At the frontlines of Canada's forests
MILES ESTEY THE UBYSSEY (UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA)
VANCOUVER (UBYSSEY) —No one can deny that the Canadian North holds a vast expanse of forest. And nothing puts a better perspective on this than tree planting. After five summers of twice-daily helicopter flights across some of the most remote locations of these woods, there’s been no shortage of time for me to contemplate this seemingly infinite wilderness.
Most mornings, I’m in a state of fearful anticipation: here goes, another day of hustling around clearcuts, carrying 50 pound bags full of seedlings, planting them as fast as possible. Looking out the small chopper window, I let my eyes glaze over, and trace the landscape with my eyes. It’s mesmerizing. The pattern of tree stands flow effortlessly into each other, dipping in, out and around the contours of the land. This is the Great Canadian North as we like to imagine it.
But depending on the path of the flight on any given day, this beautiful illusion of pristine forest becomes quickly undermined. In reality, the land is dotted with pockets of destruction.
BEAUTY IS ONLY SKIN-DEEP
Clearcuts are found close to small communities across northern Canada, from Holberg, B.C., all the way out to Ingonish, N. S.— and everywhere in between. Tree harvesting is an industry we Canadians depend on. And while it may be economically necessary, clearcuts not only leave distinctive breaks in the beauty of the northern landscape, but they also create a more notable disruption in the ecology of our environment.
Looking out at the exposed brown earth where a forest once stood, I realize how familiar I am with this sight, but how unfamiliar it must be to most other Canadians. From furniture to houses to the paper this article is printed on, we use paper and wood products with rarely so much as a second thought. Very seldom are Canadians exposed to its ecological costs. As people adopt an increasingly urban lifestyle, a critical disconnect grows between the consumer and the environment—fewer and fewer people have access to or knowledge of the state of the natural world we rely on.
Whether we hear them or not, they’re there: hidden at the end of every logging road, fallen trees abound. Wood deemed economically unfeasible by loggers (in heaps called “slash piles”) lie scattered across the land. The exposed wood no longer retains the earthly browns like that of trees lying on the forest floor, but become a bleached white, not unlike that of driftwood. Along the exposed margins stark tree trunks encircle the desolate wasteland, often giving clearcuts an eerie feel.
This is the byproduct of our demand for wood and an economy that relies on resource extraction. Most agree that Canada has more comprehensive legislation and regulations regarding forest regeneration than any other nation in the world. Nonetheless, many years of working alone in these clearcuts has left me wondering if we’re doing enough to cover our losses. As Canada continues to promote its timber industry, which represents a sizeable portion of our GDP (approximately 3 per cent), logging is certain to be an economic staple for many generations to come.
This, of course, will depend on whether or not our current methods of forest management and regeneration are able to keep up with us. Having had limited interaction with logging companies but numerous years working on their behalf at the frontlines, I have shaky confidence that all is well. And while the implicit assumption across Canada seems to be that tree planting is a good deed, I believe numerous aspects of the industry restrict it from accomplishing its goals for our environment, as well as our society as a whole.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER SEVEN CENTS A TREE
This year, thousands of Canadians, the majority of them in their idealistic twenties, will trek into the Canadian woods—“the bush”—with the job title “tree planter” forever branded to their identities, to help plant the estimated 580 million trees set to go into the ground each year. For those rookies out there who haven’t planted trees before (or made the mistake of getting drunk with a veteran planter and asking them about their job) this is a rough sketch of how it goes:
You wake up at dawn in a tent, a van, or, if you’re lucky, some sketchy motel room. You ache, and are already dreading what’s ahead: the cold, the wet, the heat, the bugs, the chronic injury, the insurmountable land, the 10 hours of “hustle-labour” you have to do to off-set the shitty individual tree price, the nagging crew-boss, the prospect of having to re-plant all your trees, the list goes on. You eat something. You make your lunch. You do whatever you have to in order to get all your equipment ready (which you paid for yourself). Transport to the job site (“the block”) can range from a pick-up truck to a rickety school bus, to a chopper, to your own two feet. Like almost everything in planting, travel is very dependent on geographic, weather and logistical conditions, and you learn quickly to accept the rule that “you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Once you are dropped off, you are given your “piece,” the chunk of land you’re expected to fill with trees over the course of the day or week. The trees are assigned a price, ranging anywhere from seven cents to $1.50 (the price will always depend on land quality). Flat, open land will dictate a low tree price, steep land with thick layers of slash and debris on it will be the mid-range, and unusual circumstances, like having to build barriers around your trees and fertilize them, will yield your upper-end price. Prices are generally geared so that motivated, efficient and experienced planters will earn an average of $250 to $500 a day. However, planters who can’t hack it will often have trouble even covering their daily camp costs. Every season, a few unprepared rookies will quit mid-season with their finances in the red.
Regardless of price, these trees are expected to be planted according to specific rules assigned to each block for spacing, acceptable soil quality, areas you can or cannot plant in, along with the general expectation that all trees be planted straight and tight into the ground. Failure to comply means failure to be paid. And not getting paid after slaving away in the bush is something akin to being kicked when you’re down—in the face.
All day, trees ranging in size from a few centimeters to a foot long are delivered to you in boxes, bins or trays. You move the trees from the boxes to the bags you wear around your hips, and your unspoken mission is to get these trees out of your bags as quickly as possible and get yourself back to pack up some more trees. Repeat steps. Again. And again. And again.
That’s it. Love it, or leave it.
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY . . .
Exaggerations aside, tree planting can, and will, make you crazy. Not necessarily in a bad way, but spending so much time forcing yourself to plant faster and move faster through relentless physical and mental adversity is truly tough on the brain. You are routinely spending 10 hours a day with nothing but your own thoughts, literally in the middle of nowhere. You try to pretend the swarms of black flies aren’t crawling on your eyeballs and into your ears (when you know they are).
With the exception of the methodical and careful planting that the rugged Pacific coast requires, the mentality that shapes the industry norm in Canada’s silviculture industry is one of speed: lots of trees in the ground is priority number 1.
With a far more profitable industry out West, tree prices tend to be significantly higher. Far less valuable trees in Québec, Ontario, and the Maritimes means that planters need to throw in three to five times as many trees to make money comparable to that of coastal planters. For these reasons, younger planters, more willing to struggle to get their cash, are found predominantly in regions outside the West coast. And hustling is often the only way to get it.
This “hustle” mentality, for the most part, causes an industry-wide level of intense emphasis on the number of trees put into the ground every day. But with the constant focus on speed and numbers, the overall quality of trees planted, and eventually the quality of our future forests, may suffer significantly from our current planting practices.
A RACE TO THE BOTTOM
The problem starts with the fact that planting has become a relatively new expectation for an industry that was never previously required to restore what it removed. Reforestation is a burden to bottom lines and to personnel resources within large logging companies. Admittedly, their practices are improving, with more and more companies seeing the value of creating forests for the future and maintaining good PR. Nonetheless, an attitude of contempt for the act of tree planting underlies every dollar spent, and cutting corners has traditionally been the name of the game.
An obvious result of this is the fact that planting companies adopt the same attitude and cut corners in order to stay profitable in spite of what frugal logging companies give them. Logging companies offer up their harvest areas to the tree planting company able to come up with the lowest bid: it’s a race to the bottom with planting companies forever underbidding one another for contracts.
Competition and cheap labour underpin Western economics and all-too-often dictate the crux of our business practices. But when such philosophies are followed in a field like reforestation—one with long-term ramifications for our ecological future—there exists reason for concern.
Many planting contracts stipulate that in order for management positions to get paid in full, they have to meet often borderline unreasonable production standards. Such pressure is then passed down to planters in the form of extended work hours and longer work weeks. “Push the envelope” is the maxim planters often keep striving for as a matter of personal pride. Often enough such conditions lead to an unpleasant work environment, where taking breaks is scorned, work days can go from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., and nothing beyond high production is worthy of appreciation or respect.
With competitiveness like this, tree prices have stagnated over the last 15 years, and in some cases have even dropped dramatically. The response of the tree planting community has been to cut more corners and battle through hard times by working harder, though not necessarily better. Pushing the limits of how long you can work, how hard you can plant, and how many trees you can get in the ground is now not only the norm, but a prerequisite to the job. Quality, while still a factor, always takes the back seat.
The competitive atmosphere also means fewer workers can plant more trees, keeping the costs down, and earnings up. But the competition has a dark side at all corners of the industry.
At the planter level, it’s “stashing,” or the illegal ridding of trees. This generally involves burying, killing or otherwise hiding trees, but can also occur by obviously planting poor quality trees or leaving areas empty. It exists universally throughout the world of planting, and generally occurs for three reasons: one, planters feel they are being screwed, two, planters are being greedy, or three, they’re just trying to keep their heads above water.
While certainly not a regular practice 99 per cent of the time, stashing remains the unspoken secret of the industry. It’s not limited to planters, either: large-scale stashing, culling, or ridding of trees, facilitated by planting and even logging management, is certainly not unheard of, and is done for the same reasons: it’s quick and cheap.
For the planter concerned with the future well-being of the work they do, observing what are obvious impediments to healthy forests can be frustrating and discouraging. Only the minimal required effort ever seems to be made towards planting. No information or dialogue exists between planters and the logging mills that employ them, and the attitude presented by the logging companies makes it easiest to believe that they care about very little beyond making money, and meeting minimal forest standard regulations.
IN THE CLEAR?
Experts for the most part seem to agree that all goes fairly well on the forest regeneration side of the Canadian forestry industry, and there are very few harsh critics of the effectiveness of our current system — a surprising fact in light of observations within the industry itself.
There’s very little doubt that Canada is a world leader in environmentally minded approaches to both logging and reforestation. With 90 per cent of all forestry on crown land, our government has significant impetus to keep Canada a leader in reforestation methods. And for those involved, the path we are on seems fairly satisfactory at maintaining forest health in the future.
Derek Sidders, a silviculture and afforestation innovation specialist for the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre (a branch of the Canadian Forest Service), concedes that this has not always been the case in Canada. Relatively lax, unmonitored legislation and practice within the industry right up through the 1970s and ’80s generated little concern about the recently cut forests, as long as something grew back. However, he notes, in the past 15 years stringent regulations have been put in place that have obligated logging companies to maintain forest quality. This has involved everything from mandatory environmental impact assessments on the roads companies build, to the necessity regenerating the diversity of the forests cut, to making it mandatory that all seedlings planted are cultivated from seeds found within 100 kilometres of the site where they were cut. “[Our] regulatory bodies don’t allow for leaving our clearcuts to nature. We have to maintain same cover [of tree species], same volume as the . . . forest that was cut.”
CUTTING COSTS AND CLONE CULTURE
Equally incapable of mimicking cut forests are the current methods of replanting. For the sake of ease and efficiency, tree planting operations tend to prescribe a single species for entire areas, as opposed to a diverse range. There are certainly attempts to place the appropriate species in the appropriate areas, but ultimately, this is insufficient. Any clearcut area tends to traverse the indigenous ranges of many species. Highland, lowland, damp soil, rocky soil, sand and black muck are some of the many forest floor qualities that only certain species are able to grow in, and these can vary within very small areas.
Efforts are made by tree planting operations to battle this through the mixing of trees, though they are minimal. It would be a difficult, tedious and costly task to do with any accuracy, and for the most part, this is overlooked in lieu of speedy replants. The result has been the large-scale creation of monoculture forests. Beyond being simply easy to organize, mono-cropping often gets done to facilitate quicker regrowth. Certain trees, like jack pines for instance, may not be the most suitable tree for the region, but they will grow the fastest, and are thus planted.
UBC’s Steven Mitchell, an associate professor in forest sciences, elaborated on this point, explaining how “a company’s interest is to get a [tree] stand planted and to get the trees to grow high, fast. . . the focus is on the best commercial value of a species in an appropriate area.” But Mitchell is also quick to point out that it is not in anyone’s interest — logging companies included — to create monoculture forests, reiterating that it can be a risky practice to overplant a single species, as it leaves them open to greater risk for fire and disease.
The solution to such problems would be to ensure that we regenerate mixed forests, regardless of difficulty in doing so. Han Chen, an associate professor in the faculty of forestry and forest environment at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, explained that planting mixed forest is a practice requiring much improvement. He describes how “We are doing well with reforesting jack pine and aspen, but where we are doing poorly is with mixed forests and low lying spruce.” Chen went on to explain that we understand much of the science behind creating mixed forests, but lack the technology or the funding infrastructure to properly implement it. This fault, Chen suggests, is one that could be potentially crippling to overall future forest ecological health.
If this is indeed true, we may be in for some danger. Despite what may be suggested by independent studies, monoculture planting still remains a significant part of tree planting. Within the past two years alone, I have been part of two separate plant operations that have put one to two million seedlings of a single species into massive blocks that once held a multitude of tree species. How negative of an effect these actions will have remains to be seen, but when such occurrences do not seem to be acknowledged by the people involved in monitoring the industry, it is a bit troubling.
The disconnect that exists between the ideas that undercut planting strategies and the act of planting itself seems to characterize the regeneration of forests. On the one hand, you have an industry so focused on speed and efficiency that it seems on the verge of failure. And on the other hand, you have industry monitoring that seems almost disturbingly content with the planting industry, hesitant to be very critical of any element of its existence.
THE FUTURE OF OUR FORESTS
Canada’s forests continue to face future challenges, and failure to fully prepare for them could lead to our collective detriment. The mountain pine beetle continues to march east. Forest fires ravage our forests with increasing size, with limited resources for stimulating regrowth. Climate change looms on the horizon with many potential threats that include new pests, new diseases, changing soil conditions and higher temperatures; any of which may well endanger the success of a given tree species. Issues such as this are going to require greater care, and a more thoughtful reforestation system from government regulations, to logging company attitudes, down to compliance of planters.
It should be said that efficiency and expense should not be the top priorities of our reforestation industry, and that somehow genuine concern for overall forest ecology should be put into profitable practice, not just policy. Solutions for ensuring this will be difficult, especially in the face of a timber industry that has been tanking for several years. However, the difficulty of this task will pale in comparison to any attempts of maintaining forests slowly depreciating as a result of lack of foresight and lack of care by previous generations of tree planters, and the rules, regulations and companies that guide their actions.
Truly, it must be said, the overt emphasis on speedy efficiency not only hides, but also destroys, genuine respect for the ecological importance of tree planting. Planting and forest health in general will be something that Canada will perhaps always depend on, and it is something that should play a much more active role in industry dialogue.
Despite being hidden from our collective sight, the effects of inefficient tree planting will be felt unless appropriate measures are taken to ensure that our forests retain the best possible health far into the future. Looking down onto the clearcuts again this summer, I will again be questioning if we really are on the positive path we claim we are.
