Media.Knet.Ca

Two Globe and Mail articles highlight the effects of "modern" forest management strategies and fuel consumption on the environment, especially the animals and the plants. The first article from yesterday's paper will have a big impact on the folks living on the Hudson Bay coast.

From http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060422.BEARS22/TPStory/?query=polar+bear

Polar bears to face extinction by 2030, researcher says
DENNIS BUECKERT - Canadian Press - April 22, 2006

OTTAWA -- Polar bears will be extinct within 25 years as global warming shrinks the ice cover they depend on for feeding and giving birth, a renowned Australian scientist says.

The Arctic ice cap is shrinking by 8 per cent a year and polar bears are already showing signs of severe stress, according to Tim Flannery, one of Australia's best-known scientists and author of the current bestseller The Weather Makers.

In the past, polar bears typically gave birth to triplets, but now they usually have just one cub, he said. And the weaning time has risen to 18 months from 12, while the average weight has declined 15 per cent.

"Polar bears are going to go with the ice cap. They're not going to actually last that long," Mr. Flannery told a news conference yesterday.

Citing other warning signs, he said B.C.'s Fraser River has been fatally warm to salmon for five of the past 13 years, while West Coast forests are being decimated by an infestation of pine beetles able to survive milder winters.

"These are unheralded signs of change. They simply haven't been seen in the past. They persuade me and the vast majority of my colleagues that the debate on climate change is well and truly over. The science is solid and the effects are there for everyone to see."

Mr. Flannery's visit to Ottawa came the day after former prime minister Brian Mulroney told an audience that included much of the country's political elite that Canada must recognize the urgency of global warming.

The current government has been sending mixed signals on the issue, saying it will stay in the Kyoto Protocol but promising a made-in-Canada solution that remains undefined.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said Canada can't meet its targets under the climate treaty. Yet Canada will preside over negotiations this year aimed at seeking even larger emissions reductions.

"It [Canada] chairs the negotiating process, and yet it is the only signatory of the Kyoto Protocol that's cutting its climate programs," Mr. Flannery said. "It looks as if it's going to abandon its commitments without ever having really tried to meet them.

"As an Australian, I'm used to seeing better things from Canada. I think it would be an enormous tragedy if Canada cut and run from its international obligations."

He said it is feasible to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by applying the "polluter pays" principle, cutting subsidies to the petroleum industry, and introducing a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Under such a plan, the carbon tax would be offset by tax cuts in other areas. But the concept is anathema in Alberta, whose tar-sands projects have become the country's biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions.

"It's only the tar sands that prevent the country from making its targets under Kyoto," Mr. Flannery said.

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from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060422.wxbugs22/BNStory/Science/home

'We might become extinct'
TERRY GLAVIN - April 22, 2006 - From Saturday's Globe and Mail

SPENCES BRIDGE, B.C. — David Walkem was just finishing his breakfast at Vicky's Café on the banks of the Thompson River and gazing out the window at a dozen bighorn sheep moving up the hillside on the opposite bank.

Here at Spences Bridge in the southern interior of British Columbia, the hills gently rise into mountains, and above everything looms Shawnikenmx, a beloved peak where Mr. Walkem's Nlakapamux people used to go in the old days to get spirit power. Back then, the 50-year-old chief of the Cook's Ferry Indian Band explains, the high country was like parkland. As a boy, his grandfather could ride his horse through the forest at full gallop.

"We used to use fire to keep it open, for berries and for mule deer," Mr. Walkem says. "Now, it's all dead and dying and bug-infested, and you can't even walk though it. It's just like a plague, all over."

Lodgepole pines are supposed to be green. But B.C.'s pine forests are turning red, and grey, and black. They're dying from a plague of mountain pine beetles that has suddenly ravaged an area roughly the size of Britain. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before.

British Columbia hasn't been this warm in 8,000 years, and the winters are no longer cold enough to keep the beetles in check. Global-warming scenarios the International Panel on Climate Change forecast for 50 years from now are already unfolding in the province's interior, says Richard Hebda, the 56-year-old curator of botany and earth history at the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria.

Now, Dr. Hebda is starting to wonder whether the pine forests will ever grow back. "We just don't know," he says.

Lodgepole-pine forests need catastrophic events such as beetle outbreaks and fires to regenerate themselves. Normally, they grow back quickly -- in only a few decades, even from a beetle outbreak even of this magnitude. But nobody knows whether B.C.'s climate, decades from now, will be able to support pine forests. Nothing is "normal" any more.

"The question is, will there be forests at all in the southern portion of British Columbia's central interior? Will there even be any trees?" Dr. Hebda asks. "It all depends on how much CO{-2} we push into the atmosphere."

Although the beetle outbreak began only in the 1990s, the story really began about 140 years ago, with an event that gave B.C.'s pine forests their dominant, bug-vulnerable characteristics. That event involved another plague, smallpox, which decimated B.C.'s aboriginal communities, and ended an ancient regime of prescribed-burn landscape management.

The practice of controlled burning of the forest to enhance food-plant production and maintain optimum habitat conditions for mule deer, elk and other game animals has been meticulously documented by University of Victoria ethnobotanist Nancy J. Turner.

She says a "very plausible and likely explanation" for the pine-beetle catastrophe is that the aboriginal regime ended, and was replaced by a rigid orthodoxy of fire suppression -- a central feature of 20th-century industrial forest management -- and now global warming is upon us.

In 2000, B.C.'s drought-stressed, dense and tangled pine forests lost about 184,000 hectares to the beetle. In 2001, the dead zone grew by 785,000 hectares. The next year, 1.96 million hectares turned red, followed by another 4.2 million in 2003 and seven million in 2004.

The toll so far amounts to about 400 million cubic metres of timber, which is enough wood to build another Toronto, another Montreal and another New York. The pace of the infestation is slowing; last year, it spread only to an additional 1.7 million hectares, but even that roughly equals the extent of all the forest set aside for preservation in this year's hard-fought "Great Bear Rainforest" truce.

Nobody is expecting the plague to halt. About half the living pine forest is already gone, and most of the rest is expected to be infested and die within 10 years. The economic prospects of at least 30 B.C. towns and cities have been turned upside down by all this. But the aboriginal communities are facing distinct and daunting challenges.

So, when Dr. Hebda looks into the future, he sees a lot of sagebrush, grassland and rangeland where the pine forests are now, at high elevations, and down among the spruce, fir and ponderosa pine. That's where the Nlakapamux territory is, as well as that of the Okanagan and Ktunaxa.

As if that weren't bad enough, in the north, where pine forests are dominant at low elevations, the Secwepemc, the Tsilhqot'in and the Dakelh-speaking peoples are watching their forests disappear entirely. Pine beetles usually infest only older trees, but lately they have been killing trees less than 20 years old. There's no telling what will come up in their place.

Around the world, UNESCO, Conservation International and the World Wide Fund for Nature have documented direct relationships between biological diversity and cultural diversity, between the loss of forests and the loss of aboriginal culture and language. When the trees go, communities disperse and languages die.

About a third of Canada's native bands can be found in British Columbia, where a rich legacy of ecological diversity is matched by aboriginal linguistic diversity. At least seven of the 11 linguistic families found in Canada occur in B.C., and within those seven families are at least 30 languages. Dozens of aboriginal communities lie in the path of the new plague. Many have already been hit, and hit badly.

"I'm not saying the sky is falling," Dr. Hebda says, "but there is a transformation of everything going on, in the landscape, the forest, the atmosphere, our communities, and our economies. This will obviously mean a transformation of aboriginal culture too."

That transformation is already well under way among the Dakelh-speaking people who occupy a vast region of dead and dying lodgepole pine in northern B.C. Among them are the Tlazten, about 800 people in several remote communities, the largest of which is Tache, about 65 kilometres north of Fort Saint James.

The Tlazten have always known mountain pine beetles, but no one has seen anything like this, says local resident Celestine Thomas, 75. The first thing she noticed after the forests turned red was that the squirrels and the rabbits started vanishing. Then, 22 moose were found dead "from ticks." Now, the trap lines are coming up empty, and it's getting harder to find devil's club, for medicine.

Veronica Campbell, 54, who lives in Fort St. James, says Shastzulh Mountain used to be covered in snow year-round, but not now. Even the songbirds are leaving, and so are the woodpeckers. "The place is becoming a desert," she says. "There's not much here that's left to pass on to our children. We might become extinct, that's what I'm afraid of. We don't stand a chance."

To the southwest of the Tlazten are the Stellaten people, whose main reserve lies about 150 kilometres west of Prince George on the highway to Prince Rupert. About half of the community's 420 people live on the reserve, and while joblessness is high, many were already employed in logging and sawmilling when the beetles came.

At the time, there was great hope that increased logging, to "salvage" beetle-infested trees, would jump-start the reserve economy and put the community on a more solid, competitive footing. There was also optimism about a revival in the Dakelh language, which only about two dozen Stellaten people still speak.

Now, everyone's optimism is quickly dimming, Stellaten chief Patrick Michell says. Nobody expected the scale of the infestation. First, the animals started to move out of the area. Then strange things started happening. A huge cougar began to prowl around the reserve, and in the nearby town of Fraser Lake, dogs and cats started to go missing. Soon, the whole forest was dying, along with everything in it.

The region's annual allowable cut suddenly shot up to three million cubic metres of timber, but Mr. Michell says his people soon found there was no way they could compete with the big forest companies. And the windfall won't last anyway. The quota is expected to fall back to about 70,000 cubic metres a year within 15 years.

"This is going to leave ghost towns," he adds. "The question is whether it's going to change our village into a ghost town."

A beetle-killed pine can stay standing and hold its value for years after its death, and forest companies are scrambling to "salvage" as much of the pine as they can. That scramble has boosted the annual cut in B.C.'s interior by one-third, or roughly 12.73 million cubic metres of wood.

To get an idea how much that is, picture a convoy of fully loaded logging trucks, bumper to bumper, from Vancouver to Toronto -- and then back again. That's just the amount of "extra" timber coming out of B.C.'s beetle-ravaged pine forests now, every year.

Among the companies cutting all these trees is Canfor Corp., now the world's second-largest forest company. Its pine is being processed at high-tech "super mills" like the one the company opened two months ago in Houston, an old logging town a morning's drive west of Stellaten on the highway to Prince Rupert. The Houston mill is capable of churning out 600 million cubic metres of wood every year. That's almost 10 times the annual output of the average Ontario sawmill.

"When I think about the future now, what I worry is that I will see an empty reserve," Mr. Michell says. "I see only a handful of people here, with nowhere else to go."

The prospects are perhaps not so bleak, far to the southeast, in the dry, rolling hills of the Secwepemc territory. But Ron Ignace, 59, former chair of the Assembly of First Nations' chiefs committee on languages and the long-time chief of the Skeetchestn community, east of Kamloops, is under no illusions about the threat the beetle infestation presents to aboriginal communities.

"It's taken a long time for people to see the connections between biological diversity and cultural diversity," he says. "There is a sense of hopelessness about this, but when people find there are others out there, working on language, they fight hard."

His wife, Marianne , a widely respected anthropologist and linguist, is among those "working on language" in B.C., and she's quick to point out that the dilemma is not so simple as forest loss resulting in language loss. "It goes the other way around too."

Language loss is often a function of dispossession and the loss of control over land and resources, she says. Lose that control, and the forest goes -- which has been the story of B.C.'s aboriginal peoples since the arrival of smallpox.

Now, of more than 6,000 people in 16 far-flung communities, perhaps only 200 are fluent in Secwepemc, a beautiful language that relies heavily on verbs and verb constructions, and is averse to naming things or people. (It is even Secwepemc custom to avoid directly naming people in conversation.) When spoken, it sounds like no European language: There are twice as many consonants, along with pops and clicks and glottal stops -- and a lot going on at the back of the throat.

"I think people are realizing now how precious these languages are, and how precarious things are getting," Marianne Michell says. "And with the loss of language goes the loss of detailed local knowledge."

Back at Spences Bridge, at Vicky's Café, David Walkem drinks the last of his coffee. He is talking about the loss of knowledge -- the elaborate technique and methodology required to manage forests with prescribed burning.

"What I don't know is whether the damage in our area could get any worse," he says. "We met Simon Fraser just a few miles from here, when he came through in 1808. Then there was the gold rush, and then the railways came through, and disease, and residential schools, and we've already lost almost all of our fluent speakers. But you know, we're the lucky ones, around here. It's not like all of our forests are going to die.

"Still, we're going to have to bring fire back, somehow. We should never have stopped. But for a lot of it, it's too late. The forest isn't the same. Everything would go up. It would blow up like a bomb. It would burn the soil and everything, and there would be nothing left."

Terry Glavin is a writer, conservationist and adjunct professor with the University of British Columbia's fine arts department. His latest book is entitled Waiting for the Macaws, and is published by Penguin Group (Canada).