We return to our conversation with Rachel Plotkin from the David Suzuki Foundation and Dr. Julee Boan from Natural Resources Defense Council. This week we’re talking caribou and the economics of forestry.
Boreal caribou habitat overlaps with forest areas where harvesting takes place. Caribou are also a species-at-risk, in trouble across the country. Julee and Rachel break down two narratives that are simultaneously taking place. One behind closed doors that seems to understand the science and is amenable to protecting this indicator species. But then in the public arena, the narrative flips to paint caribou conservation as a threat to economic health. Are economic and environmental values inherently at odds? Or as Rachel says, is there “room for both”?
Check out more of Rachel and Julee's work by reading The State of the Forest in Canada: Seeing Through the Spin and the Room for Both reports.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
We return to our conversation with Rachel Plotkin from the David Suzuki Foundation and Dr. Julee Boan from Natural Resources Defense Council. This week we’re talking caribou and the economics of forestry.
Boreal caribou habitat overlaps with forest areas where harvesting takes place. Caribou are also a species-at-risk, in trouble across the country. Julee and Rachel break down two narratives that are simultaneously taking place. One behind closed doors that seems to understand the science and is amenable to protecting this indicator species. But then in the public arena, the narrative flips to paint caribou conservation as a threat to economic health. Are economic and environmental values inherently at odds? Or as Rachel says, is there “room for both”?
Check out more of Rachel and Julee's work by reading The State of the Forest in Canada: Seeing Through the Spin and the Room for Both reports.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
Welcome to the Clear Cut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.
Kaya Adleman:And I'm Kaya Adelman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.
Janet Sumner:Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.
Kaya Adleman:The Clear Cut is bringing to you the much-needed conversation on Canadian forest management and how we can better protect one of Canada's most important ecosystems, as our forests are reaching a tipping point.
Janet Sumner:All right, it's our second episode with Julie and Rachel as I said, two of the hardest working women in conservation and we are going to dive into more conversation about caribou in this episode the Alps. So she'll be gone for a couple of weeks, but we're going to stay online with our episodes, so you don't need to worry about that, and maybe when she gets back and we start to dive into the next episode, we'll ask her how her trip went. But right now I want to start with a little bit of a rant. I want to talk about wildfires and what's coming up and why this is just really annoying me. And so, for example, this last week, I've been seeing all kinds of media on the fact that we've already started into wildfire season, that wildfires are burning right now as we sit here, and yet last summer, all I saw as a response was two or three things. One is, yes, we need more firefighters OK, great. But the other response was this is being caused by climate change yes, indeed, but the other response which I was really surprised at or really concerned about was we need to log more faster. And so just go with me on this rant, as I was reading the media again.
Janet Sumner:This week there's a new piece that came out from Stéphane LeBay, who is a reporter at Glacier Media, and he published on. He was at a meeting and he was listening in to the logging industry talking about how their communications need to be more, about how they become a hero in the narrative around wildfires that they can get in and log faster and log more. But the interesting thing is that all the experts who work on fire are now saying that this growing wildfire crisis is actually partially to blame from the logging industry, that when you're logging, or what we've been doing for the last century is we've been suppressing fire, so keep the forest from burning. In a forest that actually very much naturally burns, keep it from burning so that we can log that timber, and that century of fire suppression as a logging practice have left the forest prime to burn. And so, therefore, is the logging industry the hero, or are they one of the culprits in causing this in terms of climate change, et cetera, and logging practices?
Janet Sumner:And then how do you square that? What's the solution? Is it just saying, oh yes, go in and log faster? So we're going to unpack some of that in one of our episodes, but for me, I'm already terrified of this year's wildfire season. It's definitely a problem for people who live in communities that are close to wildfire breakout areas and also for the creatures that live there, but on a planetary scale, it is of concern because it's a huge carbon cost, and then, in addition to that, we had been relying on those forests to help absorb the carbon, and so, both from a climate and a nature perspective and a human perspective, wildfire season is a terrifying prospect.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, and Jen Barron is a fire ecologist out of BC who you're going to hear from in the next episode actually, so she has a lot of really interesting things to say, especially in a media landscape where the conversation around wildfires has been so climate change and planetary warming centric.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, and it's got to be a little bit disconnected, or seemingly so, for the general public, who may or may not be aware of Canada's State of the Forest Report, which seems to say things are all going hunky-dory, or the, to quote another YouTuber, okie-dokie. You know that things are just going along swimmingly in terms of how Canada is managing its forests to see these big outbreaks of wildfires and at the same time, we know that caribou ranges are crashing and that's what we're going to talk to Rachel and Julie about is caribou ranges. Rachel makes the quote that all caribou ranges are in trouble across the country except for three provinces. So we're going to get into a little bit of why that's the case with them, and we've talked before with Justina Ray from WCS and we've had conversations with Anna Baggio, who's also in our shop. But we'll get into more of the caribou conversation with Rachel and Julie, who have worked on those issues for a good long time.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, and maybe to even bridge the gap between our wildfire conversation and our caribou conversation, is that. What I find particularly interesting in this episode is the, the narratives that come from industry about these two issues and how what they're purporting publicly is is benefits them directly, and how do we apply. You know, a critical thinking lens to the messaging that we're getting from the forest industry and considering the science that's out there as well say it's the big commercial.
Janet Sumner:Uh, yeah, folks that are out there painting this message. It almost reminds me of when I used to work on climate change very directly with the oil and gas industry and how they were, uh, selling us their performance on climate change. So this will be interesting to get into with uh, julie and rachel on caribou, I wanted to switch up a little bit and maybe talk about, I don't know, this species you might know a little bit about called caribou. Just, anybody has anything they might want to say on caribou. We've covered caribou.
Janet Sumner:We had Dr Justina Ray on from WCS and we had a great conversation with her and we talked to Anna Baggio, who's also worked on caribou for Wildlands League, and I'm just, I know right now I'm faced with two people who have a long history of working on caribou and thinking about it, and Rachel and I have a bit of a shared history of having done some work on caribou in Alberta and we haven't yet, on the pod, had a chance to talk about Alberta and Caribou. But certainly Julie's also worked on Caribou and very specifically in Ontario as well. So either one of you want to take it away and talk about some things about Caribou.
Rachel Plotkin:As someone who's worked on Caribou for quite a while now, it's a heartbreaking file. Like it's a file that feels like the science is out there that describes what caribou need to survive and recover, and that's not the case for many species. For many species, we know that habitat disturbance, habitat degradation and fragmentation can drive their decline, but there hasn't been studies that show the relationship between the levels of degradation and calf survival like there have been for caribou. And when that was released it felt like such a triumph. It felt like we had the signposts that we needed to guide us in the decision-making processes to actually manage forests so that caribou could survive and recover. And that science came out in 2008.
Rachel Plotkin:Like it's been around for so long and the federal government did do a first good step in mandating provinces to develop caribou range plans and looking at the relationship between disturbance and survival.
Rachel Plotkin:Looking at the relationship between disturbance and survival, they made a social decision about the probability of persistence that they were picking for caribou for provinces to abide by and that probability of persistence was 60%. So they're mandating provinces to develop caribou range plans so that every caribou range has a minimum of 65% undisturbed, unfragmented habitat and, where that's been surpassed that it should be restored, and again like that's a 60% probability of survival for caribou. So what it did was it tipped the trend away from declining towards recovering, but like who wants a 60% chance that they're going to survive, you know? Like it's not very high. And even then, like there's just been so much reticence from provinces, especially the province where we live, Ontario, and the forestry industry, to just step up and take on the responsibility of if we're going to have caribou. We need to change our practices. We need to plan to ensure that these minimum unfragmented habitat thresholds are upheld, and it's just been devastating to watch year after year as basically business as usual practices have continued in caribou habitat.
Julee Boan:It's been heartbreaking and it's also been exhausting and I think in part that might be part of a strategy, I think, sometimes to wear people down until they just give up. So for me, like Rachel, like you, janet, like been talking about caribou but not caribou meetings with industry and done planning and been with government and sat with scientists in just years and years and years, and I have once in a while I do hear something that seems uplifting and exciting that's happening, although these processes take a long time. So there's always, there's always worry that you know a fickle government might change its mind, but there are. There are some hopeful moments, but there are still a lot of spaces where I attend sessions but I don't say very much anymore because it's clearly stuck in some. Sometimes it's even two steps backwards in the conversation.
Julee Boan:I find many people don't realize that in those science conversations we are building on the science that's already there. There's hundreds of studies that have been done on caribou. Most of those studies there's nothing fundamentally different about what's coming out of them. They're, you know, nuanced and finessed topics and information that help fine tune how we manage caribou habitat. But I have not seen anything come out that has said that disturbance isn't a major driver of caribou. In the 15 years since the original federal science was done, in fact, those studies coming out are validating and reaffirming that. But then, attending some of these public consultation sessions, you'd think it was the opposite.
Rachel Plotkin:One of the things that has been just so frustrating to see and, janet, you mentioned Alberta, alberta kind of has led the way on this is Band-Aid solutions. So when Caribbeanibou are declining and they want to keep on doing their industrial resource extraction practices as they do, that they have set up predator control programs to kill wolves in perpetuity, year after year after year, wolves which have evolved, co-evolved with caribou as their prey and have like a symbiotic relationship and are certainly not you know the problem. They're just the proxy for the problem, which is the habitat fragmentation that has changed the rates of success of predation and penning and sometimes building permanent fences to keep caribou away from wolves. That's just. It's just so appalling to me that those mechanisms for keeping caribou alive, so that the provinces don't have to wear their extirpation, have been allowed to go ahead and have become normalized. And I think another thing that's become normalized is our narratives about habitat protection. One of the things that we talk about sometimes is the need for species at risk legislation to prioritize the needs of habitat protection and restoration and wildlife recovery, and what we see in the absence of that is the language of balance, and so politicians are always talking about the need to balance ecological and economic objectives and, for one thing, we don't see them as polar opposites. There can be green rewards in the marketplace for doing sustainable logging things like FSC you mentioned you had on your show but it's just. It's a landscape of diminishing returns for species like caribou.
Rachel Plotkin:You have 100 hectares in 2000 and industry wants it and there's caribou there and a politician says, okay, well, we'll balance it and we'll give 50 hectares to caribou and 50 hectares to industry.
Rachel Plotkin:And then, five years later, someone comes along and they want hectares to caribou and 50 hectares to industry. And then, five years later, someone comes along and they want to keep logging caribou habitat and the politician of the day says, okay, well, we'll balance these values and we'll take the 50 hectares and we'll give 25 to caribou and 25 to industry. And that plays out until you have ranges like the little smoky, where scientists think there is one or two percent left habitat that is undisturbed. And, honestly, the forestry industry is still there saying you need to take our values into consideration as well. We need to keep logging and the plans are to keep logging in the Little Smoky habitat, and that I mean that's a crisis to me of government responsibility. It's a crisis in legislation, both at the provincial level and at the federal level, and recognize that in so doing, we are allowing species to disappear, that we could recover if we had the political will and the public mobilization to do so.
Janet Sumner:If you like listening to the Clear Cut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kaya and I.
Kaya Adleman:The link to do so will be in the episode description below. You can also become a supporter by going to our website at wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut and also make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform.
Janet Sumner:It would really help the podcast yeah, here, here, I think um little smoky is a.
Janet Sumner:They've kept what 26 caribou alive through basically killing wolves, penning and doing everything but protecting habitat chance of survival over the long term.
Janet Sumner:Penning and shooting wolves was not considered the path back to ecological health. It was at best a crutch, but it's. I mean, the whole reason that we work on caribou, the whole reason that any of us have ever worked on caribou, is because we care about the health of the ecosystem and caribou are a good proxy for that. They help us understand whether or not the ecosystem is doing well and to have all of these different ways that we can artificially, um, protect, uh, a group of caribou and not even a population, but a group of caribou, it's. It's a false, it's a false dawn, it doesn't tell the actual story. So I share the pain. I have worked on Caribou, like both of you have, for over 20 years and I would suggest that it's not only a failure of legislation but it's a failure of enforcement At some point. The only way that good legislation works is if somebody actually steps up and uses it and enforces it, and we have yet to see some form of a protection order or some form of a safety net order for caribou.
Janet Sumner:Meanwhile ranges are declining and in the red zone right across Canada, so I don't know what it's going to take, but at some point somebody has to do something, or we will just see the end of caribou, and that will mean that the boreal ecosystem is in dire straits.
Rachel Plotkin:And in places like Ontario where they had strong species at risk legislation the Endangered Species Act. When it was brought into force they granted a year long exemption for forestry and that exemption just turned over, and turned over, and turned over until finally it was turned permanent. So forestry does not have to adhere to the prohibitions against habitat destruction under the Endangered Species Act in Ontario.
Julee Boan:I live in northern Ontario, been to dozens and dozens and dozens of town halls and public events around caribou and people are genuinely concerned about losing their jobs, I mean, and they should be. I mean we have two mills right now at least temporarily shuttered, possibly permanently shuttered, and that can have a ripple effect through the entire forestry sector because of how the mills are set up and interconnected, and so people come to these town halls when what they're really scared about is their jobs and their communities and their kids and their futures. And there are unscrupulous individuals that come there and say what you really need to be scared about are caribou and you need to be scared about are caribou and you need to be scared, really scared of these people.
Janet Sumner:yeah, I agree with that. I think that one of the big challenges if you're not protecting caribou habitat, that means your fiber supply is also going to be in trouble because your forests are switching in terms of the, maybe even the ecotype. We're seeing that um, more grasslands in the southern boreal and we're seeing conversion and we're seeing things change and so if you don't take care of caribou, then you know your ecosystem is going to be changing and that's got to be a concern for the long-term health of communities and forest-dependent communities. So I agree with you. Forest-dependent communities. So I agree with you. I don't know if it's unscrupulous, but I think it is certainly part of a strategy to minimize and sideline the caribou discussion.
Rachel Plotkin:Yeah, caribou are often blamed for downturns in the industry that are actually due to global market forces.
Julee Boan:In the like, say, the economic column of interests in forests. There are huge corporations, there are indigenous tenure holders, there are workers in mills and sometimes everyone is lumped into one like monolith of economic interest. But actually a lot of those interests are also in conflict at times. When I see workers pitted against Caribou, that's when I start getting concerned. It's at best unfair and it's, I would say, at worst it's intentional about also not just pushing off the discussion on to Caribou but relinquishing responsibility of some of the actors on the forest about how they're, how they are, impacting communities yeah, absolutely okay, fair, fair point.
Janet Sumner:I. I take your point on that. Um, I guess I was. I was suggesting that it is kind of like in the climate change world. What we did for a long time is we denied climate change. It says, oh, it doesn't exist. And then we said, well, it's not caused by us, it's caused by other things. And so now, finally, we've decided, yes, it is caused by emissions, and we've decided we need to solve that. But now we're going to say, well, we can't possibly solve this because it will mean that everybody's life is worse off because they need to use oil products and we can't possibly have a transition that goes beyond that. So that's what I mean by a strategy.
Janet Sumner:I think that some in the industry are kind of looking over their shoulder at the success of the climate change resistors and how that strategy has worked out for oil and gas. And now they're looking in a forestry way. It's like caribou are not our problem. I think Rachel talked about this. Caribou weren't in decline because of us. They were in decline because of other things that might have been. Hey, I think it was climate change that caused the decline, and um, and then it's like the science comes out under stephen harper government. It's not not like it came out under, you know, left-leaning governments. It was a government that had, but had, integrity around the science, so that's fantastic. But anyway, I just I feel that there is some greater strategy at play as well, as you know offloading by corporate interests their responsibility around this.
Rachel Plotkin:It certainly has been successful because both Julie and I have been in northern communities where downturns in the forestry industry have been blamed on caribou, even though the forestry industry was exempt from having to protect caribou habitat. And one of the things that I think is interesting is that, because there have been some downturns in the market, there actually is room to protect caribou habitat, and Julie and I co-authored a report on this called Room for Both. But again, caribou can be such a good proxy for what is needed to maintain the health of the boreal forest and we can use their habitat needs to develop plans that are truly sustainable.
Kaya Adleman:Well, I think it's more along the lines of I mean, I'm not. I'm not a woman in STEM, so not as cool as you guys, but my background is economics mainly, and it seems like terrible, like forestry issues, like no one companies aren't thinking about the long-term or the long run, but everyone's thinking about the short term and how to maximize value for shareholders. So it's let's shell out all of this money like for Band-Aid solutions, like you were saying, rachel. Let's, you know, do caribou penning. Let's, you know, kill wolves to stop predation. Let's make everything look good.
Kaya Adleman:Let's spend tens of millions of dollars on like a glossy forestry for the future campaign and let's not actually invest any money in creating longer term solutions that will help the survival of the industry, like creating more value added products, rethinking, like product input mixes. Yeah, it's just that's. What drives me crazy, I think, is that there's all this money that's being spent, that's being put into these bandaid solutions, and no money be seemingly being invested into like the longevity of employment opportunities and the longevity of the industry, because if there's no more forest to harvest, at the end of the day, the mills won't have anything to run on.
Julee Boan:And I think there will be forests to harvest. It's just what. Will those forests be good for? Harvesting is a big question. Is it going to mostly be forests, that the best value we can get from it is to burn it for energy at a plant in the United Kingdom, or is it a tree that can help solve a housing crisis problem in an Indigenous community?
Janet Sumner:I think the other thing about working on caribou is that while we care about the health of the forest, we also do care about long-term fiber supply, and from my perspective, I've often been thinking about this, as is it time to transition to a economy that thinks more in the ways of how do we diversify the number of tree species that we might be harvesting, the types of inputs that we're putting into mills, the types of materials that maybe we produce out of it, what are the products, what are the other ways that we can look at forestry, and could we even make the carbon metrics work for us?
Janet Sumner:So, for example, I think if we can show that we're doing less damage in the forest, that should be worth something in terms of the carbon market. If we were to take full ownership of the carbon emissions, then certainly we could take more full ownership of the carbon potential savings that we might be able to administer if we were to do this seriously. But by shrouding all of this in a lot of a very sleight of hand game, it prevents us from being able to design the policies and decisions that could actually integrate carbon and caribou and long-term jobs and long-term survival of those ecosystems. So I think that it's well beyond time for the federal and provincial governments to be much more transparent about the impacts of the actions that are occurring and then what the true state of the forest is. Where do you see hope?
Rachel Plotkin:One of the places I see hope is the growing recognition of Indigenous leadership and the application of Indigenous governance, and our provinces have been doing so poorly in managing them and enabling degradation, and I really look forward to spaces wherein Indigenous governance flourishes and Indigenous people can reclaim their ability to be the decision makers over forest and forest ecosystems we see a lot of opportunity.
Julee Boan:I mean, we're so fortunate in Canada we have a lot of forest and there is a lot of potential about what can be done there.
Julee Boan:I do think we do need to address, like some of our local problems first with our forests, rather than having commodities that we're selling overseas. We have issues we need to solve solve and there is a role for forestry and forest to play in that. But, as I said, I think it's stepping back and thinking more broadly about what a forest is and how are we going to steward this resource and making sure that, you know, everyone is able to come equally to the table to bring all the skills and knowledge and innovation that's outside of the forestry sector as well. There is a lot of innovation potential from other people in other sectors and other places that need to be brought into this conversation in a meaningful way and actually be able to influence how the decisions are made, rather than being considered sort of secondary to the approach that's being taken right now, and so I think a lot of the potential lies in how we actually go about making decisions around forests and who has control over these decisions and who is welcome to the table.
Rachel Plotkin:I think just one other thing that provides me hope, especially because in places like Alberta and British Columbia there's no doubt that caribou are not going to survive unless restoration is done quickly and it's done well and it works. We still don't know if restoration is going to work for caribou at the population scale and at the landscape scale. But one of the things that brings me hope is that we are in an era where we are talking about restoration, where the federal government has prioritized it and hopefully that's something that lasts. But I think the most hopeful thing is just the kind of awe I have of nature's regenerative force. You know that it's like restoration is something that we just have to help. We just have to create the space for it, and nature's drive is kind of regenerative and that brings me hope that sometimes all we have to really do is just stand back and give nature the of these important stories to life.
Kaya Adleman:You can actually support our work by going to our website, wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut, or you can click the link in the episode description below. Your support means the world to us.
Janet Sumner:I'll just speak to not that I'm being asked this question, because I usually ask the questions, but I would say that one of the reasons we do this podcast is because we have hope.
Janet Sumner:We have hope in the fact that, if we are to bring out these stories from all different kinds of people, from all walks of Canadians across the country you know, speaking to scientists, speaking to advocates, speaking to people who live on the land, like David Flood, where he talks about the Honorable Harvest, etc. Practitioners like Francois once was and is now the head of FSC. So these conversations, I'm hoping, bring Canadians a little bit closer to the truth of what's going on in our forests and thereby starts to create a number of people who want to take action, because a lot of this is hidden from the general public. Certainly, the State of the Forest report doesn't give greater clarity to people, but I'm hopeful that these conversations will actually start to inform people and potentially change some of the things that we're doing. So that's why we're doing this, because it gives me some hope. Yeah, the frustration is there for sure.
Rachel Plotkin:We're still here.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, it's also to compare stories, because you see, some of the stories that get told about forest fires, for example, or what gets told about caribou, or, for example, oh, we have to get in and log in a park before it burns, you know those kinds of things that are happening in different parts of the country and yet they don't know that it's happening from one province to the next. And so I'm hoping, by revealing some of this, we'll get to that. And that's what I think is effective about the state of the forest. Seeing through this bin is that it starts to give Canadians a lot more tools to be able to look at the reality of what's going on in their forests. So I think it's a hopeful report in my mind. There's definitely sending it out there with the intention that people will grasp it and start to say, well, what about this, what about that? So I'm hopeful about that.
Julee Boan:And so you know that we do have a stateoftheforestca website and that does include all of the scientific literature and reports that we cited in our paper, and we're hoping to keep adding to that site. So when people are interested in understanding what research has been done out there, what is it saying about some of these sustainability metrics and forest degradation in particular, there'll be a place for people to go and and grab that in like one place. So we'd love it if the podcast could also um link the website, because it'll help and we're absolutely we're in a process of trying to do more, but at least it's.
Kaya Adleman:There's a place for it now do you guys have any other calls to action, like how can people get involved just with your work or with the state of the forest seeing through the spin report?
Rachel Plotkin:One of the things that people can do is gain the literacy so that they themselves can see through the spin. I think that a lot of the challenge of achieving caribou conservation is because industry has had such a success in creating anti-conservation narratives in northern communities, where there's just so much opposition to the idea of habitat protection without recognition that it could exist alongside jobs, recognition that it could exist alongside jobs. So I think it's, yeah, learning to ask the right questions and listening to lots more of your podcasts.
Janet Sumner:Thanks for that. I often compare being an environmentalist to one of my favorite games at the fair when you go there and I think it's called whack-a-mole, where you have to kind of like you have to whack that one and this one, and Julie's comments about the multitude of processes and trying to navigate all of that feels a lot like to me, like whack-a-mole. It's like a new argument against why you can't do good things. Oh, here's another new argument. Oh, another new argument. And it's like oh, now we're on replay and I'm actually back to the first argument.
Julee Boan:That's what I mean One step forward, two steps back.
Janet Sumner:So, as you can tell from this episode, I went to the fair a few number of times. Actually, the London Western Fair, that's what I went to as a child, and I played whack-a-mole and loved it, and I could sometimes win at the game not often, but, yeah, that was one of my favorite games at the fair, so I wouldn't say that it's my favorite game. Now, though, when I think about playing whack-a-mole in real life and trying to resolve the caribou issue and trying to resolve all the forestry issues that we've been working on and it's not enough to just be outside the door and be a critic, but actually being inside the door takes a great deal of patience, and that's why I have huge respect for Julie and Rachel, because they've been inside the door working with governments and working to try to find solutions with progressive industry, yet we still after what was it? She said?
Janet Sumner:The reports came out in 2010, 2012, on caribou and you had to do your caribou plans, and over a decade later, we're still waiting for these caribou plans, meanwhile caribou plans, and over a decade later, we're still waiting for these caribou plans. Meanwhile, caribou are declining and we still haven't got the solutions. We still haven't followed our own guideposts and done that. Instead, we've been playing whack-a-mole for a decade.
Kaya Adleman:I wouldn't want to play whack-a-mole for a decade.
Kaya Adleman:I mean it's fun for like 10 minutes maybe, but maybe not a decade.
Kaya Adleman:I mean it's fun for like 10 minutes maybe, but maybe not.
Kaya Adleman:Maybe not a decade. Yeah, I think what stood out to me in this conversation was this idea that there's kind of two separate discussions happening behind closed doors and in the public arena, and then what's frustrating also to me just to hear is that we have this legislation in place and it's not being followed through on at all, and then the message behind the closed doors is oh yeah, like you, I mean kudos to Rachel and Julie for sticking through it, because I could imagine that's yeah, more whack-a-mole, maybe not Maybe. I think I also just want to maybe amend some of my comments during our interview when I was talking about the idea that industry is spending millions of dollars on caribou penning areas, predation strategies, marketing campaigns, as opposed to investing in ensuring the long-term future of the forest industry. I think my main point with that was that it's a market inefficiency, that there's something wrong in the market functions of the forest industry in Canada as a whole, and it might be time to correct some of those problems.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, it's about protecting yourself rather than doing the work to change the practices. And I wouldn't want to brandish it and say it's every participant, because, as I've mentioned I think previously when we interviewed Anna that I personally have worked on caribou conservation plans in several different regions of this country Quebec, ontario, alberta, and then more perfectly, in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and there are some very good companies out there who want to do good things and they try to do them, but often they get penned in sorry the pun there. They get penned in on their strategies and their attempts to make a difference by regulations or rules that won't allow them to be more innovative.
Janet Sumner:And so that's deeply frustrating. So my hat's off to them as well, because I know that the caribou issue is not an easy one, and we seem to have set it up so that we can't change and all we do is or what seems to be the result, is funding for more process and all we do is, or what seems to be.
Kaya Adleman:the result is funding for more process. Yeah, and it is hard to be a good individual actor in a market that is inherently flawed, right?
Janet Sumner:Yeah, yeah, exactly, Okay. Well, and when we get back together, we'll maybe be able to hear from Kaya on how her ALP trip was kaya on how her alp trip was.
Kaya Adleman:Yes, I'm. I'm going with my partner and he's never been to the alps before, which I have a lot of experience in because of the german side of my family, and I was trying to hear watching videos last night of um, those alp alpine slides that you can do. It's really, really exciting. I think you're really looking forward to going is he excited or terrified?
Kaya Adleman:um, I think mostly, mostly excited, mostly excited. Good, there are a few videos. Um, if you look up alpine slide video compilations on youtube, if that's something that you want to spend your time doing, there are a few videos that are crashing. Alpine slide crashes, yeah, so it can be dangerous. You know it's scary stuff out there.
Janet Sumner:Well, hopefully, kayak comes back in one piece and we can resume our terrific conversations that we're having, and by that time I will also presumably have had my kayak in the water. I'm intending to get it in the water this weekend, so so I hope we can share stories about that.
Kaya Adleman:So yeah, and again, I'll pen slides. And again, if you want to read Julie andachel's stay in the forest report, it'll be linked in the episode description below and we'll also be linking the room for both report on caribou that was mentioned in our episode. Um, yeah, and go check out.
Janet Sumner:Uh, stay the forestca if you want, yeah, and the fire piece piece that I mentioned will probably put that in our fire ecologist. I just couldn't resist the rant because I'm getting very, very concerned about wildfires in Canada On all different levels, from a human to a nature, to a climate perspective.
Kaya Adleman:As we all are.
Janet Sumner:If you like listening to the Clear Cut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kai and I. The link to do so will be in the episode description below.
Kaya Adleman:You can also become a supporter by going to our website at wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut and also make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform. It would really help the podcast and stay tuned for new episodes by following us on social media.
Janet Sumner:That's at Wildlands League on Instagram, twitter and Facebook or LinkedIn, of course.
Kaya Adleman:See you next time.