Forests are an important part of life in Canada. In fact, Canada has the third largest forested area in the world ranking globally at 9 per cent. These are spread out across 362 million hectares. Approximately half of Canada is covered by forest. This is 15 times the size of all the Great Lakes put together.
The remaining ancient forests of the Caren Range on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast may well be the oldest living closed-canopy forests in the world.
There is a partly undisturbed region covering 55,000 hectares located in the south of British Columbia. Consisting of woods, rivers, and lakes, it is called Darkwoods, or the “Canadian Black Forest”.
The Great Bear Rainforest is a temperate rainforest on the Pacific coast of British Columbia located across 6.4 million hectares. It is part of the larger Pacific temperate rainforest ecoregion, which is the largest coastal temperate rainforest in the world.
Forests cover 62 per cent of the province of British Columbia, but only 24% is available for harvesting. Of that amount, only 200,000 hectares – or less than 1% – are harvested on an annual basis.
Logging is a main source of timber which is used for a number of human needs such as providing construction materials, flooring wood, furniture, fuel for industries and homes, sports goods and other kinds of commodities.
Since loggers cut trees, it helps to prevent the rapid spread of any natural fire. By removing fuels and dead debris logging helps protect a forest from an unexpected forest fire and saves various wildlife living in the forest.
For a lot of reasons, many people have a lot of misconceptions about the logging industry and general forest management. Unfortunately, due to past unethical practices by a lot of other forest management companies, many of these assumptions tend to be pretty negative. Forest services are often seen as damaging to the environment, and looking back on the history of logging, it's not hard to see why.
But as time has gone on, the impact of many industrial practices on the planet has been brought to our attention. It has become just as important for logging companies to compensate for their impact as it is to meet demand. Most companies now plant new trees in place the ones they fell and keep a closer eye on how their work affects the ecosystem.
Wood is lighter than many building products and the byproducts created through logging can be useful too – such as using the chips for mulch. Certain plastic or synthetic products have been touted as better alternatives to wood but they often cause more damage to the environment through their manufacturing processes than cutting down and replacing trees.
Reshaping and cultivating our natural environment and protecting the ecosystems has almost become an industry within an industry when it comes to logging. New research into how to compensate for – and even capitalize on – forestry and timber management is always emerging. In the age of environmental awareness, companies benefit far more from embracing it than not.
Logging has a place in our world just as our forests do. Working together to ensure that both stay in unison should be a priority for every Canadian.
