I have read the 272 page "Factual Record Ontario Logging Submission" report released in February 2007, by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation.
I am very concerned that Sierra Legal was able to cause such an expenditure of money to be used over five years over a charge of the imaginary destruction of an imaginary migratory bird nest (43,700 imaginary nests) by clear-cut logging by ALL the Forest Management Units in Northern Ontario in 2001.
I checked out the nesting habits of the Thunder Bay Field Naturalist's checklist of birds for the Thunder Bay District. Our birds, using about a hundred migratory land birds of the 346 land and water species, nest: on low branches; on the ground; near water; in bushes; or marshy areas. Only two species nested higher than 20 feet, the Cape May and Yellow Rumped Warblers. If a bird nests on a low branch, that branch is usually alive. Young trees have live low branches. If a bird nests on the ground, it is under a low branch, under a shrub, or out in the open as in a tuft of grass or blueberry bush. If it nests near water these areas are protected from logging by a buffer zone. If it nests in bushes such as willow these could be anywhere but mostly we see them along roadways and power lines where loggers won't get them but Hydro One sure will.
I'd consider marshy areas to be the same as a swamp. Now the Rusty Blackbird nests in Alder or Willow swamps, one to two feet above ground. There is not merchantable timber in these swamps. The very term swamp means wet terrain. It certainly will be wet in nesting time. No wood cutting machine would even attempt to cross this unless it was the dead of winter. So how can Ontario's loggers be held responsible for the decline of the Rusty Blackbirds or the destruction of its nests? (Blackbird species were/are poisoned by the millions in the United States of America.)
Northern Ontario Loggers Harassed by CPAWS
How could CPAWS and the Wildlands League and Sierra Legal Fund say on November the 2nd, 2006, that the recovery strategies have failed? The Canadian Government hasn't even approved them yet. {edit note: Saturday, July 30, 2011 The Chronicle - Journal page C8...The Canadian Press ; I quote "Environmental and aboriginal groups had hoped to persuade Crampton to order emergency protection for caribou habitat under the Species At Risk Act. They also wanted him to demand the federal government file a recovery plan for rapidly declining herds. They pointed out Ottawa has missed a legal deadline for such a plan by four years." end quote.) These groups have filed an application for review of the guidelines for protecting caribou and want all logging halted in Woodland Caribou RANGE. I bring the term range to your notice. You think we got problems with Steelhead,( a complaint re watershed ) well, Woodland Caribou RANGE will take us all out.
{edit note 2011: Can this be the precursor to the 2010 Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement , wherein they remove 29,000 hectares of Boreal Forest from use for three years?}
What if people didn't know that forestry practices in the Boreal Forest have to follow the natural disturbance guidelines? Natural disturbances like fire disrupt large tracks of forest land. Naturally we have to follow suit, but in doing so not all the trees are leveled, islands are left, peninsulas protrude, seed trees and snags are left standing - so many per hectare - even logs and debris become homes left for salamanders. The greatest cut size comes in the Woodland Caribou habitat. The Woodland Caribou require a large range, they also require old forests for habitat. The Caribou Mosaic is a strategy to keep the caribou in old growth forests by cycling a series of cuts in twenty year plots in such a way that in sixty to eighty years that plot will be old growth and they can safely move into it by the time the forest company has completed the fourth plot abutting the original old growth area. The actual Forest Management Guidelines for the Conservation of Woodland Caribou: a Landscape Approach is seventy pages long.
Our Nipigon East Forest Management Unit has been working with that guideline and is well into the first twenty-year block. The Recovery Strategy for Forest-Dwelling Woodland Caribou in Ontario (draft) has been submitted to the Federal Government (all provinces have to by 2007). Each of the five recovery zones in Ontario will have an action plan - that's the next step.
The Carbon Factor
Let's look at what a growing forest can do with sunlight and carbon dioxide. Depending on the species an acre of growing trees can capture one to two metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The Nez Perce have 5000 acres of forest restoration projects dedicated to carbon sequestration. They are looking at these projects as annual income from Carbon Credits for about the next eighty years. After that time the amount of annual carbon sequestration drops dramatically.
As a point of interest: Studies (December 2006) show that planting trees in northern latitudes promotes global warming consequences for those areas; less white snow areas to reflect northern sunlight. Studies (December 2006) show planting trees in the tropics promotes global cooling.
In 1997 scientists didn't know the effect of increased CO2 on soil carbon. Recent test results (March 2007, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center), have shown soils can reach the carbon saturation point and continued exposure to carbon dioxide and higher temperatures tips the soil organisms into a "frenzy of decomposition" that emits the Greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere without any anthropogenic disturbance involved.
Soil carbon comes from plant parts, soil fungi and bacteria and soil animals all in various stages of decay. Most of it is non-living but is continuously reprocessed through excretion by living organisms. Course textured soils contain carbon bound in microbial biomass and that carbon is easily lost with environmental changes. Its life in the soil is usually one to ten years so it is considered an active carbon sink.
The longer lasting soil carbon is of diverse composition, usually polymeric substances, depending on the litter sources and soil forming conditions. Its life in the soil is usually ten to fifty years and it is termed slow release carbon.
The third type of soil carbon is termed inert. Its life in the soil reaches five hundred years.
Section 3.4 of the Kyoto Protocol has stimulated interest in accounting for land use change impacts on soil carbon stocks. As can be seen from these studies, soil carbon can change without any forestry operations taking place.
Planting trees after logging doesn't count with Kyoto. They say that is just business as usual. Planting trees after logging doesn't count even with environmental groups. They call it un-natural forest creation.
To condemn the forest industry for logging and silvicultural processes and tree planting is an attack on the socio-economic structure of our Northern communities.
I believe the "chain-saw model" ads and "Dirty Logging" ads of ForestEthics to be demeaning to our forest workers, slanderous in their conveyance of actions, and fomenting of intolerance to our resource industries that have formed and sustained our country, CANADA!
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