Fighting for a forgotten forest
Canada's northern forests are bitterly cold this time of year and mostly quiet, except for the wind whistling through the trees. The billions of songbirds and waterfowl that nest here in the summers, filling the woods with a cacophony of warbles, trills, and honks, disappeared months ago, as have the huge, buzzing swarms of mosquitoes.
But increasingly, new sounds are shattering the primal quiet. From the Mackenzie River valley in the Northwest Territories to Grassy Narrows in Quebec, the woods reverberate with the roar of engines and the whine of circular saws. Loggers up here like winter. Bogs and marshes freeze, so heavy machinery doesn't get mired in mud. Fresh snow smoothes out rutted tracks and roads. Snug inside the heated cab of a tree harvester, a logger can fell as many as 300 trees an hour.
These are the front lines of the latest battle over the planet's imperiled wild forests. While tropical rainforests have captured the world's attention over the past two decades, logging and drilling for oil and gas have accelerated in the boreal region, a vast swath of forest and wetlands girdling the planet through Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia. Its sparse stands of pine, spruce, larch, and aspen begin just below the arctic tundra and stretch south for hundreds of miles until they give way to the grasslands and hardwood forests of the temperate region. But new maps compiled from satellite images by an international organization called Global Forest Watch show that 40 percent of Canada's northern forests have been carved up by logging, mines, oil and gas rigs, roads, and power lines. All but one seventh of Russia's European forests have been divided into parcels smaller than 50,000 hectares--roughly 14 miles on a side--the minimum size needed to preserve a fully intact ecosystem.
These developments threaten the caribou, lynx, wolves, bears, birds, moose, and martens that dwell in the forest. The encroachments may even jeopardize Earth's climate: A raft of studies show that the boreal region may play a vital role in tempering global warming. So conservationists are rallying, using tactics honed in past timber wars, including staging protests and spearheading consumer boycotts against firms that exploit the forests. In December, an unusual coalition of 11 environmental groups, energy and forest-product companies, and "first nations" (the term in Canada for aboriginal peoples) announced that they'd crafted a bold strategy for conserving Canada's forest.
The new plan would protect at least half of the forest in large, interconnected parks while opening up the rest to companies that operate in an environmentally responsible fashion. The plan is controversial and has yet to be endorsed by the federal or provincial governments. Indeed, at this point it's more a statement of first principles than a detailed road map. But its backers hope it will head off confrontations while providing for the livelihoods of the more than 4 million people who live in the boreal forest. "It's like going to the doctor for regular checkups instead of ending up in the emergency ward during a medical crisis," says Cathy Wilkinson, director of the Canadian Boreal Initiative, which pushed for the agreement.
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