Growing our future

SUPPORT LOGGERS, DON'T VANDALIZE THEM. THEY'RE ENVIRONMENTAL HEROES

During this pandemic, more people have self-isolated at their cottages. Parks, conservation areas and Crown forests received record visitors. These people sometimes stumble on loggers, and some don't like what they see.

Logging is ugly work. In short order, forest equipment can enter a woodland and make a mess. Still, we need loggers. The trees they cut become stuff we need: paper, tissue, plywood, two-by-fours and furniture. Plus, forests grow back.

Before Christmas, the Peterborough (Ont.) Examiner published an open letter from a logger. Last spring, he wrote, he had been cutting in the Catchacoma Forest, on Crown land about 200 kilometres northeast of Toronto. He left his equipment parked in a clearing for the summer. Loggers generally work in cold weather. Heavy equipment moves more easily across frozen ground, and winter harvest minimizes gouging and avoids damage to tree trunks, roots, waterways, nests and burrows.

When the logger, Curtis Bain, returned this fall, he found that someone had vandalized his machines. “The tires were flattened, windows smashed,” he wrote. “The doors on the skidder were torn off and thrown, wires were ripped, all my tools were strewn around and thrown into the mud.”

A group of researchers has spoken up over the past year about the need to protect this forest. Peter Quinby, a PhD in forest landscape ecology who founded Ancient Forest Exploration and Research, calls this the largest stand of old-growth eastern hemlock in Canada, and asserts that one tree is 375 years old. The Wilderness Committee, based in Vancouver, pleaded, “Support protection for Catchacoma old-growth forest.”

It is small wonder that many will rush to this forest's defence, based on the description. We live in an era of climate catastrophe; the urge to protect Canada's fragile natural heritage is unassailable. Almost.

There is another side to this story. Products made from wood are vital to our lives. Witness the run on toilet paper when the pandemic began. I sit at a wooden desk to type this. Housing starts, a key economic indicator, depend on lumber. Hydro poles hold up the wires that bring power to our homes.

We blithely eat hamburgers, but we don't want to watch the slaughter of the cow for its meat. In the same way, we find it hard to stomach the whine of a chainsaw that fells a lovely tree — especially if it's within an hour's drive of our house.

The Catchacoma Forest is governed under Ontario's Crown Forest Sustainability

Act, enacted in 1994 under then-New Democratic premier Bob Rae. In this type of forest, loggers cut selected trees, and protect the health of the forest during operations. Even prior to that legislation, it appears the loggers did an OK job of looking after this particular patch of bush; another article in the Peterborough newspaper notes that some of the logging roads through this area are a century old.

Foresters in Ontario, like dentists or engineers, practise under licence from the Ontario Professional Foresters Association. A forester wrote the prescription to harvest the trees selectively. Some call these protections insufficient. Thus the Bancroft Minden Forest Company, a private company with a number of shareholders,

including Bain, sought an additional bona fide: they had the forest management practices approved by the third-party Forest Stewardship Council.

Natalie Heyblom, who recently earned a Master of Forest Conservation degree from the University of Toronto, interned last summer with the Bancroft Minden Forest Company. She researched the Catchacoma Forest, in part using the province's Forest Resource Inventory data, for her thesis. She found that about a third to half of the forest is pure hemlock, and recommended, independently, that the province set aside 19 hectares of hemlock that she says is old-growth, and sustainably harvest the rest.

The forest has been logged several times, most recently

in the 1980. Loggers take older and weaker trees, giving light and space to smaller, healthy trees so they may thrive. Return in 30 years and do it again. The loggers' livelihood depends on the forest growing back. Bain, a father of six who rises at 3 a.m. during the prime winter season, is a third-generation logger.

The success of the post-carbon bioeconomy in Canada depends on a significant increase in our sustainable use of wood products. Researchers in forestry at the U of T and elsewhere are perfecting the use of wood to replace plastic, steel and concrete in car parts, bridges, and office and residential towers. Nano-cellulose has applications in cosmetics and yogurt.

Seen this way, loggers become environmental heroes.

The carbon stored in the trees that they fell will remain sequestered for the life of a floor board or book for decades or centuries. Meanwhile, a new tree reaches skyward — sequestering more carbon.

With everyone home and renovating during the pandemic, there's been a run on lumber — supplies at lumberyards are running low. We need forests — let's celebrate those who cut them. These professionals work within a framework that ensures the forests will grow back.

LOGGING IS UGLY WORK. ... STILL, WE NEED LOGGERS. — PETER KUITENBROUWER

WILDERNESS COMMITTEE A logger examines his equipment at a work site in the Catchacoma Forest, which is governed under Ontario's Crown Forest Sustainability Act. In this type of forest, loggers cut selected trees and protect the health of the forest during operations.