Help Stop Massive Clearcuts in Ontario's Public Forests

Posted by: Kathie Brosemer (kathie) on September 07, 2001 at 15:50:05
from the got-an-axe-to-grind? dept.

Late on the Friday of the Labour Day long weekend, The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) released a new draft of their clearcutting guideline which requires companies to create massive clearcuts in Ontario's public forests. An earlier draft of the guideline was released last fall and called for the use of 10,000 hectare clearcuts (larger than the City of Guelph). Rather than addressing the public outcry that resulted, the MNR has now removed any limit on the size of clearcut allowed. See more details below.

Your comments to MNR are a key element in the fight to get this guideline changed and to stop this dangerous Canadian precedent. Here's how, and why, it's important that you help...

The new draft guideline would allow the vast majority of the area logged in a forestry plan area to be in massive clearcuts.

MNR says that big clearcuts will be good for wildlife because naturally occurring fires are also big. This simplistic and misguided concept is the cornerstone of the guideline, and puts at risk the remaining areas of large, continuous old forest in the province. Woodland caribou, a threatened species, is already locally extinct everywhere that industrial logging has occurred in Ontario. This guideline sets a dangerous precedent for forestry in Canada.

Although the guideline contains some progressive changes to how many trees should be left standing in clearcuts after logging to provide better wildlife habitat, these changes don't go far enough. Any positive changes the guideline proposes are swamped by its focus on massive clearcuts, which will do significant harm to our forests.

We need your help to get the MNR to drop its plans to allow massive clearcuts. The Ontario government must be shown that we won't stand by and let them destroy our forests. Your comments to MNR are a key element in the fight to get this guideline changed and to stop this dangerous Canadian precedent.

Please follow the instructions below and voice your objection to these destructive and poorly thought out guidelines.

Important

In order for the MNR to consider your response, you must mail or fax a letter to the address below, and write "EBR Registry Number PB00E7004" on the top of your letter!

You should point out that:

Send your comments to:

Joe Churcher, Silviculture Systems Specialist
MNR Forest Management Branch
70 Foster Drive Suite 400
Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, P6A 6V5
PHONE: (705) 945-5710
FAX: (705) 945-6667

For more information go to www.wildlandsleague.org.

You can also send a message to the Minister of Natural Resources John Snobelen from the Wildlands League website.

The Wildlands League was founded in 1968 to protect wilderness in Ontario. It became a chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society in 1980. The Wildlands League works to protect wild places and to ensure resource use is sustainable for nature and communities.
Wildlands League
Protecting the Land
Suite 380, 401 Richmond Street West
Toronto, Ontario
M5V 3A8
Phone (416) 971.9453
Fax (416) 979.3155


The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for what they say.

clearcuts
by Amy Poelwyk on 2001-10-01 10:37:13

More education about the relation and similarities between clearcutting and wildfires needs to be brought up on this subject. For one thing when a company clearcut they have a buffer area which they don't cut around ie: lakes, streams, important wildlife areas such as; osprey nests and moose calving areas. When a wild fire comes through it burns everything, it is responsible for stream degradation and pollution in trout spawning areas as well as destroying other habitats.
People need to dig deeper in this issue instead of just seeing it as cutting all the trees. Trees come back!!! remember??? so go sit on your couch (which has a wood frame) or go take a nap on your bed (which also has a wood frame) and think about how really bad cutting trees is!!!

Cutting and Wildfires
by Tim Lynham on 2001-10-02 17:55:09

Amy, I read your note on the Clean North web page. Further to your comments about sitting on a wooden bed or couch, I drink water too but I think we should protect water quality and ensure that we don't pollute it to the point of poisoning ourselves like we did in Walkerton. We have to use moderation in cutting too.

I have just published a paper (I am a researcher with the Canadian Forest Service)in a journal called "Environmental Reviews" that will be printed in the Dec. issue (Vol. 9 #4). This paper compares the effects of forest harvesting (particularly clear-cutting) to wildfire. I can tell that their is an ecological price to pay for clear-cutting. Clear-cutting removes almost all the parent genetic material from a site. After the trees are gone, we think it's fine to plant the site in perfect rows with 6-8 foot spacing between the seedlings. This is unlike any natural process. In a natural process, like a fire, the seedlings come from the trees that lived on the site. They usually grow very dense which helps select for the strong ones. That's why we had such great forests before we started to cut them.

Fires do not burn everything. In fact fires don't always burn down to the water's edge and when they do they don't remove the trees like logging does. Logging removes most of the standing wood from a site and fires leave it there for wildlife habitat.

Clear-cuts are subjected to extreme weather compared to wildfire sites. Without trees on a site (like in a clear-cut) the site is hot enough to kill seedlings and the rain pounds down, causing execessive soil erosion. On a wildfire, all those standing dead trees provide periodic shade to help protect the seedlings from sun scorch and pounding rain.

Woodland Caribou used to roam from North Bay to the far north of Ontario. Now they are only found in places where we have not logged (like Pukaskwa National Park.) The public needs to know that if we make large clear-cuts north of 51 degrees latitude then we will probably eliminate the remaining caribou.

Cheers...Tim Lynham

clearcut
by al jablan on 2001-10-17 01:17:31

It's hard to give a complete silviculture course in a
few words. But let's try to define a few terms and some basic principles.
Clear cut means complete total annihilation of forest cover.
It is worse than even highgrading which was cutting the best and leaving junk.
The forest is not trees but primarily soil holding
water with microbes as the main inhabitants. Trees are an epiphenomenon, almost incidental.
Think of a sponge. How much water will a sponge retain release and suck up again after it has been liquidated. Obviously none.
A forest is a living breathing ecosystem, a
collection of minerals water organisms microbes bacteria
fungi and even a few trees and animals to top it off.
You cannot remove the soil or the water or the trees
and have a forest.
Are you getting the idea?
Detritus. All the junk slash trees trunks bark twigs
moss humus soil, in fact everything that is above the mineral
soil. Remember the fire which has left liberated minerals and organic matter as well as water retaining detritus behind. That is the
nursery of the rejuvenable forest.
Bare rock or scarce soil not only makes tree production
difficult since the last ice age it took only 10,000 years for
the forest to reestablish itself, but it also will be further
eroded as the soil with the plants and the trees will not have
binding and water retaining roots. No soil no humus no deritus
no water retention no forest.
Clear cutting is unconsionable ignorant and unscientific
Last but not least it is also uneconomic. If you have no forest
tomorrow where will you get your wood products?.
One definition I have found wanting is the size.
Drive up to Chippewa Road or Tilley Lake Road and drive past
the acid rain project station and look for the silviculture experiment. Which would be admirable if it were not ludicrous.
They call a 5 by 10 m patch a clear cut.
Clearly we are debating here a hectare or an acre or
a square km or a square mile or a hundred times larger
clearcuts not stamp sized mini harvests which you can hardly
call clear cut.
In some ways its benign not to devastate a county
or a section for a mere experiment but you cant get results
from a quartet of fleas when you are studying elephants or
dinosaurs.
All the same it's worth a visit the basic silvicultural
science is good and well presented but I am only critiqueing
the scale. When is a body of water no longer a sea or a lake
but a puddle or a teacup? Can you do limnological studies in
a test tube?
You can but how valid will your conclusions be?
A Jablanczy











response to reply
by cedar on 2001-11-08 15:25:05

excuse me, i will try to clarify your comment here briefly. if you are in favour of clearcutting over the natural and restorative means of a forest fire i have a point of interest worth mentioning. clearcutting does NOT provide the forest floor with the adequate and sufficient means to regrow. Forests fires DO. im not sure if you've ever seen a clearcut forest after the machines have left but it is not wonder the animals don't come back! its a complete disaster. it is a cruel and quick means of making profit off of our precious forests. There are alternative to the paper we write on, the houses we build and the couches we can choose to sit on for however long we want. There is not alternative to the woodland caribou or the clean air we breathe. its called reducing consumption, carefull and selective logging practices, and whole heartedly exploring alternatives. sorry if i've mis-interpreted your comment and gotten a little emotional over our greater home.

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