Status Updates From When the Forest Breathes: R...

It takes decades for clearcut forests to stop emitting more carbon than they sequester, and centuries more to recover the sink strength of the original stands. We don’t have decades for these forests to recover from clearcutting. In the hundred years it takes for a forest to mature, our planet could warm upwards of five degrees Celsius.

Logging caused a 61% reduction in forest floor carbon...Over half of the ancient underground carbon pool that had taken thousands of years to accumulate had instantly disappeared with the logging. Even more stunning, [due to the machinery destroying the rich soil] the losses were just as acute in plots where some trees had been left behind as in plots that were clearcut.

No one had asked the Haida if the loggers could take their forests. The people who’d lived here for fourteen thousand years had not been consulted. Haida law, upheld by hereditary lineages that tended the resources, was ignored. Thousands of great trees were felled.

Everything that we’re getting at in our lab, all of these ideas about connection and respect and reciprocity in the forest—these are very, very old ideas. These are not new. These are not our ideas. The original people of this land had it right. And we’re bumbling along trying to catch up. Western science is a baby.

Paclitaxel was found to be curative for many cancers. This sparked a gold rush for yew bark in the 1980s. Scientists learned to extract paclitaxel from the bark of Pacific yew, but it took 5lbs of paclitaxel—or 60,000lbs of yew bark—to treat a single breast cancer patient. Poachers hunted the yew with the intensity of ivory poachers. Hundreds of thousands of trees were destroyed each year.

Year after year, I had watched the forests decline with broad-scale industrial logging and I’d seen the vibrancy of the regenerating stands pushed further and further out of balance. The replacement of old forests with monoculture plantations and the extinguishment of native plants with pesticides was making the forests sick, yet the commodification of our landscape continued relentlessly.

Cultural burning had been banned by the Canadian gov. as part of the Indian Act of 1876, which restricted nearly every aspect of Indigenous life. This byzantine legislation attempted to force assimilation by dismantling traditional systems of governance &imposing bans on traditional practices, performing dances&songs, or accessing their own territories...gov. agents took the lands, waters, &resources for themselves.

I had spent the past three decades trying to convince the provincial government that aspens and birches were essential to forest vitality—efforts met with stonewalling. An all-out war on deciduous trees had gradually diminished these crucial firebreaks. The mountains and plateaus had become a sea of coniferous plantations, akin to a carpet of matchsticks rolled out for the flames to race across.

Hotter temperatures increase lightning activity because they result in more water vapor, which creates an electrical current when it rises, condenses, and the ice crystals collide in thunderclouds.

The government noted that high flood risk after wildfire can last up to 5yrs, until the forest starts to grow back, but risks may amplify with climate change because grasslands are now replacing forests while wildfires are expected to become more frequent. They recommended replanting clearcuts and burned areas “using a science-based approach to reduce flooding.”
No mention was made of curtailing further clearcutting.

Trust is the essential ingredient for any collaboration

When the roots are connected belowground, it’s like our communities; when we are all connected, we are stronger. And likewise, the forest is stronger when the trees are allowed to have their connections with each other.

[Logging] made the landscape even more vulnerable to catastrophic fire and pests. Precaution was ignored, and the clearcutting continued apace, even in healthy forests. These industrialized forests, combined with hot and dry conditions resulting from climate change, contributed to the megafires starting in 2017, and in some areas, the fires were followed by flash floods.

Normally, a healthy tree can “pitch out” attacking insect pests by excreting a sticky resin, but the drought-weakened and heat-stressed trees were unable to mount much of a resistance against the invading hordes of beetles, and trees perished by the millions.

The mountain pine beetle population exploded during an exceptionally warm winter in 1991 and the insects chewed through an astronomical 44.5 million acres of forest over the following decade. The outbreak was triggered by the warming climate, which sped up beetle reproduction, and a continuous policy of fire suppression, which enabled the spread of pine trees across a vast area during the colonial settlement period.

In 1670, King Charles II of England licensed the Hudson’s Bay Company to seize the resources from the Indigenous people. As with the fur trade, the forests were exploited to feed European wood demand and foster economic development of the created colonies that would become the nation of Canada in 1867.

Forests I once naïvely thought were mainly the product of climate, soil, and the lay of the land, I now understood were reflections of the philosophies and practices of the original people...We needed to transform away from a mentality of exploitation to a regenerative worldview that valued reciprocity, synergy, and abundance for the entire socio-ecological system.