Environmental Adaptations

Nothing like the natural wealth of great tracts of forests and their function as carbon sinks. Which makes Canada in theory a very good candidate for disposing of a goodly amount of carbon dioxide pollution in an advanced industrialized economy. Except for the fact that botanists seem to have reached a tentative conclusion that our forests are not sequestering carbon as efficiently as we have been taught to believe.

And then there are other problems, particularly in those areas in Alberta and British Columbia which are home to vast tracts of boreal forest. A wonderful natural resource gifted to this country through the good fortune of nature's design. But nature is capricious by her very nature. Just as the earth is undergoing profound natural changes that promise to have even more deleterious effects on us than we have already experienced, she complicates matters further.

Even if we give nature credit for ping-ponging the environment over the millennia in an irregular pendulum of minor ice periods balanced by warming periods, we've surely got to take some credit for enhancing - or if we prefer - exacerbating these swings by our own harnessing of our technology to her offerings of fossil fuels. Casually, wastefully, wilfully.

So she offers us her smarting slaps of disapproval by encouraging her destructive little creatures to warm up to the increasingly enticing atmosphere and wreak their damage at will. Fully 40% of British Columbia's priceless pine forest has been wiped out by the ever encroaching depredations of the mountain pine beetle - and more set for destruction.

Their far worse infestations in Alberta and now British Columbia no longer held at bay by winters cold enough to set them back. Alberta in particular, with its tar sands oil extraction fouling the atmosphere to an aggravated degree, could little afford to lose its forests. Tree planting should now become the industry of the future.

Not only for the purpose of logging, which in and of itself has provided more than enough eyesores and depleted too many pristine areas of mountain and forest landscapes than we should accept. But to maintain our erstwhile advantage, now slipping away through the tragedy of great tracts of dying forest.

We need to know a whole lot more about how our human activities have impacted on our atmosphere, and we need to discover, through intensive research, just what steps we should be engaged upon in attempts to sooth nature's bruised feelings.

A good start might be for the federal government to reinstate our main climate impacts research network which it had latterly shut down.

Bad move, that.