No clear-cut choice when it comes to forestry.
Teacher speaks out about loss of trees in Cape Breton national park
Large swaths of green. And dotted throughout: patches of beige, which show sections of cut forests.
This is what can be seen in drone images from Sentinel Explorer, which indicate sections of the Cape Breton Highlands that have been impacted by clearcutting.
The sections in question are outside of the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, which is separate from the highlands.
“A particular concern of mine is how clearcutting affects wildlife,” said Adam Malcolm, a high school science teacher who runs the Stop Clearcutting Unama'ki Facebook group.
The federal government defines clearcutting as when all trees in an area are cut, not just selected ones.
WILDLIFE IMPACTED
A concern of Malcolm's is that clearcutting heavily impacts forest creatures that won't leave the canopy out into the open. So wide clear cuts, as seen in the drone images, with no connectivity between different sections of forest, create serious barriers to populations that would naturally have some genetic flow between them.
“If you're isolating groups of species, you're making it more likely that there might be inbreeding, which can weaken genetic health."
Most recently, a proposed clearcut in an area designated as a marten habitat management zone by the Department of Lands and Forestry concerned Cape Breton naturalists.
The American marten is a member of the weasel family, and one of Nova Scotia's rarest animals. They're listed as endangered under the Nova Scotia Endangered Species Act, and in 2005 there were only 50 estimated to be left in the Cape Breton Highlands, though populations have since been reportedly on the rise.
“The government has been derelict in its duty to protect and try to help species recover. What we're doing to our forests is just putting up further barriers to recovery,” said Malcolm.
He said he's not antiforestry but rather anti-clearcutting.
“I think forestry is an industry that can work in the province. It just can't work on the industrial scale that we're trying to force our forests to operate under."
MOOSE ARE LOOSE
There isn't any forestry operations within the boundaries of the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, which can be seen on a map here surrounded by a yellow border line: https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/ns/cbreton/visit.
But one issue within the highlands park is what is known as moose browsing, a phenomenon that has impacted the boreal forest for a number of years. It's caused when an abundance of moose eat young trees, not allowing them to grow.
This leaves large patches of grassland, said Darlene Doucet, a Parks Canada public relations and communications officer assigned to the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The Bring Back the Boreal project, which ended in 2019, was a five-year program that tested different methods of reforestation to restore forest health.
CAPTURE CARBON
Fred Baechler, senior hydrogeologist at EXP and an adjunct professor at Cape Breton University, wonders what the impact might be when all trees are removed from a forested wetland.
“There is one way to reduce CO2 emissions sequestration. And one of the ways you can sequester CO2 is in forests.”
Baechler said “more monitoring and more research” is needed to understand the impacts of clear cutting, especially in forested wetlands.
“To my knowledge the province isn't doing any research on Cape Breton and I don't know what they're doing on the mainland.
“It's nice to say these wetlands are important but if there's no good research going on then how do you effectively manage them?”
Malcolm said there's a number of species that are “on the brink,” and many of them don't exist elsewhere in Canada.
'RIPPLE EFFECTS'
“So what we do here will have ripple effects on what the fate of these species is. And that's not necessarily long-term. That could be medium- or even short-term for some of these species.”
He said that though many Nova Scotians agree with the reality of a worldwide climate crisis, he's concerned they don't connect it to what is happening at home in their own backyards.
“I think there can be, in some cases, a real disconnect between the world out there and the world in our own backyards. I think sometimes we forget that we're [all] in the same world and what we're doing here is also having an impact on the overall state of decline.
He advises Nova Scotians to write letters to their MLA, join anti-clearcutting groups, and find as many ways as possible to organize and speak up.
[Clearcutting] is certainly having negative repercussions for wildlife and forcing species towards the brink of extinction and exacerbating the climate crisis. For myself, as a Nova Scotian, I just find it unacceptable that this is happening.
“I think the larger and more vocal [that] groups become, the more our politicians will be forced to listen.”