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| Fall colours on Granville Island |
Charlotte Gill stopped counting after she had planted one
million trees. She worked 17 seasons as a tree planter and describes the job as
one that gives a person full contact with the natural world. I’m really looking
forward to reading her memoir, Eating Dirt. At the writersfest yesterday, Gill
said she has learned that people can’t put back a forest; only time can do
that. About a thousand years. Canada still has 1.5 million square miles of tree
cover remaining and Gill would like us to view this as a planetary treasure.
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| West Coast art on Granville Island |
Andrew Nikiforuk talked about a different kind of logging
company, one that’s been around for 300 million years: bark beetles. These
small creatures – "tree managers without PhDs" – are part of the renewal process.
Like all beetles, they are the world’s garbage men. I like the way Nikiforuk
compared a tree to a well-defended fortress and bark beetles to medieval
knights and peasants, swarming the castle. Humans have aided bark beetles in
their work through logging practices that remove biodiversity in forest make-up
and through decades of fire suppression in parks. Nikoforuk explained why the
government response to the bark beetles has probably been more destructive than
the beetles themselves.
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| Book table at writersfest event |
Nikiforuk’s Empire of the Beetle is sure to be a fascinating
read. He talked about scientists working with sound to “stress the hell out of
the beetle.” They tried Rush Limbaugh and Guns & Roses, but found that it
was low frequency amplified insect sounds that completely changed bark beetle
behaviour, such as cannibalizing each other and not laying eggs. Another
solution Nikiforuk offers is community-based ownership of forests, rather than
ownership or lease by multinationals. Trees are the lungs of our planet and as
their numbers go down, so does the oxygen in the air we breathe.
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