in the Noel Paul River watershed. The survey showed that the cutovers had regenerated to the species harvested, but moose, which had been introduced, were eliminating balsam fir, birch, aspen, ground hemlock, and most hardwood shrubs from approximately 20 percent of the watershed and the most fertile soils. Most of those areas were converting to grassland with scattered white spruce.1
I was now even more skeptical of clear-cutting. After two years with Price (Nfld.) Pulp & Paper Limited I was becoming disillusioned and skeptical of the possibility of the chances of my goal to make positive changes and began looking for other opportunities. I resigned from Price (Nfld.) and was hired by Forestry Canada as a forest research officer. With them I hoped to study tree and stand growth relative to tree location and spacing within a stand and various stand-managementtechniques to vary that spacing and improve growth. I quickly began to feel that I had made a mistake, however, as I became disappointed and impatient with the slow pace and what I felt were inefficient civil service policies and practices.
At this time, I had, with Forestry Canada’s encouragement, applied to a number of Canadian and American universities for post-graduatestudies, and Yale University chose to accept my application and offer me financial assistance. That was during the Vietnam War and I was advised to register for the military draft immediately upon arriving in New Haven. Enquiry showed that as a Canadian citizen residing in the United States I would not be drafted if my “number came up.” However, America was going through a period of intense self-examinationand I feared that the military draft could be broadened. I didn’t like even a slim possibility of being drafted, and that, combined with my disappointment with the slow progress of my research proposal through the civil service hierarchy, and limited ability to access the bush except in summer, was enough for me to consider other options.
Price (Nfld.) Pulp & Paper Limited had been giving signals that they wanted me back to direct their forestry program and to serve as an understudy to chief forester, Frank Hayward, who was due to retire. The offer was certainly an improvement over the situation I had left when I was last with them. I felt that if I were to become chief forester, I would be better able to implement some of the forest management change that I felt at the time was essential for forest health. I took their offer and remained there for twelve enjoyable years, directing their forest management and forestry research.
During that period, I oversaw the re-measurementof all of the long-termtrials and wrote, or supervised the writing of, final reports. Some draft reports were reviewed by selected external experts and they were revised accordingly, but none were subjected to the rigour of official peer review and publication in accredited scientific journals.
Based on the results of trials initiated in 1921, which showed significant merchantable-yieldimprovement,2we initiated several small pre-commercialthinnings of dense young stands. The thinning removed excess tree saplings, while selected desirable saplings were left standing at as near as practical to two-metrespacing. The thinning recovered no merchantable wood and therefore yielded no immediate cash return. That type of thinning is today called “spacing,” or “cleaning.” In 1970, after improving labour productivity and thus the cost of the thinning, we began expanding the program, with both federal and provincial help, to over a thousand hectares per year.
As part of my responsibilities, and as an interested tourist, I travelled widely in Canada, parts of the United States, and New Zealand, familiarizing myself with other companies’ and various governments’ policies and practices. I visited the forestry operations of numerous companies in various provinces and states, including, among others, the clear-cutmountain terrain of MacMillan Bloedel’s business in the Vancouver Island rain forests; Proctor & Gamble’s operations at Grande Prairie, Alberta, and its clear-cuttingin the lodgepole pine forest of the Rockies’ foothills; Weyerhaeuser‘s Douglas fir plantations near Mount St. Helen’s in Washington State; California’s redwoods; New Zealand Forest Products (NZFP)’s intensively managed radiata pine plantations on North Island, New Zealand; J.D. Irving’s operations in New Brunswick, with its extensive black spruce plantations situated on former clear-cutsthat had been prepared for planting with heavy vegetation crushers; and Spruce Falls Power and Paper’s fill-inplantations on the clay belt forests of northeastern Ontario.
In almost every case, to the best of my knowledge, the forests were being managed according to the current laws of each jurisdiction that, compared to today’s laws, were rather lax. Except for Spruce Falls Power and Paper, companies that were practising the more intensive forest management, at that time, put their greatest effort into their private land.
Throughout my career, I was sometimes assigned to lead bush tours for Canadian and foreign politicians, stock analysts, buyers, and executives of international newspapers who were our current or potential customers. Conversations during those tours exposed me to the politics of world trade and investment and gave me some insight into the complexity of satisfying customer demands. To my surprise, puzzlement, and gratitude, one newspaper executive wrote our CEO giving me credit for his paper’s large newsprint order.
In 1974, Abitibi Paper Company acquired Price Brothers Limited, and the combined companies were later renamed Abitibi-PriceInc. Philip Mathias’s book, Takeover, provides a detailed and intriguing replay of events leading up to and during the high-stakesboardroom, stock market, and financial manoeuvring that occurred at the time.3In 1978, I was temporarily transferred to head office to work with Duncan Naysmith and Frank Robinson of Abitibi-Priceas they negotiated Forest Management Agreements (FMA), first with Manitoba and then with Ontario. The first FMA negotiated in Ontario, for Abitibi’s Iroquois Falls Division, became the trend-setterfor two additional agreements for Abitibi, and subsequent FMAs that followed with all other companies in Ontario. FMAs transferred responsibility for stand renewal after disturbance and follow-upstand management from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) to the industry. That exhilarating experience culminated with Bill Johnston, the vice president of woodlands for the company, challenging me, “You have helped negotiate FMAs, now make one work.”
I was made accountable for forest management of the Spruce River FMA, miscellaneous licences, and Abitibi-Price’s developing forestry program on its two thousand square kilometres of private land northwest of Thunder Bay, Ontario.
With the exception of approximately one year working for Forestry Canada and a summer job with Parks Canada, all of my employment between 1956 and 1997 was with Canadian forest-industrycompanies. I left Abitibi-Pricein 1997 to become an independent forestry consultant. For the next eight years, under short-termcontracts, I supervised forest renewal, advised on forest silvicultural and urban forestry projects, was lead auditor on two independent forest-managementaudits,4 and assisted the successful bidder when what had since become Abitibi-Consolidatedsold its private land.
During my career, various persons provocatively challenged me with, “How can you, a professional forester, promote industrial forestry and not be ashamed?”
My answer was always the same. “I am proud of what I am doing with the forest industry.” And then I’d proceed to explain why to anyone willing to listen. The remainder of this book is my expanded answer to the question.
The Forest Is More than Its Trees
As a teenager, I often travelled along the numerous fens, muskegs, and barrens of my Newfoundland home, where less than 50 percent of the landscape is closed forest. The fens at valley bottoms, muskegs, and rock barrens on the ridge tops and some slopes, support few trees.
During my work there, I used those open spaces as travel corridors, particularly in winter when they offered unimpeded snowshoe, ski, and snowmobile travel on the wind-packedsnow. I would stand gazing up from the side of a fen or down from a ridge top at the opposite hillside, studying the layout of the tree cover, its species content, and relative tree sizes and stand volumes.
Over the years, those images converged in my mind with numeric cruise data collected along parallel
