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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Taking the Axe to Alberta, Canada's Forests

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

6/23/98

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE

The following fascinating article illustrates the extent to which

Alberta, Canada's boreal forests are being diminished. Only 9%

qualifies as wilderness, logging increased 125% from 1975 to 1993, and

72% of the forest is leased for resource development. The article

states "the Canadian press carries all this crap on the tropical rain

forest while we have ignored the destruction of the boreal ecosystem

taking place under our very noses." The hypocrisy of developed

nations rapidly razing their forests as they condemn truly needy

nations trying to benefit from their resources can not go

unchallenged. All nations need a New Forest stewardship paradigm.

g.b.

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Title: Taking the axe to Alberta's forests

Economic development claims acreage as quickly as

in Amazon rain forest

Source: The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Status: Copyright, contact source for permission to reprint

Date: Monday, June 22, 1998

Byline: By Andrew Nikiforuk

CALGARY -- Alberta's vast boreal forest, which once rolled on forever,

is disappearing as fast as the Amazon rain forest.

Because of the province's economic boom, less than 9 per cent of

Alberta's 346,964 square kilometres of woodlands can be called

wilderness any more.

These and other startling findings are in a new report for the Alberta

government that ends with a blunt conclusion: "By global standards,"

the rates of environmental modification in the boreal "almost match

and exceed those reported for Amazonia from 1975 to 1988."

Based entirely on government data and aerial surveys, the report

confirms what scientists have been long warning: that "our descendants

will know a much different boreal landscape than we have today."

Ecologist Richard Thomas, who compiled the report for Alberta's

Environmental Protection Branch to identify what was actually left to

protect, said he was surprised by industry's claim on the forest.

"I expected 20 per cent of the boreal to be more or less a wilderness,

not less than 9 per cent," Mr. Thomas said.

"That really shocked me, because the future of the forest will be our

future as a people."

Alberta's northern forest (half the province) accounts for nearly one-

10th of Canada's great northern taiga -- a fabled region that provides

nearly $70-billion worth of free ecological services every year.

These natural economies include oxygen-making, carbon-holding, fish-

rearing, moose-making and water-cleaning as well as most of the

world's fibre-growing. In fact, the boreal forest is second in size

only to the moist tropical forest. It contains the world's largest

expanse of wetlands, and plays a major role in the world's carbon

cycle. If the Amazon is one of the world's lungs, the boreal forest is

its partner.

Now, human economy is changing all that. More than 75 per cent of

Alberta's 4,005 boreal townships sport oil wells, while more than 71

per cent have been fragmented by roads -- the bane of all large

roaming wild mammals including the forest's disappearing woodland

caribou and grizzlies.

Government data also show that at least 72 per cent of the forest has

been leased for drilling, logging, mining and sometimes all three at

once.

Industry's invasion of the boreal hasn't excluded protected lands

either.

Most of the region's 33 parks contain at least one industrial souvenir

(logging or drilling) while Lesser Slave Lake Provincial Park harbours

100 active and inactive well sites in a space half the size of

Edmonton.

In Peace River, Canada's most northerly agriculture frontier, the

boreal has surrendered almost half its aspen and spruce to the plow in

the past 40 years, a rate of deforestation the report calls

"comparable with that of Amazonia."

Since 1940 nearly 40 per cent of the forest area around Athabasca-Lac

La Biche has also been lost. "It's Alberta's fragmentation frontier

and looks like Belize," Mr. Thomas said. "All you see is clearance for

pasture."

In addition, the annual area of logged boreal forest increased by 125

per cent from 1975 to 1993.

"We have a static land base, yet we have an exponential rising rate of

cutting with no sign of levelling off," sai Kevin Timoney, a forest

ecologist based in Edmonton. "Unfortunately, most people know more

about what's happening in the Amazon than in Alberta."

Although government officials quickly emphasize that the report does

"not reflect government policy or thinking," Environment Minister Ty

Lund concedes that the wilderness is nearly gone.

"In fact, I'm surprised there would be that much wilderness left

without a seismic line," Mr. Lund said. "You couldn't walk 10 miles in

a straight line in any direction in the forest without coming upon a

disturbance, in my view. It would be unfair to call it a wilderness

any more. That's true."

From a plane, these straight-cut seismic lines -- the width of a

bulldozer's blade, cut to allow geological measuring -- look like the

web of a crazed spider. Seismic lines criss-cross nearly 500,000

kilometres of forest and if stretched out would go around the world

several times.

"The land is being transformed at a startling rate and basically for

things humans want -- jobs, homes and a standard of living," said Brad

Stelfox, one of North America's leading forest ecologists and a

consultant to the forestry giant Daishowa-Marubeni.

He said that most of the seismic lines are not regenerating, owing to

steady traffic of all-terrain vehicles.

"Albertans are going to get an earful of this kind of news and had

better understand that their enviable lifestyle has a cost to it," he

said.

But industry's mighty footprint in the boreal extends well beyond

seismic lines. Pipelines now slice across 73,102 kilometres of forest

to serve 88,566 well sites, 160 gas-processing plants and 26 oil and

gas waste-treatment plants.

Access roads alone have eaten up a patch of wilderness twice the size

of Lesser Slave Lake while the mining area for the oil sands, the

world's greatest energy reserve, covers a land mass as big as 37

townships.

To clear one mine site requires the removal of 200,000 trees.

The Environment Minister does not care for Brazilian comparisons: "I'm

very disturbed that anyone in the government of Alberta would use

Brazil as an example," Mr. Lund said. "The average Albertan doesn't

know what the rate of deforestation in Brazil is."

Bob Demulder, the forestry director of the Alberta Forest Products

Association, added: "I can't get excited about the 9 per cent. It's a

personal value. . . . The document hasn't been peer-reviewed. It's

just a point for discussion."

But in a recent peer-reviewed article for Bioscience, University of

Alberta ecologist David Schindler concluded that human activity,

warmer weather, acid rain and increased ultraviolet radiation have

already changed the boreal to such a degree that future generations

"will not see a natural boreal assemblage of plants, animals and

landscapes."

Mr. Schindler, who has studied boreal ecosystems for more than 30

years, argues that the Alberta study accurately reflects "the dim

future" facing the boreal forest.

"The Canadian press carries all this crap on the tropical rain forest

while we have ignored the destruction of the boreal ecosystem taking

place under our very noses," he said.

The most pressing problem facing Alberta's forest is overallocation of

the resource to competing industries. This in turn has severely

limited opportunities for protecting wilderness, most of which is now

located along the southern borders of Wood Buffalo National Park, the

report says.

According to Mr. Stelfox, when the province allotted its timber in the

1990s to companies such as Daishowa, it did so with "optimistic and

simplistic math" that didn't take into consideration the natural

impact of fires, the public's desire to protect old-growth forests, or

how much forest oil-patch activity would eat up in well sites and

seismic lines -- between 15 and 20 per cent of loggable timber.

"We have foreclosed on some future security for Albertans," he

lamented. "And that's really sad."

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