Heritage Lost: The Crisis in Canada's Forests

Roger C. Suffling was with the Faculty of Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

Don MacKay is a journalist who has written several previous works on the forestry industry, including The Lnmberjacks (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978) and Empire of Wood: The MacMillan Bloedel Story (Douglas & McIntyre, 1982). This present work was sponsored by a group of foresters (FACT) concerned with Canada’s crisis in wood supply and Canadians’ complacency with this situation.

The first part of the volume documents the history of forest depletion in Canada, first by the pine industry of the East and later by the pulp and paper industry and by lumbering on the West Coast. MacKay goes on to examine the efforts of early and later foresters, civil servants, politicians, and others to rectify these problems. The last two-thirds of the book concern the “heritage lost” and the crisis of the title: the extent to which the resource is depleted, why it is proving difficult to regenerate satisfactorily all of the forest that is cut, what needs to be done to rectify the current problems, and the difficult prospects for the next fifty years. The book ends on a pessimistic, warning note, with governments stalling on their recent commitments to forest renewal and management in the face of electoral imperatives and a worsening 1983 recession. There is a useful glossary of forestry terms, a short bibliography, and an index.

This book is the latest in a long tradition in resource management writing, which reaches back to William Vogt’s Road to Survival (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1948) and beyond. Nor is it the first in recent years to lament the crisis in Canada’s forest industry. It follows a number of well-written technical reports — e.g., F.L.C. Reed Associates, Forest Management in Canada. (Ottawa: Canadian Forestry Service, 1978) and such popular works as Jamie Smith’s Cut and Run: The Assault on Canada’s Forests (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1983) and Ken Drushka’s Stumped: The Forest Industry in Transition (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1985). What marks it apart, however, is that it is neither technical nor a raging polemic. The author shows the development of the current crisis through the formal and “off the cuff” statements of generations of entrepreneurs, scientists, politicians, and union people. This gives the work a liveliness and human warmth that should make the book appeal equally to those least likely to want to read about forests (and most in need of doing so!), and to those familiar with the industry who wish to sample a cross section of their colleagues’ opinions. The economic, institutional, and political barriers to progress become frustratingly obvious as one proceeds.

On the negative side, such a short book inevitably has to generalize — about economic conditions, the biology of trees, and the practice of logging and silviculture in different regions. For a reader familiar with these topics there is no real problem, but for one trying to pick up the rudiments there must be hidden pitfalls. The problem (or perceived problem) of land withdrawal for non-forestry uses such as parks is insufficiently covered. The maps, end notes, and bibliography are lacking in essential details (such as place names, publishers, and photo locations).

I finished the book with a profound sense of frustration: frustration at a general level, that none of the old problems have dissipated and that the fundamental institutional and attitudinal changes needed if we are to fund and sustain technical solutions to forest depletion have yet to be widely adopted; and frustration with the author, that in the final chapter no agenda for such changes was attempted. Nevertheless, I confess to having enjoyed the book immensely.

I recommend it to three groups: to those in the industry for whom this must represent a valuable compendium of opinions; as obligatory reading for any with political influence on aspirations, for the solutions must ultimately be formulated at a political policy level; and to the Canadian electorate which remains, even now, so blissfully unaware of the insidious and far-reaching crisis in Canada’s largest industry.