Decked white Spruce logs from Timber Berth 408
Keep multinationals out of our boreal forests
Most natural ecosystems and life support systems on planet Earth are under human attack. Included are the ozone layer of the outer atmosphere, the tropical and temperate rainforests and the band of forest that encircles the globe – the vast taiga or boreal forest. Averaging about 1000 kilometers in width, the area of earth covered by this kind of forest is many times greater than the tropical rainforests whose conservation is so popular today. In fact, boreal forests comprise more than 25 percent of the world’s remaining forest and are the most important terrestrial carbon sink for slowing the global warming process.
While the more accessible, higher volume forests were being cut, the boreal forest, with its low volumes per hectare and slow growing rates, was relatively safe. Now the pressure is on. Large multinational corporations are applying a tremendous amount of resource extraction technology to “harvest” this fragile forest over the next few decades. The consequences of such liquidation could be catastrophic.
"I would like to know what ignorant and stupid bureaucrat had the authority to sign the lease in Wood Buffalo Park. Can nothing be done about this horrendous pillage?"
–Camille Morin, St. Albert
The pattern is the same everywhere. The large multinationals pay off governments who sell the cutting rights without regard to the native people, other local people living in the area or the long-term consequences to future generations. The multinationals then roll through the country destroying large tracts of forest, reducing biodiversity and leaving resource exhaustion behind.
It is time for people, both native and non-native to get together and establish locally controlled, sustainably developed resource management in their bioregions. It is possible for people to have more jobs in the forest industry without devastating the land. It is desirable to keep profits in the local economy, rather than exporting them to a foreign country, like Japan, as is the case with the logging of Wood Buffalo National Park by Daishowa.
"Already 60% of the park's old growth has been logged. There remains only 400 hectares of prime white spruce, one of the rarest, most distinctive and awe inspiring forest ecosystems in Alberta."
- Gray Jones, WCWC boreal forst campaigner
No one has the right to destroy a national park and a United Nation World Heritage Site. Wood Buffalo is a sacred area, entrusted to this generation for the next. We implore the Canadian government to assure its moral and legal duty to protect this park. Present government policies are dishonouring future generations and abrogating responsibility for those living beings who will never speak out: the Wood Buffalo, the endangered woodland caribou, the wolf, the Cape May Warbler (a migratory bird that winters in the Amazon), the ancient white spruce trees and all the other creatures that make Wood Buffalo Park their home.
