The Clear Cut
A deep dive into Canada’s approach to forest management. How does it work? What are the issues? What needs to change in order to meet our climate and biodiversity commitments? Hear from the experts in the line of fire, working to protect one of the country’s most valuable ecosystems.
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The Clear Cut
The Clear Cut - Looking Back (& Farewell Kaya 🥹)
Join Jan Sumner and Kaya Adleman for this special episode as they look back on all they've unpacked on the Clear Cut. It's a bittersweet one as this is Kaya's last time as co-host before the show goes on hiatus.
Topics include: misguided industry responses to fire suppression, deceptive practices, greenwashing and pathways to a reimagined future for forestry management in Canada.
We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Kaya for taking us on an exploratory journey of Canada's forests and forestry practices.
Thank you for listening!
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Welcome to the Clear Cut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.
Speaker 2:And I'm Kaya Adelman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.
Speaker 1:Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.
Speaker 2: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. Welcome back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice to see you, Kaya. It's been a few weeks since Kaya and I sat down across the Zoom and recorded an episode. So before we started recording, I said to Kaya, what the heck are we going to talk about today? And the reason I said that is because we have come to the end of our time with Kaya. We're going to have to say goodbye to her and that's and that's really sad for me.
Speaker 1:Uh, I have loved every minute of our recording sessions and our time together, and this past year has been really a treat to work with her. Um, it also keeps me, um, thinking and refreshes my mindset, and it's, uh, really, really good for me to be working with somebody across generations, which is absolutely something that we have to keep doing. For me, kaya's going to be a big miss on the podcast, and we'll see if we can get back up and running in September, maybe with a new host or just continuing with boring old me, and we'll see where we go. But the podcast will be going on hiatus after this for a few weeks and then we'll see where we are. Back in September, kaya can tell us a little bit more about where she's going and what she's going to be doing, and maybe we could start with that. And congratulations, kaya, for this next stage in your life.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you, thank you. And you know, likewise I'm. This is a very bittersweet recording for me because I mean, as as excited as I am to go on to the next uh stage in my, in my career, um, this has been a very, um amazing experience and you know, I've learned so much um in the work that I've done and seen everyone else do at Wildlands League. And I will just say, janet, um, you know, even though you think that you're from an older generation, I will say, when you reached out to me to schedule this final recording, your intro was hope, you've been having a brat summer, so you are very with it. You know I don't think the podcast would be, you know with it. You know I don't think I don't think the podcast would be, you know, culturally irrelevant. I do like the color chartreuse.
Speaker 3:I do like the color chartreuse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I must confess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I am going to law school in the fall. I am moving back to the US and I'm going to law school in the fall. I am moving back to the US and I'm going to be attending Rutgers University in Newark and hopefully that will be the start of my journey towards a career in environmental law, which has kind of always been a lifelong goal for me. The law school has kind of always been a stage point in my life, since I was very young. Um, I think a lot of my environmental advocacy work has also tied into that as well.
Speaker 2:Um, and I've from from a very young age. You know, I grew up in a, I was raised in a Jewish household and the ideas of service and giving back to your community and making the world a better place were very ingrained in me, and working on these very big issues climate change and biodiversity and nature loss have always been very poignant and, yeah, so it's always been on the trajectory. But, yes, and I've been very grateful to gain all the experience and be able to work on the podcast at Wildlands.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what Kaya does and how she grows out in the world and what she brings to it. She's a very detailed person, as many of you may have heard me on the podcast, kaya is the one who does the research and figures out what everybody has written or done before and when they come to the podcast. We're well armed with all of that information so we can make the interviews the best we possibly can and then also provide all of the details and links on the various people that are in each episode. And if you haven't listened to the podcast before, go back and listen to all the different episodes. But for this episode kaya is going to walk us through.
Speaker 1:We thought it might just be good to to sort of walk through all the various episodes and what Kaya had taken from her journey and learned along the way, because we're going to get a chance to discuss that and also discuss it in relevance to today and what's happening right now. Like we've got wildfires. I'm thinking about doing some of the work in Eastern Canada with folks to regrow the Acadian or reestablish the Acadian forest out there. So anyway, taya, you take it away and start walking us through all the things that you've taken away from this podcast, and it's going to be mostly you.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love to yap, so I guess, top of mind, what have I learned from the clear cut? And first of all, so much about Canadian forests. I mean, I have a degree in environmental studies basically. So I mean I have some training and have done a lot of learning about ecology and environmental sciences et cetera, et cetera, but I think I definitely got a huge crash course in everything that there is to know. But even that's the thing, it's not everything that there is to know.
Speaker 2:There's so much more that we haven't covered on the podcast that there is to know about Canada's forests and their global significance. We learned about how forestry and how forests you know what their ecological value is across the country. We went to BC, we were in Alberta, we were in Ontario, we were in Atlantic Canada. So there's definitely like ecological and structural nuances surrounding the forests across the country. But there are many connecting threads, as we've learned, between how forest management works and operates in Canada, and the biggest connecting thread is this feed-the-mill paradigm paradigm and that forest management ultimately serves the purpose of maximizing the amount of cubic meters of forest, of timber, that you can fit through a mill. In our episode with Dr Peter Wood, now professor at UBC.
Speaker 4:We've learned that we have a volume-based system which allows companies to harvest a certain number of cubic meters, and then we have TFLs tree farm licenses that are sort of spatially explicit areas that a company might be allowed to harvest, and they have a requirement to replant. And this really is the mindset we have a farm, we have a tree farm license, so this is a perpetual growth of trees over time and that really is reflective of a paradigm. Right, that's a way of thinking of the world.
Speaker 2:And then in our episode on the circular economy of forestry with former Forest Stewardship Council President Francois Dufresne, he says Well, a large portion of our forest is still viewed as a commodity. In our episode that we did with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Southern Alberta chapter.
Speaker 4:Josh Killeen says there's this assumption that the timber supply must be obtained, the mill must be fed and that must increase over time, we must increase shareholder value, and so on.
Speaker 2:And then we had our very own Dave Pierce, senior forest conservation manager from Wildlands, on the show to talk about forestry in Ontario.
Speaker 6:And he talks about how they looked at the forest and said you know what? They sent out timber cruisers. I think there's this much on there and we're going to basically harvest enough to feed the mills. And they built these huge mills without really understanding what they could sustain. And the battle has been ever since to try to sustain these wood flows, which were in most cases inflated. They didn't know that the forest you know how the forest was going to grow back. They didn't really know how much timber they had.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, back in British Columbia.
Speaker 7:We had the folks from Stand Earth, richard and Tegan, on, and Tegan describes forestry in British Columbia as such a boom and bust economy Some people have called it the continuation of the gold rush economy and communities are still really suffering from the impacts of mills that continue to curtail their shifts or shut down completely after having taken all of these resources from the local lands.
Speaker 2:So there really was, I think, throughout the podcast, this underlying frame that we have built these mills and our forestry aims are ultimately to serve the sustaining of those mills serve the sustaining of those mills.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when we talk about forestry being sustainable, it's often really about sustaining wood flows, not making sure that the forest is a sustainable forest. I think that's what you're highlighting. I think that's a really great takeaway and it was certainly one of the things because I came to Wildlands League not having a forestry degree and it was certainly one of the things because I came to Wildlands League not having a forestry degree. But you know, 20 years later, you really you learn a thing or two, and I think it really is the presumption that you're going to sustain the and maximize the wood flow to the mill.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no-transcript.
Speaker 1:I would also just one last comment. Francois is transitioning out of FSC, so I think the new person coming is Monica Patel, so she'll be the new president or CEO at the FSC in Canada. He hasn't quite finished yet. He'll be finished in December. So, depending on when you listen to this podcast, he could have already gone or he's almost leaving. So we wish him well.
Speaker 5:But one of the things he also said we can actually look at what the forest can provide or sustain naturally and more responsibly for future generation by actually adapting our economic opportunities with those values.
Speaker 1:And then actually do our metrics, as opposed to hey, we've got a mill, we've got to feed it. So, that's a very different and that's from an industry guy just thinking completely in the reverse way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was great to have Francois on the podcast and kind of in that same line of thinking about metrics. One other key takeaway I had was that the way we monitor the overall health and resilience of our forests, which are so globally important, kind of also fits into the umbrella of this feed the mill paradigm. We interviewed the NRDC and Nature Canada about their forest carbon accounting report that they put out a few years ago. That episode is called Flawed Forest Carbon Accounting and they talk about how in Canada we're not looking at the explicit industrial carbon impacts of logging.
Speaker 10:Like the implications of this policy failure, beyond the fact that we're basically systematically misleading Canadians about whether or not the logging industry is a challenge, that we're basically systematically misleading Canadians about whether or not the logging industry is a challenge that we have. But the policy implications are enormous because the logging industry has been allowed to basically sit outside of the regulatory process that the federal government has been developing.
Speaker 2:You know how we'll be able to alleviate the pressures of climate change and the ability of our forests to act as a carbon sink if we don't know how our acute footprint in the forest is impacting those dynamics and that system? We saw it in our logging scars episode that we did with Dave Pierce how we're unable to see that logging scars footprint that we described and its related ecological impacts if we don't monitor our forests at the resolution that they're visible at. The Canadian government has data on our forests at a 30 meter resolution and you can't really see the acute impacts of logging scars and clear-cut harvesting on the landscape at that level and therefore we can't make informed decisions about how our forests are doing. Information and the science that exists when its implications are inconvenient and maybe don't support this overarching feed. The mill paradigm has also come up. We interviewed Justina Ray from the Wildlife Conservation Society, canada and our very own, anna Baggio, on caribou.
Speaker 1:Caribou.
Speaker 2:So caribou are a conservation challenge for us in Canada and they're very emblematic of healthy and intact boreal forests and, if you remember, the status of caribou populations helps inform us on the overall health of boreal landscapes. And we learned that caribou populations are declining across Canada. And yet we know that the federal caribou recovery strategy identifies 65% undisturbed habitat in a range as the disturbance management threshold, which provides a measurable probability 60% for a local population to be self-sustaining.
Speaker 9:We are failing terribly. I'm like we know what the species needs. The scientists have told us, we know what's threatening the species and we know what needs to be done. I mean, the species is on a collision course right now with industry and the resource sector, because the resource sector wants all those trees, the mining sector wants it for critical minerals, people want to build roads, people want to have transmission lines. All that is carving up the habitat, fragmenting the habitat, destroying the habitat, degrading the habitat.
Speaker 2:With the information that we do have. You know we're not seeing that information being applied to policy or at the government level, and you know the same thing applies to what we learned about wildfires in our episode with fire ecologist Jen Barron out of the University of British Columbia.
Speaker 11:So over the past hundred years we've been so successful at putting out fires that in the absence of that fire a lot of fuel has accumulated. So in the past more frequent, lower severity fires would have removed a lot of that ingrowth, those seedlings that are regenerating the branches in the understory. In the absence of those fires, because we've put all of the fires out so successfully for the past hundred years, there's a lot of fuel that's accumulated and that's layered on top of a lot of other land use changes related to forest management. So, starting back in the early 20th century with widespread harvesting practices, high grading, and then the legacies of those changes, clear cuts and replanting of forest ecosystems and also the way that we treat residue in the forest industry. So the slash that's left behind after harvesting has a big influence on fire behavior.
Speaker 2:We now know that our harvesting practices leaving unmerchantable timber on the harvest site, dragging heavy machinery across the landscapes is one of the contributors to the major extreme wildfires that we've been seeing last summer and this summer, unfortunately, and there's still a huge push to log more faster as a solution to this issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just want to go back on that and say, in terms of that, that's a really big piece that the wildfire response that we're seeing in Canada right now is to get out and log more faster.
Speaker 1:And yet the fuel load and how we've actually built up that fuel load from forestry is not being addressed. We've got this fire suppression model which basically, you know, says don't allow some of those smaller burns to occur, which is exactly what makes your force a little bit more fire resistant. It also in terms of our tree planting, we're not planting back the deciduous trees or we're not keeping them as much as the coniferous trees, and then that actually those, those create a bit of a fire break. And you can hear more about that, certainly more articulately than I just described, from Jen Barron, the fire ecologist that we interviewed and then talked about that in that episode. Because that's, that's a big piece of the pie and we have got massive wildfires happening again in Canada and it's just, it's so depressing to see the response I've seen yesterday and maybe a couple of days ago in the papers written by a former minister in Alberta saying yeah, you know, the right solution is really to log more faster and climate.
Speaker 1:It's not about climate change which is just it's so disheartening to see that this is the response.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was really thinking of, you know, al Gore's, who is a US presidential candidate. An inconvenient truth, and the science is inconvenient. But because it doesn't serve our you know overall aims with forest management in Canada, we might not be listening to it or implementing it into the policy landscape. Yeah, but kind of speaking about the, we need to log more faster. That is definitely a messaging that we've seen come from some industry groups. I think a big piece for me from this podcast was learning about sustainable forest management, this new branding that we have on forest management in Canada and its ability to fit into the, I guess socially acceptable, uh, uh socially defensible.
Speaker 2:Yes, that is a good way to put it. That's what I wanted to say Socially defensible um narrative that we have oftentimes on, you know, business practices today. You know this is not new to anyone who has been listening to the podcast for a while, but if greenwashing has no haters, then I'm dead. So obviously not to speak on behalf of all young people because, like any, my generation has a lot of diverse ideas and opinions about environmental issues. But a lot of young people really do care about these issues. We want to be able to build a future and forge our own path in a clean, safe planet, but the idea that our approach to fixing these solutions are wrapped up in glossy advertising and campaigns is just so incredibly frustrating and to me it's just a super insidious way to capitalize on the very real threat of climate change and loss of nature, and it presents a huge roadblock to implementing any real and meaningful change.
Speaker 4:Lots of our guests on the podcast comment about the sustainable forest management paradigm, and Dr Peter Wood, who we interviewed, says you know, this attempt to kind of rebrand what kind of forestry we're doing rebranding as sustainable forest management was quite a coup for the industry because it allowed them to say that what they were doing took into consideration you know, all these multiple values, that it was this sort of very broad term that allowed everybody to read into it what they wanted to see. It was very difficult to challenge.
Speaker 2:We also interviewed Michelle Connelly from Conservation North out of British Columbia. She says in our episode is forestry pathological.
Speaker 8:People invested in industrial forestry are putting forth the idea that we can somehow improve these things by just logging natural forests better, and we heartily disagree. We've seen this experiment play out our whole lives and it's failing.
Speaker 2:So not only this idea that forest management in its current state is now all of a sudden sustainable, it's this idea that it's a solution to address pest outbreaks, wildfires, other, you know, natural functions, oftentimes natural functions of the forest in the effort to serve mainly economic interests or the interests of the mill interesting that you're bringing all those together because you're basically.
Speaker 1:My takeaway from what you're just saying is that when you look at the messages and we haven't done this kind of scan back, but you are doing it now which is, we have a number of guests who've all said sustainability is really about sustaining the amount of fiber or the amount of cubic meters going through the mill. That's number one. Number two is the messages come back is that we've branded forestry as sustainable and we're also now purporting it to be a solution to climate change and to insect outbreaks etc. And so this starts to build up a, I guess, a body of um words or approaches that, in our worldview, would be seen as greenwashing, because it's trying to put a patina on this forestry that suggests it's our solution and it doesn't have any problems, which is, yeah, that's that's.
Speaker 2:That's a really great way to frame that and bring that back together yeah, it's like an, it's an unscrutinized uh view of uh of forest management in canada. Um, I, I feel like and know when I think about the time and money invested into the sustainable forest management greenwashing. We had journalist Joan Baxter on our podcast talk about some of the Canadian forest industry's PR campaigns and she talked specifically about the Forestry for the Future campaign. Specifically about the Forestry for the Future campaign.
Speaker 12:So there will be cross-platform digital advertising, earned and paid media relations, which is really worrisome. Of course, the media are in trouble, so they take any money they can get from anything and any content they can take Out-of-home advertising which is in transit, shelters and airports. They have money, obviously. Multi-medium flagship content the Capturing Carbon documentary, canadian Forestry Can Save the World podcast, animated video shorts and creative asset production TikTok and Instagram, influencer partnerships, indigenous partnerships, community development and real-time knowledge building and their purpose was to let me see saturate target audiences and increase public opinion of the sector and to create a more amenable environment to advance the sector's policy priorities. Well, any industry's policy priorities are going to take precedence over other priorities for me, which would be the health of the forests. So it was a deliberate and very well thought out and no doubt, very, very expensive campaign designed to help the industry get exactly what it wants, which is more access to the forest, and to be able to do more of what they want in what's left of the forests.
Speaker 2:So I guess this is just getting back to what I was saying earlier is that we're putting a lot of not only are we rebranding the forestry. That we was saying earlier is that we're putting a lot of not only are we rebranding the forestry, that we're doing without scrutiny, we're putting a lot of time and effort and money into this um rebranding when we could be, you know, putting more of that towards thinking through real paradigm shifting solutions.
Speaker 1:I think one of the big things I think about is that, like, when you say a paradigm shift and I think that is short form for let's actually talk about what the principles are behind forestry and what it's set up to do so if we set the table to basically maximize the volume of trees going through a mill, then what's the new paradigm? What does that look like? And we're going through an energy transition right now. We're transitioning from one paradigm in terms of how we provide energy to hopefully, a new one that actually functions better with the climate and helps secure a safe climate. So what is the new transition for forestry? What does that look like? How does it better serve us in terms of keeping a robust, thriving natural world and how does it also contribute to securing a safe climate? Because it's got a big role to play in terms of absorbing CO2 or carbon based greenhouse gases and how we prevent it from producing and releasing those gases to the atmosphere. So it's got all of those roles and so we start with that as our fundamental, as opposed to trying to make sure we maximize the fiber going through a mill.
Speaker 1:I think that's different.
Speaker 1:Also, starting with, how do we maximize jobs, and that might be a very different question than how we maximize the amount of timber or amount of throughput we have in a mill.
Speaker 1:Like that's going to get jobs in the mill, but is it the maximum number of jobs in an area for a forest dependent community? Maybe it's producing community, maybe it's producing products, maybe it's making things, maybe it's harvesting other ingredients out of the forest, maybe it's. You know, different kinds of ways of thinking about the forest and the economic values you can, whether it's carbon or whether it's tourism, or whether it's other products or synergistic products, like in terms of different types of I think they're maple syrups, but also other kinds of birch bark syrup, all those kinds of things. And just thinking in a very different way and starting to bring it all together as opposed to we have one industry, one goal, one thought process and we have lost more jobs to mechanization of forestry than we've, you know, and we have not started to rethink how we actually secure those jobs. So I think that paradigm shift, that thinking that you're suggesting, is really asking us to relook at this whole problem from first principles.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I so agree, and I think what I've loved about doing the podcast with you is that all of our guests have been very forthcoming and sharing what they imagine the world to look like, or what they imagine Canadian forest management to look like, you know, in a paradigm shifting way, in a paradigm shifting way, and so that's given me a lot of hope.
Speaker 2:I think there's, rightfully a lot that's happening in the world that can ignite feelings of hopelessness and despair. It can be feel very overwhelming to think about. You know, how do I, as an individual, change how Canadian forest management works when there's so many other things that we're confronted with, oftentimes at an individual level the increasing cost of living, health care, taxes, unemployment, debt, child care, you know and these feelings can be very paralyzing and you know there's a lot of research that backs up that those feelings of hope and despair are very paralyzing and I think what this podcast has taught me is that there's so much hope and strength in community and meeting and talking to people who really care about Canada's forests and their importance and learning about the work that they're involved with to protect them. I mean one of the top, the top one point blank that comes to mind is the work of David Flood with Wakotuin development and the incorporation of two-eyed seeing Indigenous knowledge into everything that they do. Seeing Indigenous knowledge into everything that they do.
Speaker 3:That is the purposing of what Cotuin is to actually turn that page and find the vehicles, find the pathways to accelerate that resurgence of moving us to that inherent rights jurisdiction and honouring what Section 35 was meant to and actually showing that we can lead the way, both through ownership and forestry assets.
Speaker 3:It doesn't mean we support the system that's in place for harvesting, but someone's going to do it anyway, and so we're working in multiple angles. We want to change the way forests are managed. We want to be involved in the economy of forest. We want to be involved in diversification of it. We want to actually get involved in self-supplying our own homes. We've got to come up with another way of making available that fiber in some manner that'll be effective in our communities. So it's well. My utopia as a land user and a harvester and a manager is to understand who you're actually sustainably managing the resources for. You know, and at the end of the day, if we actually do it right and lean into the way First Nations want to see the landscape managed, it'll actually benefit the world.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's actually been proven time and time again world I mean that's actually been proven time and time again Like they're really thinking of how they incorporate their culture and interaction with the land into how we do that in today's world and the state of our forest today, bringing back Indigenous guardians, rekindling their relationship and stewardship of the land.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say. I don't think I'll ever forget his story about the little frog.
Speaker 3:Instead of like spraying 50 to 100, 1500 hectares and having those little tree frogs sitting on the trees with all the leaves falling off going. Oh, I'm supposed to try and get from here to that standing cover of forest over there and it's a kilometer away. How does that little frog do that? He doesn't. He dies. And there's many, many frogs in the forest like that, many mice, many small animals. We call them all our relations right the crawlers, the walkers, right the swimmers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how does that little tree frog that's left in the middle of a clear cut make it to safety? That is, you know, several hundred meters away and what does it, you know. So, just in terms of the way that the whole thinking behind Wakotuin and how they think about forestry, it, you know, deeply humbles me in terms of the first principles that bring to the process. It's just incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those are very different principles than feed the mill for sure, their ancestral lands and resources and how they're actually not only doing that, but we're we're learning about and through that we're learning about a better way to do joint lands and resources management with indigenous peoples, and I think that's that's so important. Um, in what's next for Canadian forest management?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great.
Speaker 2:And, um, you know I'm going to go back to Michelle with my last, with my last top line message of hope.
Speaker 8:There's a kind of like elevated professionalism that gets in the way of regular people being involved in advocating for natural forest protection and I think that deters a lot of people from getting involved. That's definitely the case in BC. This kind of like. Only experts have the right to comment on the destruction of biodiversity. That is not the case.
Speaker 2:I think that is really meaningful and I think really helps me, and I hope anyone who has been listening to the podcast really takes that to heart, because I mean, if you care about the natural resources, maybe it's you live in a community that's dependent on the forest, or you travel, you like to do recreation in the forest, like, or if you just care about Canada's forests because of their global significance for climate change and biodiversity, like you don't have to have a master's in forestry to be able to advocate, or maybe you like to breathe, you know things like that.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean because that's the thing you talk about the global significance but these wildfires are impacting air quality and last time we saw them affecting air quality all the way down to washington right, like in uh, in dc, um, you know so, so it's, it's it.
Speaker 1:It really is like, if you like to breathe or you like your climate to be safe, any of those basic things, then you can engage on what's happening on forests, and even if you do some takeaways from ours and apply them to the US forestry, it's also relevant right Like how we harvest and what we harvest and how much we harvest is absolutely an important piece.
Speaker 2:Yes, oh, definitely, definitely. Yeah, I enjoy breathing from time to time. That's kind of the those top line messages of hope that I've garnered from the podcast. When I was an undergrad I read a book called the Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. He's a reporter at the New York Times and there's an article, a short version article, of his book that you can find online as well, but he writes about the notion that if humans have created the environmental disaster, we are capable of undoing it. And he writes the path we are on as a planet should terrify anyone living on it. But, thinking like one people, all the relevant inputs are within our control and there is no mysticism required to interpret or command the fate of the earth, only an acceptance of responsibility. And I really like that call to action, I like the call to action from Michelle and I like I've been really inspired by all of the work that our guests have been doing on the clear cut.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:Maybe I'll just reference a couple of other things is that we also heard from Kim talking about urban forestry and how that's hope right in your own backyard if you're living in an urban or near urban area that there are many uh foresters that are across canada and down into the us that are thinking about the urban environment and what does that mean for trees and what does what do more trees mean for the urban environment? I think that's a big piece. One of the other updates I'll just give you is um and this is just because I've been doing some work since k Kai has been out getting prepared for law school that apparently there is going to be. One of the challenges that we have with what's happening in our forests is the data layers that we've been looking at are at this 30 meter resolution, especially if we want to have a time capsule, like you want to be able to back cast and see how forestry you know what happened to that forest and then where's it at now. So if you're going to figure out the carbon impact, you have to know well, we cut it in 1982 and now it's, you know, 2024 and this much is regrown or this much less or whatever, but you need to be able to do that math. My understanding is there is going to be a new data layer that will be available. It won't allow you to backcast in any way, but it will give you a real-time or at least a very recent time, one-meter resolution for the tree canopy height cover.
Speaker 1:So this is actually going to be, I think, changer. And it's planetary, so it's not, uh, you know, restricted to just north america, or what we've seen with some of the more recent spatial analysis has been, uh, very focused on the tropics and has ignored the north, which is, uh, we discuss in our episode with etel Ygeni, and that is, you know, basically blaming the global south for deforestation and not taking ownership of the deforestation and degradation that happens in the north. But this new day layer, apparently, is going to be out very soon, or, if not, it's already out. So that's a big piece. And then the other one that I've seen coming from Ontario, which is the province I live in, is they're talking about having a 30 centimeter, I believe, a 16 or 30 centimeter data layer for all of Ontario by 2027, I believe will be a big game changer because you'll be able to see the spatial disturbance in reality and what's going on, not just this 30 meter, which is not showing things that are like three to four meters wide, which are the roads and the landings that get put in place when you're doing a full tree harvesting.
Speaker 1:So I think those could well be game changers and I think we may be on the cusp of some of these new ways of analyzing the forest, being able to provide better information so we can make better decisions, and not just relying on the the word or the promise of the industry or governments that hey, hey, we're sustainable because we require it, which is right now, quite frankly, really the way things are operated is sustainability is required. Therefore, we tell the rest of the world that we're being sustainable because it's required, but we aren't. I don't know how those things can be true and still have caribou ranges collapsing. So yeah, that's a big, that's a big miss.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing those come out. I mean, even though I'll be in law school, I will be keeping track of all of the ongoings in in this space. And yeah, I love to hear what you can count. You can change.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:The other one that we did a great episode on and I know Kaya was very interested in because she is going to law school and she's interested in legal means is how the different legal frameworks are going to be affecting forestry globally, and that is the EU has come out with a directive on degradation and deforestation where they're not going to accept fiber from regions where or fiber that has come from a region with deforestation or degradation, and that is I think it's supposed to be in force by the end of this year.
Speaker 1:Go back and listen to that episode for the exact details.
Speaker 1:But that was also something I could see Kaya's eyes light up across the cameras from me that you know this was a big deal, and right now Canada has been arguing that you know we have no deforestation and almost no degradation over time. And that over time piece is really important because it's saying, basically, eventually, the models because we run forestry models, we do all this calculation, we feed in all this data Sometimes it takes millions of dollars to produce these forest management plants and we run the models out and then it says, ah, the forest is regrown in 80 years. We don't have the luxury of waiting that long. No, and, quite frankly, we can look at forest management plans that were supposed to be completely sustainable, and logging scars demonstrates that after 35 years, those areas that we thought were going to be regrown are just not so I think there is great hope in having the degradation deforestation procurement policies coming out of the EU and we're also seeing those now popping up in various US states and the fact that it also got bipartisan support in Congress was crazy.
Speaker 1:Congress, Congress was crazy. So. So I think that there is some hope here that that it's not just young people who want to see these things, but it's actually the very systems of power that are now starting to wrestle with these, these ideas, and put this in. And you know, Canada's fighting against it. We have the proof of that. We have the letters. They're online. Please check out the Italigone episode. It will say more about that.
Speaker 1:But certainly, in terms of those, that degradation piece is going to be a very big piece that Canada is going to have to wrestle with. And, very specifically, I don't know how we can have almost no degradation when our caribou ranges are collapsing because they're in exceedance of the disturbance regimes that we've put out there. So those two things cannot be oh, it's all sustainable, but caribou are in massive decline, and one of the ways that you can measure this is the federal government just did a safety net order in Quebec, because I think it was three ranges have been deem, deemed to be extreme risks. That not even just a protection order. It was a safety net or, or sorry, a protection order a section 80.
Speaker 2:Has cabinet? Has cabinet voted on?
Speaker 1:It got approved and it's already been issued. There is now consultation happening on this. It was brought by the First Nations there, but maybe we can actually provide a link to that so people can actually read about it. In case I've misnamed it, but it is an emergency order. It's not just a safety net order, so check that out. It's a section 80 under the Species Risk Act that the federal government has done on three ranges in Quebec.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Thank you, environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault for bringing that forward. I was actually going to thank you on the train when I was coming back from Toronto. Saw you in line boarding. But I'll thank you on the podcast.
Speaker 1:Okay great. So, kaya, that is one heck of a whirlwind wrap up and, as you can see, there are still issues that I'd love to keep unpacking. Going forward, we will be on hiatus and I'll let people know when we're ready to resume and what kind of format. I will also say that, for anybody who's listening to this, you can maybe catch up with us on our email listserv that we have. If you haven't signed up for that, you should, because it will include updates on this podcast, but also updates on all of our work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean also to anyone who has been listening to the podcast. I'd like to just extend my sincerest thank yous for listening to me ramble on for 40 minutes to an hour sometimes every week. I hope you learn as much about Canada's forests as I did. And yeah, and also thank you so much to the team at Wildlands and Jan for you know having faith in me in the editing process for this. I really appreciate them and you know obviously, all of our listeners. It's been really great to see the podcast grow over the past year and I will miss everyone so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we couldn't have done it without you, kaya. When Kaya and I started, we had an external contractor who was helping us produce the show, and then, finally, kaya just said to me I can do this. So she did it, picked it up, did it better and did a great job, and so we are deeply grateful for all of Kaya's incredible work behind the scenes, and I will miss you, but I'm really looking forward to how you just explode into the next episode in your life. So, uh, go forth and do great work oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much please thanks, thank you, thank you.
