Help Save the Broadback River Valley
Canadian logging companies want to carve nearly 50 miles of roadways through the old-growth forest—threatening the woodland caribou, endangered wolverine, and the Waswanipi Cree First Nation.
Drive out of Montreal, steer north toward Canada’s great boreal forest, and don’t stop for 10 hours. That’s what it takes to reach the gently meandering Broadback River, flowing through a vastness of old-growth forest that — for now, at least — stretches uninterrupted as far as the eye can see. The untouched and timeless woodlands are home to golden and bald eagles. Grizzly and black bears travel over its soft, mossy floor among spruce and pine that have never met the blade of a saw.
There’s remote, and then there’s remote. The Broadback River valley, within the ancestral lands of the Waswanipi Cree First Nation, is an unpeopled haven for the endangered wolverine and several herds of woodland caribou, which are on the verge of disappearing from the area forever. But drastic change has arrived at the wilderness’s doorstep. A proposal by Canadian logging companies would carve nearly 50 miles of roadways through the valley, opening the way for clear-cutting 300,000 acres of pristine landscape, an area roughly the size of 210,000 football fields. And that’s just phase one of the likely future incursions into these woods.
For a preview of what’s to come if Quebec’s provincial government approves the logging plans, you have only to take a look at the region from above. Seen from the air, the current southern boundary of Canada’s boreal forest — the thick band of northern woods that wraps across the country from Alaska to the North Atlantic — looks like a checkerboard of giant clear-cuts alternating with dwindling islands of virgin forest. Hundreds — if not thousands — of logging roads up to 100 feet wide bear the timber to market in huge trucks, with much of it ultimately headed to the United States. Acres of land that have been stripped bare and replanted still look like bald patches a decade later.
The incursion of commercial logging into the Broadback River watershed, an area about twice the size of Yellowstone National Park, threatens its human and animal populations alike. Generations of Waswanipi Cree have maintained their traplines through once-uninterrupted forest for centuries; now, only 10 percent of their traditional hunting grounds are in intact forest. Despite relying on caribou for centuries, they have agreed to voluntarily stop hunting the animal as the region’s herds have rapidly vanished. But if logging overtakes more of their land, their people’s traditional way of life will likely disappear, too.
Tell Quebec’s minister of sustainable development to permanently protect the Broadback River valley from this kind of brazen industrial development.
To the south of the Broadback River, Canada’s boreal forest has already suffered massive degradation during the past century. Along its southern tier, the last of the commercially viable old-growth woods are steadily being razed. This is the habitat of billions of songbirds and an ecological asset of the first importance. As the planet’s temperatures rise, the boreal forest traps more carbon from the atmosphere than South America’s Amazon, constituting a buffer against climate change that can never be replaced.
Americans are important stakeholders in this fast-deteriorating situation. Our appetite for everything from paper towels to building materials accounts for 80 percent of Quebec’s lumber product exports, meaning we are very much a part of the problem. We can also be part of the solution. As the director of NRDC’s Canada Project, I work with a team of attorneys, scientists, and our millions of member-advocates, who are asking for permanent protection of up to five million acres of the Broadback River valley from commercial development. That’s the only way to defend this crucial battleground in the fight against climate change, save its imperiled wildlife, and help indigenous communities carry on the lives and traditions they have forged in this forest for centuries.
Canadian lawmakers, and those in Quebec in particular, are proud of their reputation as protectors of the environment. But commercial logging has been their blind spot. Along the southern border of the boreal forest, tens of thousands of miles of crisscrossing logging roads cut what was once a vast swath of forest into fragments. For the woodland caribou, a migratory species that feeds on lichens that can take decades to regrow after fires and logging, survival itself means access to forest unbroken by human exploitation. Wolves like to hunt along forest roadways — and caribou know not to cross them.
