Forest Management in Canada and South-East Asia. by risa
I’m glad some scientists have noticed that burning peat releases serious carbon dioxide and are drawing our attention to the unfolding strategic importance of our thinking about forests and other natural resources:
Tropical peatlands are spread across numerous islands in South-East Asia, including Borneo, Sumatra and Papua. The peat is found in lowland areas, can exceed 10m in thickness and has a high carbon content of about 60%.
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The driving forces behind destruction of the peatlands have included clearance and drainage on a large-scale to set up timber, oil palm or rice plantations, and on a small-scale for subsistence farming and settlement. Poor forest management is also a cause.
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It has been calculated that in 1997, 2.67 billion tonnes of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide were released through burning of these peatlands. This is equivalent to 40% of one year’s global fossil fuel combustion, Dr Page says.
Forest Management is a strange and interesting subject. It seems odd somehow that we need to take over management of something that is so good at finding balance on its own. But we have learned some lessons about forests and development, and the kinds of behavior that seem like good ideas in the short term but that bring about cascading destruction and imbalance in the environment (and therefore the economy,) here in Canada. This document, the Canada Forest Accord, seems a pretty balanced value statement, and is signed by a diverse collection of interested parties- industries, ministries and environmental coalitions. “To realize our vision, we the undersigned commit ourselves to applying our knowledge, expertise and resources to sustainable forest management. We also pledge our cooperation, assistance and energies toward sustainable forest management nationwide and encourage others to do the same.”
There are some really interesting initiatives taking place in South East Asia already, many of which have become newly important following the Tsunami. The problem that has faced forests in South East Asia is quite similar, unsurprisingly, to that which has plagued Candian forests: an unbalanced relationship between corporate force, and community and government organization, cooperation and protection.
In Southeast Asia primary rainforests have contracted from 250,000 million hectares in 1900, to less than 60 million hectares in 1989. In Indonesia, a nation possessing 10 percent of the world’s tropical rain- forests, over one million hectares of forest are cut each year. The rapid reduction of Asia’s natural forest lands reflects the failure of conventional management systems to ensure the survival of these diverse and important ecosystems. In the past, governments in search of foreign exchange revenues have encouraged rapid timber exploitation, leasing out vast areas to private companies controlled by multinationals and politically and economically powerful people. Population growth floods the forest with poor migrant people in search of farmland, while tribal communities are forced to migrate or are increasingly marginalized in their ancestral homelands. Government forest departments hold authority for 25 to 75 percent of a nation’s total land area; yet, they are pushed by political, economic, and demographic forces and have limited ability to control access and guarantee that forest resources are managed sustainably. The absence of effective management often allows a sequence of human activities to disturb and erode the forest ecosystem, which in some cases eventually leads to almost complete devegetation and loss of top soil. In other cases, the forest may be converted to agricultural land or tree plantations.
The process of forest degradation can be slowed, stopped, and reversed by the establishment of effective access controls. Many communities located near forest lands are in a position to protect these resources. Due to their proximity they can mediate the interaction of outsiders with the forest. Many communities are also economically dependent on the forest for both commercial and subsistence products. Indigenous peoples usually have considerable understanding of the species composition and ecological functions of tropical forests and strong socio-religious ties to their environment. Farming communities may perceive a need to manage forest resources because of their hydrological and nutritive contributions to agriculture. In communities where sustaining forest resources is perceived to be important, members may be motivated to provide labor and other resources to effectively protect and utilize the forest on a continuing, long-term basis.
A pretty great-seeming gov’t initiative in Canada has been addressing the surprising social, environmental, legal and economic complexities of forest management with consensus-driven partnerships:
Canada’s forests are an integral part of our national identity. They grace the landscape with breathtaking beauty, and are a key contributor to Canada’s natural wealth, providing clean air and water, habitat for wildlife, recreational opportunities, and wilderness areas. At the same time, the economies of 337 communities are solely reliant on industrial forest production, and one in 17 Canadians depends directly on the forests for employment.
The Government of Canada, through the Canadian Forest Service, launched Canada’s Model Forest Program to address the challenge of balancing the extensive range of demands we place on our forests today and the needs of tommorow’s generations. The principle behind the program is simple. Each model forest serves as a demonstration of partners with a diversity of forest values working together to achieve sustainable forest management. (SFM)
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“During the past ten years, the Model Forest Program has made a substantial contribution to sustainable forest management practice in Canada through partnerships developed among industry, the research sector, environmental and other nongovernmental groups, Aboriginal and community groups, and governments,” said Minister Dhaliwal. “Through the renewal of this program, the Government of Canada will continue to work with our partners toward common goals of improving our quality of life through sustainable resource development, environmental preservation and economic growth.”
http://www.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca/cfs-scf/national/what-quoi/modelforest_e.html
The government discourse as well as its practices have certainly evolved over the years, but there is still a need to be conscious of the kinds of slippages in language that can allow economic motivations to eclipse moral and pratical distinctions. In “Industrial Forestry and a Critique of Natural Resource Management” David Orton draws attention to some sad and scary examples of this strategic distortion:
Human-centeredness in the Language of Industrial Forestry
The following are some examples of this language with a contextual discussion and explanation:
– “Pests” or “Infestation”: This is usually a bloom or blossoming of insects created by industrial forestry itself. This kind of forestry in the Maritimes region, narrows the species basis of the Acadian forest. This is because the pulp and paper industry, which fundamentally shapes industrial forestry and hence the forests of the region, only wants a few tree species for its mills. In Nova Scotia there are about 30 indigenous tree species which make up the Acadian forest type. (There are also introduced species.) The pulp and paper industry puts a premium on five or six softwood species. There are for example, no replanting programs for hardwoods. Preferred softwood species for pulp and paper production are also, for example, food for the spruce budworm. In order of preference, the budworm feeds on balsam fir, white spruce, red spruce, and black spruce.
Ninety percent (90%) of commercial forest cutting is clear cutting. This type of cutting, which has a commercial advantage, is defended by the forest industry as a biological necessity. Yet when, for example, spruce/fir forests are clear cut, if naturally regenerated, such trees tend to grow back to balsam fir. This tree species is the prime food of the budworm.
In industrial forestry, there is no place for insects or wild fires which are part of the ecology of the Acadian forest, because every tree is spoken for. So an “infestation” of insect “pests”, means the application of chemical or biological poisons to “sustain” the commercially desired tree species.
– Even-aged plantation equals a “forest”: Plantations usually contain one or two softwood tree species. Such plantations create a concentrated food supply for insects or disease. There is always one more bug and hence the necessity to spray, from an industrial forestry perspective.
– “Chemical thinning or site preparation”: This is the application of herbicide poisons to kill non-pulpwood vegetation. It does not matter about the requirements of mammals or birds for the destroyed vegetation.
– “Overmature or decadent”: This means usually that desired tree species are getting too old to be used for pulpwood. It does not matter that birds/insects need old decaying trees, or that trees when they decay, breakdown to produce forest humus.
– “Weed species”: This often means non-pulp species, or any non-commercially desirable species. Alders are often referred to as a weed species. Alders, a short-lived early successional tree, are an atmospheric nitrogen-fixating species.
– “Underutilized species”: This means there is no present commercial market. In Nova Scotia, hardwoods were declared underutilized and they are now being shipped as woodchips to Japan. Local people in my own area cannot now buy hardwood for firewood, because of this Japanese market.
– “Fibre” is how living trees are described.
– “Forest management” rests on industrial capitalist assumptions about the natural world. The ever increasing management of industrial forestry means more attempts to control the problems which arise. Thus more spraying. This past summer in Nova Scotia over 150,000 acres were sprayed with the so-called biological spray B.t.k. (Bacillus thuringiensis variety kurstaki). This was the largest ever forest spraying program in NS. Spray planes were over our house about eight times. We took many photos of these planes and, in aiming the lens, I often thought of the Bruce Cockburn song, “If I had a rocket launcher.”
There is no place for wildlife in industrial forestry except insofar as it can “adapt” to commercial forestry operations. There is a fragmentation of habitat by logging roads. Clearcutting, for example, in May and June destroys the nests of birds nesting on the ground or in the trees being cut.
September 3rd, 2005 at 1:56 pm
too little too late for the animals in South east asia?
“Human settlement, logging, mining and disease mean that orangutans in parts of Indonesia may lose half of their habitat within five years. “All of the great apes are listed as either endangered or critically endangered,” co-author Lera Miles from the World Conservation Monitoring Centre near Cambridge told the BBC News website.
“Critically endangered means that their numbers have decreased, or will decrease, by 80% within three generations.”
One critically endangered species is the Sumatran orangutan, of which around 7,300 remain in the wild.
Most live in Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra, which saw armed conflict for decades between the Indonesian government and separatist rebels, and which suffered heavily during December’s tsunami.
n mid-August, a peace deal was signed which may end the 29-year conflict.
“The irony is that just as things are getting better for the people of Aceh, they’re getting worse for wildlife, with people collecting timber, dormant logging concessions being activated, and illegal logging as well,” said Dr Miles.
“Projections show that in 50 years’ time, there could be as few as 250 left in the wild; but that’s not a viable size for a population.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4202734.stm
September 5th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=9562425&src=rss/scienceNews : about sharing co2 emmissions reducing technology with china. good news, but burying the emissions in rock for “long term storage” sounds a little sketchy to me.
September 8th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
this is rather crass: i generalize and know little beyond my own experiences, but suggest that forest management is pretty in word but gnarly in practice. most logging corporations ensure they’re regulated by either internal audits levied in industry-wide consensus or via ascriptions of ‘ecological validity’ rendered by private firms conferring symbolic power upon producers. these commissions or organizations (e.g., iso) are bound into the circuit of economic and cultural capital; they’re like bourdieu’s experts in the field of signs thriving off the work of primray producers, increasing their own cultural capital by playing a role in locating and positioning the work of forestry. these days, there’s little in the way of independent parties monitoring and performing a regulatory role. compliance is a relative measure.
in passing, here’s a nugget i’d written last year regarding greenpeace’s campaign against kimberly-clarke, logging magnates and coreners of the kleenex and toiletry market. have a look at both the tp and the plastic dispensers in most public washrooms and you’ll notice the high incidence of full-package k-c units. my thoughts on greenpeace are that they do well when tactical-minded, which is to say they hit the mark from time to time. i’m often skeptical about their long-term strategy and agree they raise consciousness but also suggest they fail to make in-roads on the policy side (like, say, the sierra club and ducks unlimited, who certainly must be read in their own political context).
anyway, here’s a link to the campaign, which i assume is still in progress:
http://kleercut.net/en/theissues
here’s what i composed and sent to the greepeacers at the outset:
Kudos on your consciouness-raising mandate and your mission to make Canadians aware of what happens behind the thin 20 metre treelines off Highway 43. I planted trees and worked silviculture for nine years, always balancing the free-wheeling but always beneficial reforestation imperative with the coporatization of the environmental ethos, a thing always-already sliding on a slippery slope. Treeplanting has really changed in teh last ten years, as has logging and production in most forestry sectors.
A few comments. Rhetorically, your Kleercut campaign approach depends on facts, figures, stats, and anthropomorphic presentations of other animals and species affected by the ecological fallout of cutting practices and clearcut logging. The
juxtaposing of images and the free play between iconic renderings of our industrialized landscapes, geographies, and displaced inhabitants generates a sympathetic response. Yet, you abstract the forest; you speak of the boreal forest, its age, its hinge-status as the ancient forest’s place of demise and the mythic last-stand. I think you should, instead of mythologize, concretize the boreal forest; throw a few maps up. Locate KC’s Canadian operations. I am sure you don’t want to instigate
an inappropriate response on the part of constituents by providing specific information but you need to add some substance.
As artificial as our logging practices are, we are still internal to and ineherent of the natural systems we’re altering and telescoping at alarming rates. Daunting? Yes. Yet, making the “forest” this opaque and external thing to us, into which we
descend to purge and harm, is a maligned rhetorical tactic. While it may be internal to Greenpeace’s discursive and ideological outlook, its affect and effect is, to some degrees, alienating. The ecology of the boreal forest is enchanting and
you need to cultivate an awareness that fosters people’s entry into that enchantment in order to produce a realistic rendition about what our responsibilities as technologized and capitalizing animals entails in relation to stewardship and some ideal version of palatable environmental mangement. The narrative thread is important; it establishes causality and is the “optics” through which Greenpeace presents its arguments. Insert people into the narrative.
That said, regardless of my criticisms, I applaud your efforts.
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