When elders in Asubpeeschoseewagong [a-sub-eeshko-see-wa-gong] First Nation community speak about their northern Ontario forest before pulp mill activity in the 1960s and logging in the surrounding region, the observations are specific.

“They’ll talk about a bug that has disappeared, and of frogs they no longer hear in the forest. You hear hundreds of frog voices in the spring: there’s one they don’t hear anymore,” says Judy Da Silva, a conservation activist and resident of Asubpeeschoseewagong, also known as Grassy Narrows.

Elders, activists and community members have been fighting logging in the area for more than 40 years. The dispute is intractable — a blockade has stood for more than 12 years; the companies have been absent from the table and the government has been unable to bring a resolution to the issue. But in British Columbia an effort to protect the Great Bear Rainforest from logging found success through a conservancy agreement, an uncommon tool that could be a way forward for Ontario’s Whiskey Jack Forest.

Earlier this year a network of B.C. First Nations, environmentalists, forestry interests and government officialscompleted an environmental accord that promises to protect at least 85 per cent of the 6.4-million-hectare coastal rainforest’s old-growth areas. Nearly 20 years in the making, it offers insight into what it takes to protect vast swaths of forest in Canada.

“Now that many issues have been resolved on the B.C. coast, the attention of forestry buyers is turning to the boreal forest, so Ontario would do well to turn its attention to B.C.’s [accord],” says David Sone, a northern Ontario campaigns director at Earthroots, an environmental advocacy organization.

Jens Wieting has worked on the B.C. accord’s file for nearly a decade as a forest and climate campaigner with Sierra Club Canada Foundation, a charitable organization that funds environmental projects.

“It took time for companies to realize that they had to give up some of the forest they had planned to log, and for the government to realize that they had to develop a new relationship with First Nations,” he says.

The work of doing that alone spanned nearly 10 years, until a shared set of goals was set out in 2006. Prior to this, in the early to mid-1990s, environmental groups and First Nation alliances found they had to turn to international markets to campaign and organize purchase boycotts before getting the attention of government and logging companies. It took another 10, Wieting says, for the specifics of each to be hammered out — everything from differing categories of forest protection afforded to parts of the forest, to restrictions in the spaces that forest companies were permitted to log; to how ecosystem-based management would fit into all these categories.

One feature of the accord Wieting says is key to effective resolution is also relatively uncommon in North America: conservancies.

“They’re a new type of protected area,” he says. “They’re different than parks because they explicitly allow for traditional First Nation uses: it allows them to use medicinal plants or non-timber forest products. It makes it clear that these are not protected areas to keep humans out; it’s protecting ecological First Nations and their cultural use of the land.”

While conservation provisions currently exist in areas such as parks to allow for traditional First Nation uses such as hunting and fishing, Sone says, their development isn’t First Nations-led. “There could be a provincial park in which fishing is allowed, but nearby First Nations would not have been the initiator or part of setting the boundaries or management guidelines,” he says. “There’s a whole other range of land-use activities that fall between hunting, fishing and logging that First Nations might want to pursue in their lands that fall in that area in between.”

The Whiskey Jack Forest, where Grassy Narrows is located, is part of the larger boreal forest — a thick, evergreen halo of trees that extends across the upper crown of Canada, Europe and Russia. Despite its status as the world’s largest forest, less than 10 per cent of its Canadian area is protected from large-scale industrial development, Sone says.

While much of its area is currently intact, the boreal stores massive amounts of carbon in its trees and soil. Clear-cut logging would release this carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change—which researchers say already threatens to subject the ecological zone to severe temperature increases, insect infestations and wildfires due to drier weather conditions.

There are also the public health effects felt by Grassy Narrows residents from pulp mill activity. For decades after a Dryden pulp mill disposed of roughly nine million metric tonnes of byproduct mercury into the Wabigoon River, people from both Grassy Narrows and nearby Wabaseemoong Independent Nations have exhibited symptoms of mercury poisoning. In 2015 a provincially-commissioned report found that even 50 years after the dumping, mercury levels in the area continue to rise. It’s largely for this reason the Grassy Narrows community has advocated against Ontario provisions for clear-cut logging in the local Whiskey Jack Forest for years; staged a logging blockade in the area since 2002; and recently launched a legal challenge against the province arguing that allowing clear-cut logging in the area would infringe upon their charter rights.

“We’ve spent a long time bringing the issues out to the forefront,” says Da Silva, who recently travelled to Geneva to present Grassy Narrows’ case to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. “It’s not recent, but the momentum’s been building with the support on the world stage.”

To date much of the negotiations, insofar as they exist, between stakeholders in the forest has been between First Nations and the provincial government. Historically, Sone says, the two major companies that held logging licences in the area have been Weyerhaeuser and Abitibi-Consolidated, which has since rebranded to Resolute Forest Products and surrendered its area licence in 2008 due to pressure from international boycotts.

In response to questions about B.C.’s accord, an Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry spokesperson said in an email statement that work with the province’s First Nations is ongoing. According to the province’s 10-year Forest Management Plan, however, clearcutting is included in plans for Grassy Narrows’ traditional area of the Whiskey Jack Forest until 2022.

Da Silva says the Grassy Narrows advocacy efforts will continue until there is a guarantee that there will be no logging of any kind in the area. Last summer, she says, “our community was asked by our chief and counsel what kind of logging they might accept. We were given four choices, and the overwhelming vote was for no logging of any kind.”

“Even though they’re being told that if you allow logging you’ll get brush-cutting jobs, they still said no logging,” she says. “To me that indicates how strong the community is committed to protecting the forest.”

Map by Michael Lehan