Make the right decisions for our forests

Gillian McEachern
Director, Forests Program
CPAWS - Wildlands League

The impending wood supply shortage in Northwestern Ontario made headlines this week with the release of MNR’s new wood supply strategy.
It talks of the need to address a pending wood supply shortage. But this situation is actually old news: The forest industry has long known that harvest levels would have to drop as the last of our original old forest with its high volumes of timber was cut and replaced with younger forests.
What’s new is the urgency to find solutions to deal with the economic, environmental and social fallout of this shortfall. The potential economic and social impacts of the situation are not really clear. This is because the forest sector has been moving rapidly to replace people with machines and to invest in systems that use less wood to produce final products. In addition, the growth in the pulp and paper sector is not in Canada but rather in areas closer to emerging markets where trees grow faster like Southeast Asia.
However, the environmental impacts of unsustainable logging rates are serious. Proposals from industry have included removing buffers protecting waterways and special habitat areas set aside for sensitive wildlife and postponing urgent actions needed to improve the protection of wild forests and threatened forest creatures like woodland caribou.
The natural response to a decline in any resource - whether it is wood, oil or fish - is to try to squeeze out every last drop. By now, we should be well aware of the consequences of this approach. They are damaged ecosystems that can not be nursed back to health, economic turmoil for communities with little in the way of services or resources left to offer, and squandered opportunities to try new approaches before it is too late.
Here’s an example of what could happen from right here in Northwestern Ontario. If we remove or weaken protection for tourism values such as remote forests and lakes, we would endanger a $1.2 billion industry. Resource-based tourism is a big employer in northwestern Ontario, providing nearly 10,000 jobs in the region. But to be successful, tourism operators must be able to provide their high-paying clients with access to lakes with plentiful fish, rich forests with healthy wildlife and, possibly most important of all, the sense of being lucky enough to have landed in the middle of a big, wild, untouched space.
For the forest industry itself, smart companies are learning that sending every last tree through their mill won’t bring them or the communities they operate in long-term prosperity. In fact, some forestry companies are realizing that ecologically and socially responsible forest management can pay. For example, Tembec’s commitment to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) was recently rewarded with a $120 million per year contract with the Home Depot to supply FSC certified wood. Setting aside some critical ecological areas for protection, adopting best practices during harvesting and responding to growing customer demand for wood products from well-managed forests has become good business. These changes can actually benefit communities and workers: Companies taking these steps are likely to get a bigger piece of the market, will help protect healthy forests for future harvesting and will be the ones with reputations as leading-edge suppliers in a highly competitive marketplace.
We could take the easy way out and decide that we must keep unsustainable levels of wood flowing to the mills at any cost. That is the easy way only for this generation. The next generation - our kids - are going to have to deal with the consequences of that decision, and it is not going to be a pretty.
So, yes, we are facing a drop in the quantity (and quality) of timber being harvested in Ontario. But, no, that does not mean that we should simply continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. By working together - communities, industry, conservation organizations, governments and citizens - we can develop more economically and environmentally sustainable approaches that will make us the envy of the world. It’s not going to be a short or easy road, but it beats the one that’s headed straight for the cliff.