There is a guest editorial in The NY Times by Claire Cameron (Link through the paywall):
Cameron, like many Canadians, once spent a summer working for the forestry industry replanting clearcut land with seedling pines.
In the early 1990s, I worked as a tree planter in northern Ontario. This was a common — if notoriously grueling — rite of passage for Canadian university students, since it allowed you to make good money while spending a few months outdoors with other like-minded young people. I was driven in part by the idealistic view that planting a tree was always going to be better than not planting one.
In retrospect, this wasn’t true. Forestry experts understand that a monoculture of trees — like the black spruce saplings we were planting, six feet apart in neat rows — has made wildfires more likely, and much worse when they occur.
Planting nothing but one species of tree in a landscape that has been stripped of every other species is not recreating a forest. It’s planting a cash crop, no different from plowing up a meadow supporting hundreds of different plants and planting nothing but corn. You’d never mistake a cornfield for a meadow, but it’s easy to look at a bunch of trees and think you’re seeing a forest.
Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them “gas on a stick.” The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil. In “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World,” an investigation of the devastating wildfire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, John Vaillant laid out how climate change had turned some forests into combustible time bombs, where “drought conditions, noonday heat and a stiff wind” can turn a black spruce tree into “something closer to a blowtorch.”
In a naturally occurring forest, black spruce is often found in a mix with trees like aspen and poplar, which are full of moisture and provide a natural resistance to fire. But as a report by the Forest Practices Board of British Columbia pointed out, “Large homogeneous patches of forest are more likely to lead to large and severe wildfires.”
A forest is not just a bunch of trees.
The forestry industry likes to greenwash what it does as being sound stewardship of the land, that it ‘manages’ forests to keep them healthy.
What they actually do is turn a complex ecosystem into a uniform ‘product’ that can be easily harvested, grown to size in minimum time at minimum expense for maximum profit. That’s not a living forest; it’s a bio-factory assembly line. A natural forest is a complex interlocking system of different species of plants, animals, and fungi, shaped by factors like soil, water, and climate. It’s ‘messy’.
Dr. Suzanne Simard’s “Finding the Mother Tree” is the story of her personal journey as her years of work in the field and in the lab revealed that what is happening in a natural forest is more about cooperation than competition between different organisms. The simplistic notion that getting rid of all the ‘junk’ trees will free up the ‘good’ trees from competition so they can grow better turns out not to be the case.
Take soil for example. Clear-cutting a natural forest leaves the soil disturbed and vulnerable. It devastates the fungal communities in it that thrive among the roots of plants, including trees. These fungi act as a kind of messenger/transport system, exchanging nutrients and chemical messages between each other and the host plants they co-exist with. This exchange allows different plant species to co-exist and actually foster each other’s growth and health.
Stripping away the ground cover to harvest trees in a clear cut destroys those networks, and planting just one species of tree loses all of the surviving network that requires a mix of species to thrive. Simard first began to wonder about this when she noted that many of the seedlings she was planting in clear cuts while working as a forester failed to thrive, despite supposedly being selected as prime stock.
Simard’s work is part of growing body of work parsing out all the ways a diverse forest interacts to maintain itself and respond to disruption. “Mother trees” for example are mature individuals who may go so far as to stint their own needs to boost the survival of their seedlings.
Unlike humans, forest communities function for the long term, not just immediate survival. A diverse plant community supports a greater variety of animal and bird species. Species diversity allows these biological communities to respond to disruption like fire, flood, drought, disease, etc. to maintain themselves over time. Even so, climate change is stressing them, perhaps faster than they can respond. So, what chance does a monoculture like acres and acres of black spruce all the same age planted six feet apart have as things get hotter and drier?
Kauffman’s Rule 5 applies here, and not just to natural systems:
5. Nature knows best. Natural ecosystems have evolved over millions of years, and everything in them has a role to play. Be very suspicious of any proposal to alter or eliminate an apparently "useless" part of the system. If it looks useless, that just means that you don't understand its function, and the risk of doing harm is that much greater. When in doubt, be careful, and always try to find a "natural" solution to a problem if at all possible.
Superficially, planting thousands of trees must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but doing it in a way that just served logging company interests turns out to have been a bad idea. It was a policy choice as the essay notes: “In Ontario the responsibility for woodland regeneration had largely been transferred to the forestry businesses that held the logging contracts; as part of those contracts, they could do things like cut more trees or reduce their government fees if they invested in reforestation.” The logging company got the profits — the rest of us are getting the costs. If there is a justification for clear cutting a forest other than maximizing profits, I am not aware of it.
Climate Change is a stress test that’s revealing all of the vulnerabilities human activity has created around the world. The short-term thinking that only focuses on immediate returns and increasing shareholder value is ultimately self-defeating in the long run — and that run is coming to an end.
It’s not enough to mean well. We must know that what we do actually turns out well.