The Globe and Mail

Logging industry targeted

March 2, 2006

Environmentalists determined to save province's vast tract of boreal forest

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

TORONTO — For years, British Columbia has been the scene of Canada's hottest wars in the woods between environmentalists and forestry companies.

But since environmentalists' major victory last month preserving B.C.'s Great Bear Rainforest, the battle over logging practices is shifting to Ontario. Conservationists who were instrumental in lobbying B.C. have launched a high-profile fight with logging companies over the future of Ontario's last untouched tract of wilderness, the vast boreal forest that stretches across the northern half of the province.

In an opening salvo, environmentalists are trying to hit Ontario companies where it hurts most — on their bottom lines — by urging U.S. buyers of forest products to reconsider purchases from some of the province's biggest operators, including Abitibi Consolidated Inc. and Weyerhaeuser Co.

Environmentalists are also targeting the two giants because of a bitter dispute the companies have with natives over logging practices around the Grassy Narrows First Nation in Northwestern Ontario.

ForestEthics, a B.C.-based group, and the Rainforest Action Network, based in San Francisco, have written to more than 500 companies in the United States that buy paper or lumber products from Ontario, warning them that their orders "may soon become embroiled in the growing controversy about Ontario's boreal forest," according to one of the letters.

"We're putting both the Ontario government and industry and major customers of Ontario's forest products on notice that they all have a responsibility and a capacity to take action to protect Ontario's forests," said Tzeporah Berman, a program director at ForestEthics.  "A growing coalition of environmental groups from Canada and the U.S. are focusing their efforts on Ontario," she said.

Representatives of both Abitibi and Weyerhaeuser say their logging plans comply with the province's forestry rules.

"All of our forest plans are worked out in advance with the province," said Paul Barnum of Weyerhaeuser.

Among the highest-profile uses of Ontario forest products in the United States is in newsprint for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Environmentalists want the province to place a moratorium on logging in boreal forest areas that provide habitat for caribou, a species that has been wiped out from half of its historical range in Ontario because of its need for large tracts of mature forest.

The moratorium would allow time to develop conservation plans for the remaining uncut land, which stretches north from about the Red Lake area in the west to Cochran in the east. Environmentalists also want Ontario to end clear-cutting in favour of smaller-scale, more selective harvesting.

Up until now, the boreal forest — which doesn't have towering, photogenic trees — hasn't received the kind of publicity from environmentalists that has made conservation of the Amazon and the temperate rain forests of B.C. major international issues.

"This is an issue that the marketplace wasn't really aware of. When you say boreal forest, it doesn't immediately resonate. It's not like the Amazon basin," said Brant Olson, a spokesman for the Rainforest Action Network.

He said the activist group is trying to "educate buyers about what the issues are," and plans to invite purchasing managers from big U.S. building supply chains and paper buyers to tour logging sites in Ontario during the spring and summer to view industry practices.