08/21/2025
All across Canada, from coast to coast, except for Saskatchewan, we wage chemical and mechanical warfare against the deciduous forest type to grow the most flammable forest type possible. (Saskatchewan requires conifer planting but aspen is acceptable, so if you get free aspen growing, they just leave it)
We have spent billions of dollars spraying and brushing millions and millions of hectares of natural fire break. These are provincial and federal policies. Provinces directly regulate it but the Federal Government has promoted anti-aspen “forest management” for decades and has given us the chemicals to do it. Health Canada approves the spraying of forests with herbicides, including glyphosate, which it requires only 1 meter setback to fish bearing waterways when spraying with a helicopter, and has lied to us about its persistence in forest ecosystems. (BC exceeds the federal guidelines and requires 10 meter buffer to fish bearing water when spraying with helicopter even though drift has been measured over 800 meters away)
Meanwhile our national identity is wrapped up around treeplanting, which is a great Canadian cultural touchstone and which is 99.999% about planting the fire trap plantation you see on the right.
Yes climate change is making fire worse but forest management is gasoline on the fire.
These are side by side cutblocks photographed on same day on kilometre 18 of the Grizzly Forest Service road about 10 km south of Bobtail Lake. The one on the left was logged in 1972 and allowed to regenerate mostly naturally. It has a healthy mixture of 7 species of trees The one on the right was logged in the 1980’s and sprayed twice in the 1990’s. It is almost 100% pine.
The Forest on left has rich biodiversity, devils club, shrubs, berries, lots of leafy vegetation and extensive evidence of ungulate activity (moose, deer, cattle), had heavy bird activity, and was moist and lush. The Forest on right had some pine grass and alder in pine understory. No observed evidence of ungulate activity on short inspection. Very quiet with few birds.
Of course it is well documented that healthy deciduous components boost biodiversity and wildlife carrying capacity, but you won’t see government moose researchers point any fingers at the forest on the right which we’ve covered our landscape in, when we talk about catastrophic moose declines. Apparently growing landscapes of dried out, low biodiversity pine with next to no moose food doesn’t matter.
