Feature

British Columbia (BC) has been developed,
in large part, by exploitation of natural
resources, including large tracts of mature
forests. While forest management has
evolved to provide reasonably sustainable
harvest levels, including protecting (or
minimizing damage to) many key nontimber
values and assuring reforestation
of logged areas, the system is based on
deriving short-term economic values from
forests. The primary beneficiaries have
been corporations, who hold the harvesting
rights, and the BC public, through jobs
and stumpage/tax revenue used to fund
infrastructure and government initiatives.
While this system has shortcomings, overall
it has served BC well.

Two springs ago – in May of 2009 – I left
my shovel in the shed. For the first time
in 14 years, I paid rent in the city, and
neither reprised the dance of planting nor
the crewbossing of the last nine seasons.
Instead, silvicultural work became the
spring and summer focus of my MA thesis
which shifted me from fourteen seasons
of ‘doing’ to one season of articulating
the labour of implementing the forester’s
prescriptions. The thesis traced the ways
treeplanters, and treeplanting management
staff, function as invisible transcribers on
the map of reality of these paper and digital
prescriptions. The thesis explores the point
past which foresters are no longer able to
implement – to actually make material –
their prescribed renewal program. From
this beginning point until the trees are in
the ground, the thesis explores how the
outcomes foresters prescribe are wholly
in the hands of the silvicultural workers
and so highlights the role of professional
silviculture practitioners.

Forest in India provide a tremendous
diversity of benefits to society, ranging
from local subsistence uses like fodder and
firewood, regional services like water cycle
regulation, and global contributions in
terms of endemic biodiversity and carbon
sequestration. Given this diversity, it is no
surprise that Indian forests are managed
under an equally bewildering diversity of
systems. Some of these can be traced
back hundreds of years (sacred forests),
while others owe their origins to recent
interventions. The patchwork patterns
of forest management evident in India
today can be attributed to a combination
of factors operating over the 19th and
20th centuries, as well as to an evolving
set of objectives of forest management.
Commercial timber production and
biodiversity conservation have been the
two most important policy objectives,
and consequently, forest management
has remained concentrated in provincial
and federal agencies until recently. In
spite of the heavy and direct subsistence
dependence of millions of people on nearby
forests across India, larger economic and
ecological considerations have dominated
forest management systems.

The forest industry plays a significant role in
many communities in Canada. One model
of forest management is that of community
forests. “A community forest is decisions
being made by people who have to live
with the outcome; finding local solutions
to contentious issues; keeping benefits in
the community; a very good idea; and one
of the hardest things I have ever done,”
says professional forester John Cathro.
The concept of the community forest has
been around in British Columbia since
1945, when Mission Municipal Forest was
established, but it wasn’t until 1998 that
the Forest Act was amended to allow for
Community Forest Agreements (BCCFA,
2010).

Silvicultural management staff move back and forth between the scientific imperatives of the foresters, and the non-scientist treeplanters – those who actually execute the treatments designed to change the structure of Crown stands. But as skillfully as management staff translate the language of forest science for the labourer, such translations can only ever operate at a representative – an abstract – order. In the final instance, it is always the labourer herself who must translate what she has been told into the material inscription: the trees in the ground.

Root disease is very difficult to locate and study as the infection process takes place under ground where insect feeding is not visible. Disease and therefore pine decline is normally not apparent until you see above-ground symptoms in the crown and by then, it is often too late to save the tree. However, using detection dogs may give us an advantage. A detection dog is a canine trained to work using its senses to detect substances such as explosives, illegal drugs, or blood. In the past decade, the use of detection dogs has expanded from these more traditional targets to a number of ecological targets.