Plundering the boreal forests.

• Author: Acharya, Anjali
• Position: Forest belt around the North Pole

When the press talks about deforestation on a massive scale, it is almost always talking about tropical forests - the rainforests now embla-zoned on T-shirts, posters, and internet bulletins. But the tropics are only part of the story. There is another immense belt of forestland that is disappearing at least as rapidly as the tropical forests. The boreal forests - the forests of the far North - make up the world's largest terrestrial ecosystem and have become the world's main source of industrial wood and wood fiber. Much of that wood is cut by the same companies that are felling the tropical forests. And as in the tropics, this logging involves an enormous mismanagement of natural wealth; it threatens indigenous cultures; and it is degrading the biodiversity of large areas of the planet. But the logging of the boreal forests is a tale that remains largely untold. There are no "boreal forest crunch" granola bars.

Covering 11 percent of the earth's surface and including almost a third of the world's forests, the boreal forests form a belt that encircles the North Pole. They cover much of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and northern Russia - more than 70 percent of the forests are Russian. The boreal landscape consists of vast stands of conifers, aspen, and birch. Occasionally, the forest gives way to peatbogs, which cover about a fifth of the region. The winters are long and bitterly cold, with temperatures dropping to minus 40 degrees Celsius; the summers are brief. Much of the region is underlain by permafrost - a subsoil that never thaws.

The forest itself is usually dominated by relatively few tree species. In eastern Canada, for instance, black spruce, white spruce, and balsam fir cover thousands of hectares. In central Siberia, there are vast tracts of larch. Broadleaf trees like birch, aspen, poplar, and alder appear in the southern areas and as pioneers of disturbed sites. The vegetation supports a rich diversity of animal life, including a wide variety of mammals, birds, and fish as well as clouds of insects that feed them. At the top of the food chain are such predators as wolves, lynx, and the highly endangered Siberian tiger.

In global terms, one of the most significant aspects of the boreal ecosystem may be the enormous amount of carbon that it stores. Carbon is the basic building block of the heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" implicated in global warming. The region is estimated to contain about 709 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to all of the carbon held in all proven fossil fuel reserves. Currently, the boreal forests are a "net carbon sink" - their growth absorbs more carbon than they release through decay. Their current net intake appears to be about 700 million tons per year, roughly equal to China's annual carbon emissions. But that intake will almost certainly drop if logging continues at its present rate.

CANADA: A DEFORESTATION ECONOMY

Near the Nelson River, in Canada's west-coast province of British Columbia, the Mitsubishi Corporation has set up the largest chopstick factory in the world. Mitsubishi, a Japanese manufacturing conglomerate, chose this site because the province has an enormous supply of wood and charges very little for it. Chopsticks require a perfect grain - even the disposable ones that Mitsubishi makes here - so 85 percent of the wood cut for the plant has to be discarded. But even at this level of waste, Mitsubishi is transforming aspen stands into chopsticks at the rate of 7 to 8 million pairs per day.

The Mitsubishi operation is just one of many unnecessary bites that the timber industry is taking out of Canada, where forestland is being felled at the rate of 1 acre (about four-tenths of a hectare) every 12 seconds. Canada has 10 percent of the world's forests, and three-quarters of that - about 1 billion hectares - is boreal. In Canada's boreal region, virtually all of the most productive forests have been committed to logging. Loggers have already claimed most of the old growth in the country's eastern and central provinces. They are now felling the secondary growth of those regions - and rapidly consuming the ancient forests of the Canadian west. About 1 million hectares of Canada's forests are logged annually; over the past ten years, that amounts to an area the size of the former East Germany.

Canadian logging, incidentally, is not much different from that of its neighbor, the United States, which owns huge tracts of boreal forest in Alaska. Plans for Alaska will increase the logging of its interior twentyfold.

As the trees disappear, so do whole constellations of other living things as the system is thrown out of balance. The woodland caribou, for instance, is quietly dying out as its habitat in northwestern Ontario is logged into oblivion. Migratory birds that summer in these forests, like the Cape May warbler, are affected. The cut-over slopes erode into rivers, where the silt suffocates aquatic animals. And many plants are threatened too; in the province of Alberta alone, about 100 plant species are known to grow only in boreal forest, and roughly half of these are already rare.

Canadian logging is essentially a subsidized employment program. The country's provinces, which own 80 percent of the forests, are practically giving their trees away to timber companies, in exchange for logging and pulp mill jobs. The fate of a forest is usually sealed with a "Forest Management Agreement" (FMA), under which authorities lease the land to the corporation that does the cutting. In some provinces, the process does not even allow for an environmental impact review. In effect, the corporations become the owners of the land - they can even use their FMAs as collateral for financing their logging operations. In return for the forests, the provinces usually collect only a minuscule stumpage fee - a payment determined by the amount of wood actually cut. The terms for Mitsubishi's chopstick factory are typical: a 20-year FMA and a stumpage fee of $0.37 per cubic meter of wood cut.

Deals like this have provoked a boom in industrial forestry. Enormous government subsidies, both direct and indirect, have won agreements for some 45 new plants, worth more than $7 billion, all destined for Canada's boreal forest. But it is debatable how well this expansion serves the public. Critics point out that the new operations are ruthlessly efficient in their use of labor - they need very few workers to devastate vast tracts of forest. And the more labor-intensive finishing processes are often done offshore; the Mitsubishi plant, for instance, ships its chopsticks to Taiwan for finishing. So as the cutting in Canada's boreal forest has increased, critics charge that the employment level has generally dropped. Today, no other country in the world has fewer jobs per volume of wood cut.

Alberta, the province just east of British Columbia, has timber fever in its most virulent form. Oil, natural gas, and grain...