Clearcut logging by Tierra Chilena (a timber company owned by Mitsubishi of Japan). Nahuelbuta Mountains, south central Chile, 1995
Clearcut logging by a small Canadian timber company, Upper Lillooet Valley, Stoltmann Wilderness Area, British Columbia, Canada, 1995. Photo: Ian Mackenzie.
Eco-Forestry Needed Now!
Ancient temperate forests once blanketed most of Earth's temperate zone-vast tracts of treed lands in Europe, northern Asia, North America, Chile, Australia and New Zealand. Oaks, pines, fires, cedars, spruce, araucaria, alerce... out of these magnificent new trees were civilizations built.
But native forests play an even more significant role on planet Earth: regulating the hydrologic cycle, conserving water and soils, stabilizing climate, and maintaining biodiversity. Once thought to be biologically impoverished, temperate forests are now recognized to support an immense variety of flora and fauna. Scientific studies in a research station built by Western Canada Wilderness Committee(WCWC) high in the temperate rainforest canopy on Cananda's west coast are projected to result in identification of about 600 new species to science.
For millennia, temperate forests have suffered the onslaught of logging, burning and clearing for wood products, pasture lands and cities. Almost all of the native hardwood forests of Europe, the eastern U.S. and central and eastern Canada have disappeared. Finland and Sweden have only tiny patches of oldgrowth forest left. Less than one percent of British Columbia's magnificent coastal old growth Douglas fir forests remain. Most of the native forests in south central Chile are gone.
The replacement of forests by farms and cities is an obvious form of deforestation. More insidious, but every bit as ecologically destructive, are the current forest practices that replace native forests with plantations(monocultures of single tree species planted by humans) and commercial tree farms (managed "forests" that are thinned, tended with biocides and clearcut on short rotations to achieve optimum fibre yields for industry). Plantations now cover over 13 million ha in northern Europe, 11 million ha in North America, 17 million ha in Russia and Eastern Europe, and 1.7 million ha in Chile.
Tree farms and forest plantations are ecological abominations. They are wrested from native forests through clearcutting - the complete removal of all trees and associated vegetation over a large area of land. Clearcutting and its associated logging roads cause soil crosion, water degradation, and loss of biodiversity.
In Sweden, for example, where oldgrowth forests have largely been replaced by plantations of Canadian lodgepole pine, the loss of biodiversity has reached disastrous levels. Over 40 vertebrate and 50 plant species are seriously endangered, and another 220 species are threatened with extinction.
In British Columbia (B.C.), Canada, where clearcutting and conversion of ancient forests to managed tree farms occur in more than 90 percent of the harvested forests, 24 species dependent upon oldgrowt forests are now at risk of extinction. In 1992, a government audit of randomly-selected logging sites on Vancouver Island showed that almost two-thirds of streams were negatively affected by logging and one-third suffered complete salmon habitat loss.
In Chile, where native forests are being clearcut, burned, highgraded and converted to exotic tree plantations on a massive scale, 6 plant species are almost extinct, 11 tree species are now endangered and a further 26 tree species are classified as vulnerable. Many wildlife species are also at risk of extinction as a direct result of the destruction of their forest habitats, including the Huemul, Pudú, Guiña cat, Chilote fox, Comadrejita Trompuda, Black Woodpecker, and Darwin Ranita.
Ancient temperate rainforest, Chile. Photo: Fundacion Lahuen files.
Ancient temperate rainforest, Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia, Canada. Photo: Mark Wareing.
Although this paper primarily focuses on forest practices in Chile, the parallels to B.C. are strong. Chile and British Columbia are both at a crossroads. They still harbour a variety of oldgrowth temperate forests, including Earth's largest remaining tracts of extremely rare, biomass-rich, ancient temperate rainforest. But both governments currently allow forestry practices that are destroying, at a rapid rate, the last of these unprotected ancient forest ecosystems.
In order to prevent the loss of biodiversity and achieve truly sustainable forestry, major changes in forest practices must occur. Hope lies in adopting ecologically sustainable forest practices that many people are calling "eco-forestry". Eco-forestry is a low-impact method of forestry based on selection harvest of trees at a slow enough rate to allow native forests to sustain themselves through natural regrowth.
Eco-forestry does not highgrade or degrade the forest. It retains wildlife trees along with the diverse ages and species of trees found in native forests. Eco-forestry is based on the understanding that nature knows best how to manage forests, and humans must take the "interest" not destroy the "capital" of the natural forest ecosystem.
To complement the ecologically managed forests, areas of unaltered native forests must also be preserved, so that we can better learn how native forests function.
Only through increased preservation and a switch to eco-forestry practices that sustain the structure, functions and biodiversity of native forests, can we hope to save Earth's native temperate forests.
(Global statistics from Imperiled Planet: Restoring Our Endangered Ecosystems by Edward Goldsmith et. al., MIT Press, 1990.
