Macphail Woods Articles
Presentation to the PEI Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Fall 2003

Presentation to the PEI Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Fall 2003 by Gary Schneider

I would like to thank John MacQuarrie for inviting me to speak to you today. I was especially grateful since the expertise of the audience crosses several disciplines. Some of you know that I sat as a member of the province's Round Table on Resource Land Use and Stewardship. One of the challenges all members noted was the lack of overall resource planning, and the lack of contact between departments and divisions at all levels of government. So while my talk is primarily about forests, I think much of it is applicable to both agriculture and fisheries. Since this will be an especially wandering talk, I just had some slides of forests and forest components put together for you to watch.

A few weeks ago I attended a concert by a group of women primarily from the Atlantic region. They were releasing a CD entitled "O Beautiful Gaia - Love Songs to the Earth". These women differ in their backgrounds, their social positions, their religious beliefs. The thing they share is a strong love of the Earth and a fearlessness in saying that out loud. Hundreds of people came out to hear their music and sing with them. One of the songs that touched me the most was called The Longing, where the women sing the names of species that are extinct or threatened throughout the world, accompanied by a slide show of those species.

And longing is exactly what I felt, not just for those species but in myself as well. What I was longing for most was to see a time when people began taking better care of where they live and of each other. To see us all become more conscious of beauty. To open up our eyes and allow all that is around us to enter our vision. The idea that in these days of relative wealth we allow species to become endangered and even extinct is a very sad one. Hearing people sing the names of those species was especially illuminating, and though sad, perhaps provided the type of light and witnessing that we badly need.

With this music in my head, I thought of the metaphor of shining light, both in the awakening of new ideas and in the sunshine that leads to growth. I see that light when I walk with a woodlot owner who loves her forest and speaks of her children and grandchildren enjoying its wonder. When I began the Macphail Woods project people would come and talk about their love of woodlands, but mostly in a shy way - I don't think it was very common at that time for many people to be talking about forests in this way. People would tell me stories about their trees, show me pictures. To me it has become very clear that given a choice, most people would like to keep their woods standing. They all want to use them - for recreation, for vacationing, for birdwatching, for fishing. Many want to generate some income, but this is not the primary reason for owning a forest.

Prince Edward Island's 2002 Woodlot Owners' Survey found that "Ownership motives related to legacy (given as heritage for future generations) are rated as important by most owners. Motives related to environmental considerations (wildlife enjoyment, ecosystem protection, water quality, green space) are also important for most owners. However, timber harvesting is rated as not important for most owners in all sizes of ownership, even though owners of large woodlots give it more importance. Most owners also rate economic motives (retirement funds, investment, making a living, a complement to income) as not important even if owners of large woodlots give more importance to these reasons. I'm hearing this from people all the time. They come for walks and workshops and want me to write management plans for them because they can identify with someone who sees so many values in forests.

The light shines when I see a robin nesting in a hemlock tree that I planted, a tree that is now over my head and with any luck might live for another three or four hundred years. In this, as in most other things at Macphail Woods, it is not that we've created something, but that we've allowed something to happen. It starts with a recognition that the Acadian forest, even one in a degraded condition such as we find here today, is an ecosystem full of wonder and promise and perhaps even wisdom. I've crawled around the Townsend Woodlot near Souris looking for rattlesnake plantain, a tiny native orchid that for some reason almost overwhelms me with its beauty. I've seen eagles feed their young in a huge white pine on the edge of a stream running into the Orwell River and was left amazed by their majesty and grace. The places where I collect hobblebush seed from fill me with my own inadequacy as a landscaper. These plants form a layer of large, heart-shaped leaves topped with mounds of red berries, a scene so beautiful that I can only aspire to re-create it someday.

I admit to being one of those annoying people who thinks that all is possible, that we can actually have our cake and eat it too. One of the tenets of the Macphail Woods project is that if I see two or three positive reactions from one action, then it usually means I'm on the right track. We'll look at hedgerows and windbreaks. I have a problem to solve - let's say I want to stop snow from drifting around my house every winter. I can put up one of those orange snow fences that may or may not be effective. In general, it is not attractive, and provides little protection, food or nesting habitat for wildlife. It also takes a lot of labour and money each spring and fall and creates more plastic for our waste managers to deal with. This cycle has to be repeated each and every year, which if you look at it is an incredible investment.

Another solution is to plant one or two or three rows of white spruce. This is much more attractive and provides good winter protection for wildlife and food for certain species. It may not be very stable, though, since if an insect or disease comes along that favours spruce, your windbreak is pretty much toast. The third solution is to plant a mix of trees and shrubs suitable to the site, carefully planned to block the wind but also provide a huge array of other benefits. The spruce provide shelter and food and may carry much of the burden of slowing down the wind. But the oaks feed the squirrels and chipmunks and turn a beautiful colour in the fall. The wild apples and hawthorns provide summer nesting sites and fruit for winter birds. The sumacs provide some of the best fall colours, the serviceberries shine in the spring and produce heavy fruit crops. The white birch feeds the red polls and the ruffed grouse. The bayberries and roses fit in to the lower section of the windbreak, adding winter food and colour. Picture something that gives you all the values of a fence a hundred times over - rich in blooms, colours, textures and wildlife. I think these are the things we need to learn - how to help nature paint these pictures and do the things it is so good at doing.

I see another light each time people attend a forest walk and tell me that they no longer feel they have to clean up their woods. Through my work on breeding birds and amphibians, it has become abundantly clear to me how important dead wood is to forests. A forest without wildlife trees is quite impoverished. I was walking through a woodlot in Lewes a few weeks ago and as the woodlot owner and I discussed what kind of treatment might be suitable for the stand, a flying squirrel popped its head out of an old woodpecker hole in a standing dead tree. Somehow it seems that we've forgotten how important dead wood is to forests. The woodpecker hole later houses a saw whet owl. Three or four redbacked salamanders might be living under the loose bark of a dead hemlock. Yellow birch and hemlock seedlings often successfully colonize a rotting log, where even in the heat of summer there is enough moisture to ensure life to these young plants.

Herb Hammond is a Registered Professional Forester from British Columbia and author of "Seeing the Forest Among the Trees - The Case for Wholistic Forest Use". When he visited PEI in the mid-nineties, he talked about the importance of natural succession, not only of live plants but of the dead wood in forests. He said we need to plan for dead wood in forests, that up to 30% of the trees have to be allowed to mature, die and fall down to the forest floor. That's how important these natural processes are to forests, and indeed to all ecosystems. The high-value forests that European explorers found here centuries ago came from trees getting old, falling down and enriching the soil. When land managers think they can ignore basic rules of biology, they endlessly get into trouble. That dead wood is critical to both wildlife and to the continuance of the health of forest ecosystems.

Another thing I have learned is how complex these things called forests can be. They are not just trees, they are complex ecosystems that include the dead tree where that flying squirrel is denning. Chris Maser, one of the most highly respected restoration ecologists in the world, has written eloquently on this subject. He speaks of the northern flying squirrel, which primarily feeds on fungi. Some of these fungi are mycorrhizal, meaning that part of the fungus actually grows around the fine root tips of trees. This is a two-way partnership. More nutrients are moved from water and soil to the tree because the root surface is increased and the mycorrhizae themselves are more efficient at this transference. In return, the trees provide sugars from photosynthesis to the fungi. These two-way relationships are not at all unique. What we are just beginning to understand is that there are three-way and four-way and who-knows-how many-ways relationships that are critical to forest ecosystems. Back to the flying squirrel. It eats the fungus, and spreads spores throughout the forest in its droppings. As if that weren't enough, the fecal pellets contain not only the spores, but also nitrogen-fixing bacteria and yeasts - they in effect innoculate the forest with spores and the nutrients they need to get growing.

To me, the truths are that forests are things of beauty, they are complex ecosystems, and they are incredibly valuable for a myriad of reasons, including those ones that are difficult to measure, such as cleaning air and water, storing carbon both in the woody material and in the soil, providing homes for a wide variety of wildlife species, moderating stream temperatures and windspeeds, and providing places for recreation and relaxation.

As a culture we don't know how to accurately value these benefits. We can't always fix an exact price on these things, but we know they are important. They are often overlooked because they take too much time, or we can't model them on a computer, but we have to start putting values to them instead of pretending they don't exist. Ron Coleman of GPI Atlantic has been developing some very creative methods to look at how we value these things. It certainly makes for more sound economic planning, which seems to be taking place in other countries. I was intrigued to read in the Globe and Mail that Iceland is trying to grow hardwoods to start a furniture industry. They are planting trees to be able to harvest wood to create wooden tables and chairs. How far-thinking is that? Do they have more money than sense in Iceland or do they know something we don't know? My sense is that if we looked very closely at all the values provided by healthy forests, we'd be doing an amazing amount of restoration. Look at the long-term jobs that could be created with with biologically-sound silviculture, with growing and planting trees and shrubs, with tending those plantings, with harvesting mushrooms, ground hemlock, fiddleheads, witch hazel and hundreds of other products we may not even know about yet. And we haven't even got to the high value trees like red oak, yellow birch, sugar maple, white ash, white pine and red spruce that our climate grows so well. We have the craftspeople and artisans here, and I think many tourists would be happy paying more for high-quality products made with wood from truly sustainable forests. That's something we could brand like crazy - high-quality products from truly sustainable ecosystems.

Employment is one of those interconnections that we ignore at our own peril. Herb Hammond talks about the employment potential of value-added wood manufacturing. He has found that milling 30 board feet of wood provides employment for 1 person for 1 minute. Using that wood to make a cabinet provides 1-2 weeks of work. Making violins from that wood provides 1 year of work. When we ship raw logs off this Island, especially given our finite land base, we are losing an incredible amount of potential to build employment. Where the money goes in forestry operations is another thing we should pay more attention to. Here is one scenerio, based on an idea in Herb Hammond's book, that changed how I looked at the economics of forestry. Two people decide to form forestry companies. One sets up using mechanical harvesting equipment, and the cost per job created is probably somewhere around $150,000. The other person has a crew of four people and uses a small Forcat skidder or horses. His investment per job created is about $20,000. Herb suggests that most entrepreneurs have about 25% to put into their businesses and borrow the rest. He makes a convincing case that a great deal of the value of wood harvested by the larger company actually flows out of the community to pay bank charges. How wasteful is that? He suggests that the mechanized harvester has to cut five times more wood than horse logger to create each job. I have always felt that the subsidies governments provided to purchase large equipment here (which thankfully no longer exist) had very positive benefits for banks and manufacturing companies in Ontario and Sweden and very negative impacts on Island forests and forest workers.

So how do we get to a better place, where we have a healthier environment and more sustainable communities? By taking steps. We can't get there quickly, but we must act immediately. The first thing we need to do is to keep those flying squirrels in mind. Complexities abound. Actions have reactions and interactions. One reason I accepted John's invitation to speak is that it involved employees from three areas that often are seen as unrelated. When the hedgerows are mowed down the winds increase and invaluable wildlife habitat is gone. Clearcuts are actually quite depressing for many of our tourists. When visitors see our rivers running red or read about fishkills, many decide not to come again. The new provincial tourism group was all over the radio last week talking about cultural values and eco-tourism. How do you sell eco-tourism when there is so much obvious degradation going on? So we have to start thinking how all our actions affect others. Government policies should be comprehensive, so that all sectors of the Island economy can flourish, and all Islanders can live high-quality lives.

If I had a magic wand, I would look at three things that might help us get to truly sustainable living. First, I would communicate the inherent values in being good stewards of this Island. That means being both honest and enthusiastic about what those values are, everything from cleaner air and more wildlife to better employment and tourism opportunities. When I began Macphail Woods in 1991, it seemed like everything was against me. I had very different views on forest management than the provincial government, I had no political or financial support and I wasn't even from the community. In spite of those hurdles, and it has been a huge surprise to me, the project has been very successful. Not because of light shows or big budgets but because people could come out and see the work done on the property. They come to learn about the beauty of native plants, the migration of birds and the life cycles of amphibians. They also come to understand patch cuts and thinnings, underplantings and enrichment plantings. They want to know why we concentrate on native trees and shrubs and all the values those species can bring to a woodland planting. They continue to come - and we have thousands of visitors each year - because of a love of nature and a desire to learn more about wildlife and woodlands. Given the popularity of our publications and the number of visits to our web site, there is an almost insatiable desire for knowledge that is not being met.

Once we understand the benefits of stewardship, it should be promoted with honesty and enthusiasm. When Irving tries to sell itself as "The Tree Growing Company", I think it does them more harm than good. In the same light, when governments finally start seeing wood supplies dwindle, the response is "we need to plant more trees". Again, I think it can do more harm than good. If those trees (and shrubs) are native and planted in appropriate places (not just to fill up clearcuts) then by all means plant more trees. Fortunately, we are all starting to get a better handle on stewardship and are less inclined to equate the number of new plantations with how we are looking after our forests. I talk with many woodlot owners who want to do good things for their forests but just aren't sure how to proceed. That's why it is important that ecologically-sound information and advice be available to all woodlot owners.

As a start, here's what Herb Hammond lists as his principles of Ecologically Responsible Forest Use:

• protect the integrity of the whole forest, maintain biological diversity at the landscape and stand levels
• establish a protected forest landscape network in each watershed
• in forests used for timber management: minimize fragramentation; maintain the old growth phase, particularly old growth structures such as large living trees, snags and large fallen trees; retain natural biological diversity; use natural processes; and protect water and soil.

That seems like a good base to build upon. There are many others who have devoted their lives to sustainable forestry who have ideas we could build upon. Orville Camp, author of The Forest Farmer's Handbook and president of the Forest Farm Association, has developed some guidelines for sustainable logging practices and natural selection forest management. Some of these include:

• addressing forest needs first. In so doing, you will address yours.
• maintaining habitat suitable for providing food, shelter and reproduction needs for all normally associated species. All these needs must continue to be met for each species to survive.
• maintaining the natural selection system of "checks and balances" for keeping the forest ecosystem healthy and productive.
• removal of no more than what the forest is truly capable of producing at any given time. Overharvesting can substantially reduce production and seriously affect forest health or result in its death.

The second thing I would do is provide more support to sustainable forestry, farming and and fishing activities and eliminate all incentives for unsustainable practices. We need to look at what is important to people here, what they really value, what kind of a province do they want to live in. While the idea of subsidizing good stewardship is starting to take hold here, it has a long way to go and needs to be more comprehensive. If someone wants to clearcut a forest, burn the brush, plant one or two species of conifers and use herbicides to keep down the native hardwoods, that should be a business decision. The landowner is gambling that there is going to be some huge return at the end of 40 or 60 years. Let's not use taxpayer's money to subidize this risk.

On the other hand, if a woodlot owner keeps a forest standing, or improves degraded woodlands, there should be a broad range of subsidies available since that landowner is benefitting the larger community by storing carbon, providing wildlife habitat, and cleaning air and water. These subsidies should be performance-based. One small example could be giving all forest owners who have a sound management plan ten or twenty native plants suitable to that site - perhaps on a dry site it could be a mix of red oak, white birch, white pine, beaked hazelnut, American mountain ash. If they are well-looked after, then give them more. Wouldn't it be great to have our provincial tree growing all across the Island? People who work towards restoration and all the benefits that can bring should have first access to provincial support, especially since those people who are clearcutting their land are already reaping short-term economic gains. There could also be support for purchasing small-scale equipment or for training. All subsidies, whether for forestry, farming or fisheries, should be judged in light of sustainability - does this benefit more than just the landowner and does it improve the environment. I think we'll all be pleasantly surprised at how much land actually gets well-managed once more support is in place for landowners.

Finally, I would start thinking creatively about how we develop partnerships. Instead of having a consultant do a study on value-added products from forests, we could partner a woodlot owner and a craftsperson, pay them $5,000 and let them spend a month trying to develop products. Can the small yellow birch from a thinning be turned for chairs or railings? Can the pin cherry become a bowl or even jewelry instead of being left on the the forest floor? Would that piece of red maple stained with a flower pattern be useful for carving? This funding framework might also be useful in other areas, such as teaming up a woodlot owner and a herbalist, or an organic farmer and a caterer, or a watershed group with a tourism operator. Let them try to find solutions to their own problems. This new way of looking could also extend to other funding opportunities. There seems to be huge amounts of money coming down the pipes for carbon credits. Forest owners or farmers should be able to access federal funding for storing carbon - not with more hybrid poplar plantations but through growing trees and storing carbon in soil. If you cause the organic matter levels in your soil to rise, that benefits the broader community and maybe there should be some carbon credits for doing so.

If we act boldly and take the steps that need to be taken, Prince Edward Island will quickly be a leader in ecological forestry. That will only lead to good things. It will mean more well-managed forest land, filled with a mix of plants including high-value trees and medicinal shrubs. It will mean increased employment, both in the forests and in the value-added industries that have already started to take root here. It will mean support and increased opportunities for tourist operators - ecological forest management will actually bring in tourists, either for learning opportunities or for recreation. Imagine having our forests as something we could brag about. It will also mean that our water and our air have more protection in both the short and the long term. And of course, if we manage our forests well and become leaders in the field, we should develop a teaching program to help others. Creative, innovative management and teaching would attract people from all over North America. There are few examples of broad-scale forest restoration and we have the perfect laboratory in this province. Just think how proud we could all be of our forests. Perhaps there would be people singing songs about how well we look after our environment on Prince Edward Island. That's the type of publicity and attention that will help us all.