Beetles, Forests and Climates: Introducing Sinead Earley.
My dissertation, entitled “Beetles, Forests and Climates: Historical and Cultural Geographies of Forest Entomology and Forest Management in British Columbia, Canada,” expresses both my interest in history and my investment in the future of forest practice in the province. As I explore cultural values and meanings embedded within specific managerial paradigms, I aim to complement the prevailing techno-scientific approach to forest management with some socio-cultural storytelling.
I use the most recent and most extensive Dendroctonus ponderosae (mountain pine beetle, or MPB) outbreak to frame my discussion about the history of entomological research in British Columbia. Forest inventories indicate that the outbreak in British Columbia has spread over 16.3 million hectares, resulting in tree mortality for roughly half of the mature Pinus contorta (lodgepole pine) trees in the province. Cumulative estimates of the outbreak, which peaked in 2004, suggest that 675 million cubic meters of pine were killed between 1998 and 2008 (Natural Resources Canada, The State of Canada’s Forests Annual Report, 2010). The social and economic impact of high mortality rates for the most lucrative of commercially harvested tree species in BC’s southern interior is formidable, as are the impacts on global carbon dynamics.
In many ways, the current MPB outbreak has transgressed our notion of ‘natural disturbance’ in which the beetle has always played an important role within forest ecosystems. This transgression, not only of biophysical processes but also of certain conceptualizations in theoretical ecology, is unprecedented. It begs questions of causation that lead me to review historical management practices (fire suppression, silvicultural methods, pest control strategies), our human contributions to a warming globe, as well as the biological characteristics of a bark beetle species.
Exploring the discursive formations of a particular set of socio-cultural forest values will allow for a genealogical understanding of BC’s forests. As Bruce Braun expresses (The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture and Power on Canada’s West Coast, 2004), the advantage of a genealogical approach “allows us to recognize understandings of the forest – and our interests in the forest – as historical rather than timeless and partial rather than objective.” Historical geographies of the present can be powerful textual tools when trying to grasp at the fissures of a nature-culture dichotomy that continues to spur humans towards profligate modes of resource use. I will attempt to identify the cultural politics and philosophies of nature that have guided entomological research and forest management decisions, using specific paradigm shifts in BC’s forest management - the introduction of the Sopron School of Forestry beginning in 1957, and the MPB outbreak beginning in 1998 - as examples. I am interested to discover what cultural values and meanings (of insects, trees, and forests) are embedded within specific managerial paradigms.
The most effective way to convey the situated and (most often) highly contentious claims to forest knowledge can be achieved by drawing together a wide range of narratives: from the industrial to the personal, from the institutional (educational and governmental) to ecological accounts of forest ecosystem dynamics. Such a highly variegated gathering of narratives calls for a mixed methodological approach. By way of archival materials, government documents (Forest Insect and Disease Surveys, 1952-1985; Royal Commission reports), life history interviews (with foresters, entomological researchers, and industry representatives), and my own autoethnographic recordings, I plan to deliver content that depicts a crafted forest.
A creature of tiny scale – the MPB is on average 6mm in length – is presently implicated in environmental change of global proportions. The choice to connect (or not to connect) such sizable differences in scale is a political query, and is revealing of human attitudes towards social and environmental responsibility. Throughout my life forests have been a primary source of employment, of academic interest, and have always been sites of personal and emotional contemplation. I carry this forest intimacy with me as I work through my doctoral studies, and continue to invest time and creativity towards a publicly engaged dialogue about forest history and environmental ethics.
The Tree of Life: A History of the Western Red Cedar on Haida Gwaii
Introducing Alexandra Vlachos Grünig, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she is currently working under Prof. Christian Rohr. The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has just granted Alexandra a 3-year full scholarship for her doctoral studies. Previously, she studied contemporary history (19/20th century), Egyptology and journalism at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. During those studies, she mainly focused on the cold war, US foreign affairs, the Swiss political system, and the global and European history of ethnic cleansing.
Alexandra is very keen to correspond with Canadians about her research, so if her work interests you, please get in touch with her.
The Tree of Life: A History of the Western Red Cedar on Haida Gwaii
I have spent this summer on Haida Gwaii, learning and discovering the seemingly endless different views about the cedar tree, talking to cavers, loggers, chiefs, museum curators etc., exploring the Islands from the very north to the south tip down in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve (the first conjointly managed park of BC government and the Haida Nation – mainly a result of anti-logging protests on Lyell Island in the 1980ies). Even though cedar has a rough time to grow back due to introduced sitka deer and badly managed logging, it is still very present on Haida Gwaii in many different ways.
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) is easy to distinguish from any other tree of British Columbia. Its bark is different, its needles are soft and its smell is unique. Old growth cedar is an essential part of BC’s coastal rainforest and is closely connected to healthy salmon streams. In second growth forests, it usually grows after other conifers like spruce and hemlock, because it needs shadow and wet soil. There are surprising facts on the Thuja plicata: first of all, it is not a real cedar, but a cypress. This tree produces thujaplicin, its own defensive mechanism against rotting and fungus. This natural fungicide enables even a long gone dead tree to still be a valuable part of the rainforest. Red cedars make excellent nursing logs and everything that is produced from its wood will reliably resist rain and salt water.
For this reason, cedar was and still is the foundation of the culture and art of BC’s coastal First Nations. Literally every essential part of their material (and supernatural) world depended on cedar wood: longhouses, canoes, paddles, totem poles, hats, bowls, clothing... It is for the same reasons, that cedar wood today is a sought after wood for the timber market: The light timber is the perfect wood not only for shingles, but for everything exterior facing from garden furniture to entire houses. Together with its beautiful appearance, it makes red cedar a commercial valuable product – but only if it has grown to certain dimensions. After extensive logging in the 20th century, old growth cedar is becoming more and more rare on Haida Gwaii. It is not too hard to sense a highly sensitive political issue here: The Haida claim red cedar as an existential resource not only for their art, but for their heritage and culture. Timber companies value cedar as a commercial product that makes big money. The BC government – involved in several negotiations with the Haida around land use and ownership – has its own interests in the management of natural resources.
My dissertation project is all about a “biography” of the cedar tree, aiming to analyse the conflicts around it with the tree itself in the center of the study. I use more of a cultural approach than intending to write a “traditional forest history” of Haida Gwaii. With the theoretical background of the cultural history of Jan Assmann and the Actor-Network-Theory of the French sociologist Bruno Latour, the main goal is to detect the different attitudes and emotions around the cedar tree. It is about the memories of fallers and loggers as it is about the point of view of a Haida carver.
It is not so much about “hard facts”, than it is about stories, about memories, about emotions. It is a multi-disciplinary project focusing not only on archival sources, but also on diaries, photographs, stories, objects and oral history.
New Brunswick Aerial spray programs in context.
Pesticide spraying has been controversial in Canada for several decades. One of the more contentious applications of pesticides has been the forest sector's use of aerial spraying to control insects considered "pests." In New Brunswick, for example, a province with a long history of intensive commercial forestry, the Department of Natural Resources announced in early June 2011 that 10,000 hectares of Crown forests near Sussex, New Brunswick, would be sprayed aerially with Abietiv to manage a balsam fir sawfly outbreak.
Minister of Natural Resources Bruce Northrup was careful to explain to the media that the insecticide was based on a naturally occurring virus that was
"effective against the sawfly but research has shown it does not affect humans, other animals, birds, bees, other insects, fish or aquatic organisms, or plants." Northrup's cautious explanation has its historical roots in the growth of opposition to New Brunswick's spruce budworm spraying program in the 1950s and 1960s. An analysis of those events can be found in an article by Mark J. McLaughlin in the most recent issue of Acadiensis, entitled Green Shoots: Aerial Insecticide Spraying and the Growth of Environmental Consciousness in New Brunswick, 1952-1973. Bruce Northrup would have been well aware of the historical sensitivities when he made the Abietiv announcement.
Canadian Forest History, ASEH 2012.
Myself and Dr. Robert Griffin are working with the history of the last 100 years of the BC Forest Service. We would like to find other
presenters interested in a session on the perspective of specific foresters in shaping forestry organizations or forest policy in Canada, the United
States or globally between 1920 and 1970 with a focus on their philosophy and actions within their organizations, in forest management and in the sphere of public policy.
Lorne Hammond, Ph.D. lhammond@uvic.ca
Department of History
University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada
and Curator of History, Royal BC Museum, Victoria BC
Forest History Society of Ontario celebrates first birthday with a third newsletter.
The spring 2011 newsletter of the Forest History Society of Ontario is now online. Articles of special note include those on Peterborough's nineteenth-century Anti-sawdust crusade; Tom Thomsons's first northern canoe trip (1912); Hearst (une Région exportatrice de bois à pâte!); brief histories of the 'Blue Ox Forwarder' and the Rockland plantation; the emergence of Dubreuilville; biographies of Ralph S Carman, and others; an archives corner, book reviews, and much more!
The newsletter can be accessed at:
http://www.ontarioforesthistory.ca/index.php/newsletter