Enclosed for your information is a letter to the editor of the
Edmonton Journal regarding forestry practices in Alberta. The
letter was written by an internationally recognized ecology
professor at the University of Alberta.
Re-printed from THE EDMONTON JOURNAL, Saturday, August 24, 1991
Letter to the Editor from D.W. Schindler, Killam professor of
ecology, University of Alberta
ANSWERS, NOT RHETORIC NEEDED ON REFORESTATION
Many of minister's claims unsupported by fact
LeRoy Fjordbotten, minister of Forestry, Lands and Wildlife,
appears to have answered many public concerns about his
department's "free to grow" reforestation practices
(Reforestation, Letters, Aug. 17), but many of his assurances are
unsupported by fact.
While the "free to grow" concept is admirable, there are no data
to support his statement that following clear-cutting, "new
northern boreal forests are a healthy mix of several tree species
and a variety of understorey shrubs, herbaceous plants and
grasses."
The only ecosystem-scale study in Alberta was in the Tri-Creeks
area west of Jasper National Park, and results on forest
management from it have not been released. The site is not a
northern boreal forest, in any case.
The Alberta-Pacific review board called for Alberta Forestry to
provide information to guide its deliberations with respect to
the board's mandate to assess the impact of forestry practices on
Indian lands; the department did not respond.
In May 1990, the province's expert panel on forest management,
chaired by Prof. Bruce Danzig, reported to Fjordbotten that
Alberta's forest management plan was severely deficient.
The panel made 133 recommendations for improvement, including in
the area of reforestation, and noted that the department did not
have the necessary professional and technical staff to carry out
its mandate.
In the early 1970s I participated in a study of clear-cutting in
the boreal forests of northwestern Ontario by the Canadian
Forestry Service co-operating with the Canadian Department of
Fisheries and Oceans. Results showed that hardwoods were favored
over conifers after clear-cutting. Water quality was
compromised, with high turbidity and increased concentrations of
nitrate and several other chemical elements. Logging machinery
destroyed ground cover and soils, increasing the exposure of
bedrock by several percentage points. Roadbuilding caused severe
erosion.
Globally, in the few areas where biological diversity following
reforestation has been studied, regrowing forests are not as
diverse as the original ones, and many of the original species
are rare or absent.
The famous ecologist, Luna Leopold, has reported that reforested
areas of Germany were "an ecological desert devoid of birds and
insects and with no soil development."
A "free to grow", or any other, forest policy must be based on
sound scientific studies, whose cost is small compared to the
large grants given to large companies to extract pulp from our
northern forests.
I have no reason to believe that our forests are being managed in
a sustainable manner. Albertans demand answers, not rhetoric!