Wildlands League -- State of our Forests

No other activity has a bigger impact on wild places than logging. Each year more than 210,000 hectares of Ontario's public lands is cut. South of the current cutting limit, almost all forests outside of parks are allocated for industrial logging and most of that logging is clearcutting -- today, 94% of the land area cut each year in Ontario is clearcut.

If we want to ensure a healthy future for wild species and wild spaces we must look at the impacts of logging and how we can make logging practices more compatible with the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems -- and with healthy communities.

The Wildlands League recognizes the importance of the forestry industry in Ontario. But we believe that forestry operations must be better tailored to protecting the environment and that we must move away from clearcutting and toward harvest practices that protect ecosystems. We are proposing a new model of forestry that is built on the idea that there are critical forest characteristics that must be protected during forestry operations. At any time, large, old areas of remote forest must be retained on the landscape. Similarly, where and when it does occur, logging must retain elements of the habitat, food sources, diversity and species that existed beofre logging began in order to allow the area to grow back into a healthy forest.

We also believe that one of the most important steps in ensuring better forestry is to finish a parks and protected areas system that can serve as an ecological benchmark and a backbone of diversity for the rest of our wild lands.

Finally, we also need to rethink our approach of putting industrial allocations ahead of protected areas and ecosystem protection as we consider the fate of boreal forests north of the current cutting limit in Ontario. We will need to institute a very different approach based on comprehensive land-use planning with a mandate to conserve wild forests as we look at the future of one of the largest areas of intact wild forest remainng in the world.

The impacts of logging can be wide-ranging:

The rate and intensity of logging in Ontario's boreal region could lead to the loss of critical habitat for wildlife. In particular, the declining amount of older forests and forest types that are difficult to renew after logging (eg. pine) threatens plants and animals that require these habitats for survival.
Logging methods that remove all or most of the trees on a site (eg. clearcutting) remove critical habitat elements and often change the forest from a complex to a greatly simplified structure.
Roads and harvesting near waterbodies can lead to sedimentation and deterioration of water quality. The extent of logging around a lake can also have a negative impact on water quality and hydrology.
Permanent road networks allow easy access to formerly remote areas, leading to increases in hunting and fishing pressure, poaching, fragmentation of habitat and the spread of alien invasive species.
The suppression of wildfires in fire-dependent ecosystems in order to "save" timber can fundamentally disrupt the ecology of these forest systems.
Garbage and toxic waste left behind by logging operators and others using the logging road network pollute wild areas.
In many cases, forest harvest levels in Ontario are above the amount that nature can sustain. A focus on raw product exports like logs or wood pulp puts pressure on the forest and results in low employment levels.
Industrial logging often occurs without the consent and at the expense of the Aboriginal communities located throughout Ontario's forests.

Global Forest Watch (GFW) Canada has mapped out the impact of logging and roads on our forests using satellite data. Take a look at a couple of the maps from the GFW report Canada's Forests at a Crossroads.

Converted and Accessed Forests
This map shows the extent to which our forests have been opened up by logging operations ("accessed forests" - pale green areas) or converted to other land types by agriculture or urban development (orange areas)