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.
The plight of the tropical forests may be more familiar, but the American public has a much more direct stake in how the forests of the north are managed. The United States consumes 80 percent of Canada's forest products, including pulp, paper, particleboard, and lumber. The boreal zone provides much of the wood, the vast majority of it harvested by clear-cutting, in which loggers mow down every tree in the parcel of forest they're harvesting. U.S. consumers also suck up 60 percent of the oil and gas extracted from northern forests.
Bird-watchers and hunters owe a different debt to the boreal forest. Almost one third of all land birds in the United States and Canada--more than 3 billion birds--head to the region each summer to nest and fledge their young, according to the Boreal Songbird Initiative, a conservation organization. The woods teem with vireos, chickadees, sparrows, shrikes, and flycatchers, drawn by the profusion of insects and the expanses of unbroken forest. Millions of ducks and geese also see this chilly, watery landscape as a little piece of nesting heaven. In fact, 40 percent of North American water birds nest in the boreal forest.
But as the pace of logging and oil and gas drilling has accelerated in some regions, bird populations have declined. In Alberta, only 10 percent of the forest exists in untouched tracts larger than a few square miles, down from about 95 percent in 1960. The rest is shot through with pipelines, roads, and narrow, logged corridors cut by oil and gas companies for seismic testing. Over the past decade, bird populations in many parts of the province have plummeted by 20 to 50 percent, researchers at the University of Alberta say, and habitat fragmentation is probably the major cause.
Going to the mat. The boreal forest's greatest gift, however, may be climatic. When plants photosynthesize, they take in carbon dioxide, the same gas implicated in global warming, and release oxygen. Some of the carbon is sequestered in their limbs, leaves, and roots. Typically, lush landscapes hold the most carbon. But surprisingly, the spare woodland of the far north stores more carbon than any other land ecosystem, and not just because the forests still cover a lot of territory. The secret is the soil, which is made up of a mineral layer, covered by a blanket of partially decomposed plant matter, and topped by masses of living moss and lichen. In northern forests this carbon-rich, layered mat can get several feet thick because cold, wet conditions hamper the growth of microbes that would break down the plant matter. The mat locks up far more carbon than the scrubby trees--up to 90 percent of the forest's total, says University of Maryland fire ecologist Eric Kasischke.
What's the harm, then, in logging, which at first glance would seem to liberate only a fraction of the carbon? Scientists are concerned because after an area is cut and shade-giving trees removed, the ground typically warms up. Warmer conditions foster microbial activity, which could release a flood of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Just how much is not yet known, although studies of fires in boreal forests suggest it could be substantial. A hot forest fire burns soils right down to the mineral layer, also unleashing stored carbon. Kasischke estimates that during an average fire season in North America, the amount of greenhouse gases that the blazes release from the forest is about one third as much as the world's entire fleet of cars and trucks spews out during that same time. Widespread logging is a real concern, says Marcy Litvak, a plant ecologist at the University of Texas, because "we're disturbing a system without fully understanding what the consequences will be."
Environmentalists aren't alone in wanting an agreement. Canada's boreal coalition, called the Boreal Leadership Council, has gotten a lot of feelers from forest-product companies, says Wilkinson, a member of the council. Bill Hunter, president and chief operating officer of Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, a pulp producer, says one reason he joined the council was to forestall the kinds of protests that snarled logging in the old-growth coastal forests of British Columbia. Confrontations are bad for business even if logging in an area isn't permanently shut down, he says. Kodak, for instance, is one of Al-Pac's larger customers, says Hunter, and "they have to know they can count on us for a long-term, sustainable supply."
Increasingly, forest-product companies also want to be viewed as green suppliers when activist environmental groups pressure big retail stores to change their purchasing policies. A little over a year ago, for instance, superstore Staples agreed to stop purchasing paper that originated in endangered forests and to increase the fraction of recycled paper in its products to 30 percent. Activists had picketed Staples stores, heckled executives at shareholder meetings, and issued critical reports and press releases in a campaign led by ForestEthics and the Dogwood Alliance. By contrast, Canadian mining and oil and gas companies, which have drawn fewer boycotts, have expressed less interest in the forest-protection scheme, Wilkinson says.
Some environmentalists have charged that the framework doesn't go far enough to protect forests and is dangerously vague in places. The crucial term "protected area," for instance, seems to mean different things to different people. Al-Pac's Hunter embraces the idea of "floating preservation," whereby companies could borrow land from the parks for mining or logging if they substituted land of equal ecological value. Wilkinson, by contrast, maintains that protected areas should be kept pristine for all time. And battles are sure to erupt over how to exploit the remaining forest "sustainably."
Closing the deal. The council has also come under attack for not inviting government to the table as it fashioned a deal affecting Canada's vast public lands. Critics point out that the boreal region covers half the country and that most of it is publicly owned, mainly by the provincial governments.
But some provincial governments have a pretty poor track record of safeguarding their forests, says Monte Hummel, president of World Wildlife Fund-Canada and a veteran of decades of timber wars. And one lesson of past battles is that conservation deals often come together more quickly in the early stages when environmental groups negotiate directly with industry. "Things are changing; get used to it," Hummel says.
One of the next big challenges is bringing the Canadian government aboard. Without it, "this thing will go nowhere," Hummel says. But some timber companies are already re-examining their logging practices, looking for ways to speed forest recovery and minimize long-lasting impacts. The rescue plan for Canada's great northern forest will take at least a decade to firm up, says Hunter, "but it's a wonderful model," not just for Canada but for forests worldwide.
Great Green North
A belt of trees and bog girdling far northern latitudes, the pristine boreal forest is dwindling as logging and mining encroach.
[map labels]
Arctic Circle
North America
Russia
Intact forest
Fragmented forest
Source: Global Forest Watch; USN&WR
This story appears in the February 9, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.