Tree huggers bark against bill

>> Bill 136 ensures that the woods will be alive with the sound of "Timber!"

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

They were easy to spot last weekend amid the sweltering masses of semi-clad carefree souls at the Tam-tams on Mount Royal. While most basked in the blazing spring rays, tossed frisbee and soaked up the tribal bongo beats, supporters of SOS Gaia, a grassroots coalition of environmental groups, wielded worrisome placards warning others to join their march against a potentially disastrous new bill.

Barring an unexpected interruption before the end of June, the PQ government will pass into law a new forestry policy that will dictate logging practice for the next few decades. Among other issues, environmental activists warn that Bill 136 will green light changes that will allow the lumber industry to increase its harvest by 23 per cent.

Permission to increase the number of chopped trees was based on unreliable estimates of the amount of wood in Quebec's forests, argues SOS Gaia. They are renewing the call for an independent inquiry on the state of the forest, a demand the PQ government has long refused.

"The government doesn't even know clearly where and how much wood is left," says SOS Gaia rep Myriam Brouillet. "How can we increase the quantity of wood we extract when we don't even know what's remaining right now?

"The bill doesn't consider forest fires and insect invasions correctly, and impending climate change isn't even included in their calculations. We can't predict how the forest will regenerate without a good provisional model," she says.

To illustrate their opposition to the bill, Brouillet and other like-minded activists marched on pulp and paper giant Domtar's downtown offices last weekend. Domtar logs about a third of Quebec's forest and is also half-owned by Quebecers, partly through such government-related agencies as the Caisse de Dépôt.

Domtar representative William George considers some of the worries unnecessarily alarmist. "Globally it's not true that the forest is threatened. The lumber industry cuts one per cent of the forest per year and the Canadian forest is actually getting bigger."

He points out that Domtar makes its activities public over its Web site and suggestions are answered. And George says that, in spite of many popular misapprehensions, logging is often good for forests. "A forest that's not commercially harvested will run into another problem: it will get old and die. Also, the older a forest gets, the more it becomes vulnerable to forest fire."

Naturally, SOS Gaia representatives see the other side of the leaf. "In a forest fire, a lot of trees survive and there's fauna and flora that adapt very fast," says SOS member Franck Tieman. "But when loggers clear-cut a forest, the water gets contaminated by mercury, animals lose their habitat and microflora get destroyed."

Tieman feels that the government should look at recent events before being wheedled into improvident commitments to corporate interests. Recently officials acknowledged that little forest remains in the Gaspé, a fact they've acknowledged by ordering a 20 per cent reduction of logging in that area. As a result, wood-hungry chainsaw wielders have reverted to cutting the thin trees up at the 52nd parallel. "That's the tundra line, trees don't even grow beyond that," says Tieman. "It goes to show that loggers must be really desperate if they have to go all the trouble and expense of going that far just to get wood."