"We'll Just Plant Trees"- How Did Monoculture "Reforestation" Work Out For Canada?
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Cameron, like many Canadians, once spent a summer working for the forestry industry replanting clearcut land with seedling pines. In the early 1990s, I worked as a tree planter in northern Ontario. This was a common — if notoriously grueling — rite of passage for Canadian university students, since it allowed you to make good money while spending a few months outdoors with other like-minded young people. I was driven in part by the idealistic view that planting a tree was always going to be better than not planting one.
In retrospect, this wasn’t true. Forestry experts understand that a monoculture of trees — like the black spruce saplings we were planting, six feet apart in neat rows — has made wildfires more likely, and much worse when they occur. Planting nothing but one species of tree in a landscape that has been stripped of every other species is not recreating a forest. It’s planting a cash crop, no different from plowing up a meadow supporting hundreds of different plants and planting nothing but corn. You’d never mistake a cornfield for a meadow, but it’s easy to look at a bunch of trees and think you’re seeing a forest.
Much later, I learned that the trees we were planting, black spruce, are so combustible that firefighters call them “gas on a stick.” The trees evolved to burn: They have flammable sap and their resin-filled cones open up when heated to drop seeds into charred soil. In “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World,” an investigation of the devastating wildfire in 2016 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, John Vaillant laid out how climate change had turned some forests into combustible time bombs, where “drought conditions, noonday heat and a stiff wind” can turn a black spruce tree into “something closer to a blowtorch.”
In a naturally occurring forest, black spruce is often found in a mix with trees like aspen and poplar, which are full of moisture and provide a natural resistance to fire. But as a report by the Forest Practices Board of British Columbia pointed out, “Large homogeneous patches of forest are more likely to lead to large and severe wildfires.” A forest is not just a bunch of trees. The forestry industry likes to greenwash what it does as being sound stewardship of the land, that it ‘manages’ forests to keep them healthy. What they actually do is turn a complex ecosystem into a uniform ‘product’ that can be easily harvested, grown to size in minimum time at minimum expense for maximum profit. That’s not a living forest; it’s a bio-factory assembly line. A natural forest is a complex interlocking system of different species of plants, animals, and fungi, shaped by factors like soil, water, and climate. It’s ‘messy’.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/15/2193439/-When-good-intentions-turn-out-badly-Canadian-wildfires-in-the-context-of-planting-bomb-trees
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This is yet another reason we need to change the rules of corporate governance so they hold the interests of workers, consumers and all life on the planet of equal value to shareholder profits.
I don't know if you saw the CNN vid of the GM CEO, but this woman makes $30 million a year - 362 times what her companies median employee makes and she has no fucking clue why the UAW wants to go on strike.
Just one example, but in these corporations, everything they do is looked at through the lens of shareholder profits. Planting these spruce trees in neat rows allows the timber company to pay lip service to 'managing the forests,' but the reality is cash crop, just like the post says.
Shareholder primacy capitalism is literally destroying the habitability of this planet.
But who has time to worry about it...
