Woodman, Spare That Tree
(This post is cut-and-pasted from three sources: Audubon Magazine, and Boreal Birds 1 and 2.)
Next week as my biology class draws to a close, we'll be continuing our survey of major biomes. My notes from last year say that the Northern Coniferous Forest or Boreal Forest biome is the largest of all. I couldn't remember my source for that fact, so went checking to confirm that I am telling it right. I am. Here are some of the discussion points I found for our focus on northern forests:
The global realm called boreal forest encompasses 6.5 million square miles in Siberia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada. There is more intact forest in Canada’s boreal than there is in the Brazilian Amazon. In fact, the boreal, named after Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is the largest intact terrestrial ecosystem in the world, and Canada’s portion alone represents 25 percent of the world’s remaining frontier forests, consisting of a 1.4 billion-acre shawl of black spruce, aspen, paper birch, and larch that drapes from Newfoundland to the Yukon.
Nearly half of the regularly occurring birds on the North American continent use Canada’s boreal forest either for breeding or as home habitat. Each spring, according to data compiled by Peter Blanchard when he was working for Bird Studies Canada, a nonprofit conservation group, up to 3 billion songbirds migrate to nest in the boreal. By midsummer, an estimated 5 billion birds start flying south.
But sheer size is not enough to protect this global treasure, and it is not just the birds who need it.
Every year timber companies slash swaths of forest almost as big as Connecticut, mostly to feed American consumers’ prodigious appetite for wood and paper. "Less than 3 percent of the southern boreal is protected right now,"says Hobson. And less than 10 percent of the Canadian boreal as a whole is permanently protected.
Protected from what? Our demand for wood fiber. Kimberly-Clark Company, which produces Kleenex, Scott, Viva, and Cottonelle brand tissues, toilet paper, and paper towels, uses no recycled content in many of its disposable products, and it cuts down more than a million cubic yards of boreal forest a year. The American Forest & Paper Association estimates that recycled paper represents less than 5 percent of the fiber used in the printing and writing market. Nearly 95 percent of the paper and fiber for book production comes from newly cut trees.
The advocacy group Forest Ethics reports that about half of the paper used to print magazines, newsprint, and the 17 billion catalogues produced annually in the United States was once boreal bird habitat. The majority of mailed catalogues are produced using virgin boreal wood fiber logged in clearcuts as big as 30 square miles.
What can you and I do to be part of the solution? Be careful consumers of wood products, including our reading material.
Noted bestselling authors like Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro have joined with environmental groups to promote more use of recycled paper and less use of ancient trees while producing books. Natural healing author and physician Dr. Andrew Weil has made a similar pledge. In Walker's case, her last three books were printed on recycled paper. She has the practice written into her contract with Random House.
One alternative is to buy from publishers who use post-consumer and non-virgin sources for paper. Raincoast Books prints more than 95 percent of its text-based books on ancient-forest friendly paper. When the large-house Canadian publisher printed almost 1 million copies of the last Harry Potter book on recycled paper, enough trees were saved to more than fill Seward Park and Discovery Park combined. Raincoast has been very pleased with its ability to get the paper it needs, deflating the notion that supply wouldn't match demand if big U.S. publishers went to recyled paper. Many paper industry leaders concede that if larger publishers wanted recycled paper, the supply flow would be there.