface of the ground. And with forest clearance, that carbon is released into the atmopshere, adding to the gases causeing global warming. With more warming, the northern forests will degenerate simply because of rising tempuratures. This could begin what's called a positive feedback loop: forests cut or dying will release more carbon from thier soils; more warming will cause still more carbon emissions; and the situation could spiral out of control.
Can anything be done to protect the remaining forests? Despite the lure of billions of dollars and the unprotected status of most of the remaining forests in the world, there is some hope for protection and even reconstruction. Sixer has some hopeful stories even from a poor country like Surinam. After the WRI released a report about rapacious Asain loggers who were about to move into that country, the people of Surinam objected to selling off their forests, and the international community offered assistance to Surinamese citizens' groups. And, says Sizer, "The government of Surinam did not sign the massive and highly lucrative contracts that the Asians were offering. In fact, the previous government lost the elections partly because they were proposing to sign those contracts. The people of Surinam objected strongly, especially the indigenous people in the hinterland, who do have a vote in that country."
We could take a lesson from the Surinamese. For large multinational corporations, the ultimate goal is to maximize profit in the shortest possible time and give investors the highest possible return on investment. These companies do not - indeed their shareholders will not allow them to - consider the well-being of local ecosystems or communities. To gain access to forests, companies will do whatever they can, and are not above briberym deceit, or threats. In an industrialized area like British Columbia, companies routinely threaten to move their plants, lay off employees or pull out of the province in order to win concessions Through 1970s and 1980s, as the vloume of wood being cut climbed steadily, the number of jobs in the forest industry dropped steeply. The reason, of course, was greater mechanization and automation that replaced employees, yet the industry and many workers blamed environmentalists. In a recent book, the forest expert Patricia Marchak has indicated that the province's system of stewardship over the forests must undergo a radical shift away from large companies and towards local community-controlled forests. The annual volume of wood being cut in British Columbia's forests far exceeds by a large margin the amount that can be removed sustainably while still protecting diverse values of the forest.
In seventeenth-century Europe, trees were considered unsightly, gloomy weeds, obstructions to healthful freah air, agriculture, and human activites. Trees weren't allowed in gardens or cities. But, at that time there were still enormous, untouched forests spreading out over the rest of the planet. Today we know how vital trees are and how badly we need them, yet we still treat them as if they're obstructions to human progress or, at best, a source of fuel or cash. Today our ecological footprint hovers over every tree on Earth. Without making major changes in the way we live, we'll all come crashing down together.
Alan Durning, author of How Much Is Enough?, has devised a visual image to help illustrate both the speed and severity of human pressures on Earth, as well as their astonishing escalation in the last few decades. He asks us to imagine a time-lapse film of Earth taken from space. "Play back the last 10,000 years sped up, so that a millennium passes by every minute. For more than seven minutes, the screen displays what looks like a still photograph - the blus planet Earth, its lands swathed in a mantle of trees. After seven and a half minutes, there's a tiny clearing around Athens. This is the flowering of classical Greece. Little else changes. At nine minutes - one thousand years ago - the forest gets thinner in parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. Twelve seconds from the end, two centuries ago, the thinning spreads a little farther in Europe and China. Six seconds from the end, eastern North America is deforested. This is the industrial revolution. Little else has changed.
"In the final three seconds, after 1950, the change acclerates expolosively. Vast tracts of forest vanish from Japan, the Philippines, the mainland of Southeast Asia, most of Central America, the Horn of Africa, western North America and eastern South America, the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. Fires rage in the Amazon basin, wjere they never have before. Central Europe's forests die, poisoned by the air and the rain. Southeast Asis looks like a dog with Mange. Malaysian Borneo is shaved. In the final fractions of a second, the clearings spread to Siberia and the Canadian North. Forest disappears so quickly from so many places that it looks like a plague of locusts has landed on the Earth."
One last little note..... Sizer and his team estimate that four-fifths of our great natural forests are gone. And the 20 percent that is left is concentrated in three countries: Brazil, Canada and Russia.
From Naked Ape To Superspecies - Dr. David Suzuki, Holly Dressel
Most Canadians are surprised to find that their country is the target of this Third World type of resource exploitation. They shouldn't be. Canada is one of the few countries in the world with much of its original forest cover left. The boreal forest lies just south of the Arctic tundra. It's not as lush or diverse as a tropical rainforest, but it's a vast system that is just as important for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumping out oxygen. Sizer says the Canadian Government and its bureaucracy are no different from those he encountered in Brazil or Africa. "We see a very tight connection between the political system, politicians, and [thier] campaign financing, and the operations interests of the large pulp-and-paper and timber companies in [Canada]. We see very limited public access to objective information about the state of Canada's forests.'
Furthermore, Sizer says. "Canada is one of the countries with the poorest national statistics on the state of [its] forests, which is very striking when you consider that the forest industry is one of the largest industries in Canada, and that thia is a country with the expertise, the ability and the resources to collect better statistics than just about anywhere else. This is a striking situation, and I don't think it's a coincidence. In our work mapping out global forest conditions, the country where we received the most conflicting, and the most concerted pressure to ensure that we reflected this or that point of view, was Canada - more than Brazil, more than Indonesia, more than Russia. I think that says a lot.'
Of course, it's not just Canadians who have to worry about how we treat our forests. One of the special charecteristics of the boreal forest that you find in Canada and Russia is that they store vast amounts of carbon in the soil below the surface of the ground. And with forest clearance, that carbon is released into the atmopshere, adding to the gases causeing global warming. With more warming, the northern forests will degenerate simply because of rising tempuratures. This could begin what's called a positive feedback loop: forests cut or dying will release more carbon from thier soils; more warming will cause still more carbon emissions; and the situation could spiral out of control.
Can anything be done to protect the remaining forests? Despite the lure of billions of dollars and the unprotected status of most of the remaining forests in the world, there is some hope for protection and even reconstruction. Sixer has some hopeful stories even from a poor country like Surinam. After the WRI released a report about rapacious Asain loggers who were about to move into that country, the people of Surinam objected to selling off their forests, and the international community offered assistance to Surinamese citizens' groups. And, says Sizer, "The government of Surinam did not sign the massive and highly lucrative contracts that the Asians were offering. In fact, the previous government lost the elections partly because they were proposing to sign those contracts. The people of Surinam objected strongly, especially the indigenous people in the hinterland, who do have a vote in that country."
We could take a lesson from the Surinamese. For large multinational corporations, the ultimate goal is to maximize profit in the shortest possible time and give investors the highest possible return on investment. These companies do not - indeed their shareholders will not allow them to - consider the well-being of local ecosystems or communities. To gain access to forests, companies will do whatever they can, and are not above briberym deceit, or threats. In an industrialized area like British Columbia, companies routinely threaten to move their plants, lay off employees or pull out of the province in order to win concessions Through 1970s and 1980s, as the vloume of wood being cut climbed steadily, the number of jobs in the forest industry dropped steeply. The reason, of course, was greater mechanization and automation that replaced employees, yet the industry and many workers blamed environmentalists. In a recent book, the forest expert Patricia Marchak has indicated that the province's system of stewardship over the forests must undergo a radical shift away from large companies and towards local community-controlled forests. The annual volume of wood being cut in British Columbia's forests far exceeds by a large margin the amount that can be removed sustainably while still protecting diverse values of the forest.
In seventeenth-century Europe, trees were considered unsightly, gloomy weeds, obstructions to healthful freah air, agriculture, and human activites. Trees weren't allowed in gardens or cities. But, at that time there were still enormous, untouched forests spreading out over the rest of the planet. Today we know how vital trees are and how badly we need them, yet we still treat them as if they're obstructions to human progress or, at best, a source of fuel or cash. Today our ecological footprint hovers over every tree on Earth. Without making major changes in the way we live, we'll all come crashing down together.
Alan Durning, author of How Much Is Enough?, has devised a visual image to help illustrate both the speed and severity of human pressures on Earth, as well as their astonishing escalation in the last few decades. He asks us to imagine a time-lapse film of Earth taken from space. "Play back the last 10,000 years sped up, so that a millennium passes by every minute. For more than seven minutes, the screen displays what looks like a still photograph - the blus planet Earth, its lands swathed in a mantle of trees. After seven and a half minutes, there's a tiny clearing around Athens. This is the flowering of classical Greece. Little else changes. At nine minutes - one thousand years ago - the forest gets thinner in parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. Twelve seconds from the end, two centuries ago, the thinning spreads a little farther in Europe and China. Six seconds from the end, eastern North America is deforested. This is the industrial revolution. Little else has changed.
"In the final three seconds, after 1950, the change acclerates expolosively. Vast tracts of forest vanish from Japan, the Philippines, the mainland of Southeast Asia, most of Central America, the Horn of Africa, western North America and eastern South America, the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. Fires rage in the Amazon basin, wjere they never have before. Central Europe's forests die, poisoned by the air and the rain. Southeast Asis looks like a dog with Mange. Malaysian Borneo is shaved. In the final fractions of a second, the clearings spread to Siberia and the Canadian North. Forest disappears so quickly from so many places that it looks like a plague of locusts has landed on the Earth."
One last little note..... Sizer and his team estimate that four-fifths of our great natural forests are gone. And the 20 percent that is left is concentrated in three countries: Brazil, Canada and Russia.
From Naked Ape To Superspecies - Dr. David Suzuki, Holly Dressel