Connecting Past and Present
August 13, 2024 By: Sam Al-Alimi
‘Cutting the heck’ out of Canada’s boreal forest has put caribou at risk | CBC News
- A new study finds that more than 14 million hectares of boreal forests have been cut just in Ontario and Quebec between 1976 and 2020. Personally, that number shocked me because it is in only two provinces and second. While more scientific methods of logging have been introduced and forest regrowth is happening, the study says that the newly grown trees don’t have lichen which is the main food source for caribous. The conservation of forests is not just about trees, but also about the species that live within this habitat. Finally, conservation is not preservation because it allows the cutting of trees even at low numbers thus old growth trees are being cut and the word conservation is a nice sort of cover for it. As Jack Little said, the forest farmers themselves are the ones that started the forest conservation in Canada. The incentive to start the conservation was economic due to the uncontrolled cutting of trees and facing the fact that this resource is finite.
Jasper wildfire: Before-and-after photos show destruction of town | Globalnews.ca
- Wildfires wreaked havoc on the national park and the town of Jasper. Reading articles in topic 2 of unit 3 challenged me to read about the history of Jasper National Park and how it came to be. Jasper National Park was in territory of several indigenous peoples. Indigenous people were not considered during the establishment of the park; many were forced to move their traditional lands and who refused were served eviction notices treating the natives as squatters and barring them from entering the parks.
The comments in the first section make a good point that new growth does not replace old growth in terms of moose protection. It also shows that simply maintaining the number of trees for economic reasons is not enough. Biodiversity is not being maintained in this case. This is something that people need to pay more attention to when designing conservation policies.
Hi there,
I appreciate the perspective of protecting Lichen for Caribou, among other species. Living in Northern BC and surrounded by the Boreal Forest, you can see the devastation of logging. Although, a main economic driver in the North, it is hard to understand how it is renewable – trees can not grow fast enough to meet our consumption and manufacturing needs. Between increasing stressors, such as beetles, other pests, drought and wildfires, the Boreal Forest seems to be under tremendous stress. I agree that old growth should be protected because it offers more than high-value timber. It supports a network of life and ecosystems, not to mention a massive carbon sink!
The story ‘Cutting the heck’ out of Canada’s boreal forest has put caribou at risk shows that improper land management comes at a perilous cost to caribou populations. Our conservation practices haven’t progressed far beyond Gifford Pinchot’s “first principle”, as the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia continue to approve industrial developments in caribou habitat. One development logged over 900 square km of critical caribou habitat within the calving grounds of an endangered herd (Pacific Wild, 2022). We need economists to incorporate resource depletion and degradation of habitat as economic liabilities to more accurately reflect the environmental costs of development.
Pacific Wild. (2022). Save BC wolves. Retrieved from Pacific Wild: https://pacificwild.org/campaign/save-bc-wolves/