Frontier dreaming: The absence of foothill forests in the Canadian future
The sun starts low and shines through the chalky spruce frost. It’s below zero but only my face is cold, I’ve dressed like the rugged bush-men do and I’m almost sweating. My nostrils freeze as I take in the sleepy dawn of the boreal forest. The Yukon, Northern Canada — I finally made it.
This esoteric land in the north has called me for years. The cold winters with more snow than I could ever ride on. Those enigmatic mammals: the moose, the bear, the wolf that I stared at on the pages of Nat Geo as a child. The friendly, welcoming people that love their wild places and our shared outdoor culture. Since driving through the TransCanada from Calgary to Banff, to Revelstoke, to Silverstar 10 years prior, I was transfixed by the scale of the mountains and forests, and those unrelenting views that would appear around every corner. It really was like the adverts we got 13,000km away in the South Pacific.
This time, I was here for research which started in the Yukon, and would end up in South-Western Alberta. Working in the forests and mountains of this great western region, I enthusiastically signed on for the frontiersman identity clutched so closely by many. The belt knife and axe, the bear spray or better yet, shotgun. Fires, hunting talk, fishing, working in the frozen land hoping to spot something big and dangerous. The mug holding the dreams of my childhood was overflowing. This place was great and my Instagram ecology was overrun with the best bits of the job.
Before long, at precisely the moment I stepped off that main highway that tourists see, cracks would form and giant fissures would rip through those boyhood perceptions. If only to save some part of those dreams, I would hear myself desperately justifying the discrepancies that would soon be an everyday part of my Canadian research. When I began work in the foothills of Alberta, I would sheepishly realise what the legacy of a frontiersman obsession looks like. I drove through thousands of hectares of gutted forest where those nostalgic frontiersmen driving the 30 ton harvesters would tell me the wilderness here is endless, untouched. They would say that forestry was still the lifeblood of lonesome lumberjacks, as though the industry was made up of good strong men, with rolled up plaid sleeves single-handedly sawing down mighty pine. This was delusional but it seemed the answer was simply to look past the incessant line of logging trucks on every back road, look over the cut blocks to a remaining stand of 100 trees, and suspect anyone who might say trees aren’t just lumber. With the right mind set, and a readily available narrative about the economy and Albertan tradition, everyone was ready to sharpen their saws for a piece of the Alberta pie.
My title as an ecologist was not an insignificant barrier to gaining trust, and I knew coming to this area, it would be blasphemous to mention inconvenient facts about oil or mining, or forestry — not to mention the omnipresent challenge of climate change. Like talking about cancer in a cigar club, neither the guy selling them, nor the guy smoking them wants to hear it. Though the science of our physicians is welcomed when personal health is at risk, communication of ecological science in a place like this requires a different kind of tenacity. This void of gumption extended through senior ecologists and big name researchers, who would argue over how many wolves to kill to save caribou, while remaining eerily silent about habitat loss. 40 years in the game wasn’t worth risking — besides, the real challenge of species loss and an absent wilderness would not be addressed by them, but would be inherited by the future managers they were training. Industry and their chokehold on government had come to expect amiable solutions from ecologists. Solutions and conjecture that require nothing about practice to change, but rather provide convenient options saleable to an economy hungry culture. Options like the persecution of wolves: one half of an irreplaceable evolutionary relationship. The culling of these predators, which holds no evidentiary backing, speaks so strongly to the narrative of the cattleman and the outfitter that strychnine poisoning has somehow remained a valid management technique. We were all playing outdoorsman while around us the life was being scraped off the earth like excess plaster. Poisoned, shot, cut-down and sold at rates I had only ever attributed to nations living in the past, or to the past of nations, who now know better.
The now bandied about quote, “Being a naturalist in the 21st century is like being an art enthusiast in a world where an art museum burns to the ground every year”, was easy to reconcile. Our ethical and objective compass was broken, unable to find north among the magnetism of the dollar south, the reputation west, and culture east. In this place, breaking the land and selling the products meant new trucks, snowmobiles, hunting rifles and houses and grappling with the contradictions of an outdoorsman image with a bald, lifeless landscape means potentially giving a piece of that lifestyle up. Talk about Albertan superhero economics, about liberal know-nothings and their climate change money grab though, and friends are easy to find.
I was fortunate enough to work with two octogenarian, cowboy hat wearing Albertans. We couldn’t talk about politics, oil, or mining, but on forestry, we could agree. One of the pair had worked most of his life in forestry and started when single trees were hauled out by horse. The forests of his childhood were rapidly disappearing to be replaced with grass. Clear-cut logging was now the predominant landscape change and within half his lifetime, much of the Alberta foothills he knew was gone. Cut blocks 1000’s of square miles in size were appearing everywhere, with environmental consultants paving the way for B.C. logging companies. Slash, deadfall, scrap wood was free to be left as this was better for the soil they were told. Rumours of logging rates higher than those in the Amazon rainforest would circle though no Albertan besides the irrelevant city dwellers complaining about unprecedented flooding would dare resist. Blocks of 1300 square kilometre mature forest were permitted to be logged, trappers and outfitters not consulted on the impact this would have on their personal economies. I could only imagine how trapped he felt seeing his backcountry turned into barren deadfall, while being unable to oppose it without certain ostracism. The economy and industry so central to the collective mentality that even as a wild frontier held so tightly is wrenched through the hands of remaining few, nothing is said, the gates are opened and backs are turned on this once magical land.
On top of this immediate loss, communicating the reality that climate change may all but prevent these forests ever returning, seemed a salt not worth applying. This is a global problem that maybe wouldn’t be realised within his lifetime. This was my problem and one that I will be forced to manage. Contrary to the preoccupation with their resources, the impacts of their extraction won’t stay in the Alberta foothills. That the rest of us don’t have new trucks to buoy our faith in saw and pipe and drill is perhaps a blessing among damnations. The horse has bolted and the barn door can’t ever be closed again. In forty years, the small (2000 km2) area within which I conduct research had changed from mature forest to grass. The area is the rule not the exception, and much of the foothills no longer possess mature forest. As the foothills fill with heated trailers, quads and truck hunters, the forests continue to disappear with the clatter of logging trucks. Populations of Canadian animals are following the felled trees silently into the memory of the wild. Though we have corporate health to gaze and wonder at, it is at the cost of an ancient and unique Canadian wilderness. The joy that came with frontier life and that wilderness is now no more than pretense, that least of Canadian attractions.
