By Nina Newington,
On Friends of Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area
(Public Facebook Group) Sep 12, 2024
The Way In
The forest right around our camp is not old forest. It is 50 to 60 years old and as close to a softwood monoculture as the forestry industry of the day could make it. It is made up almost entirely of red spruce.
Here and there red maples have sprouted from the stumps left after the area was clearcut. The forest floor is carpeted with moss. Ever more fungi are popping up. In spring it was studded with wildflowers: bunchberry, blue-bead lily, lady slippers. Squirrels scold and Golden-crowned kinglets chitter in the treetops, as they have done since we first set up camp, back before the migratory birds came and went.
It is beautiful, this forest right around camp, but it doesn’t support anything like the variety of life that you find in the old and old growth forests we have been discovering. It began life as an industrial forest. A ‘managed’ forest as the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables likes to describe it. But it is capable of growing out of that straight jacket. Red spruce can live to 250 or 300 years old.
If it is protected from now on as part of the Goldsmiths Lake Wilderness Area, this forest will, over many decades, become more complex and more diverse. It helps that Bowater left so many pockets of old forest. These are storehouses of biodiversity. Nature will mend the torn fabric of life. Climate change will create terrible pressures but nature is powerful.
Leaving this forest alone to heal is not, however, what the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables has in mind for it. Instead, it has been identified as a potential site for ‘High Production Forestry’.
And what is ‘High Production Forestry’? It is clearcutting and spraying. The same old playbook: cut down and haul away the forest, plant with softwood seedlings then, in a couple of years, come in with a helicopter and spray to kill off the hardwoods that have regrown, as well as all the other broadleaf plants, frogs, toads, salamanders, and the microbial life of the soil.
Then stand back while the soil, rutted up and exposed to the sun, moss shriveled and gone, releases the carbon it stored. The forest, which had only recently begun to suck in and store significant amounts of carbon after the last time it was clearcut, is gone. In its place is a carbon emitting wasteland that may possibly return to storing carbon in 20-30 years. Or it may not.
If we want a livable planet, we have to change the way we treat the forests in this province, starting with the ones the government has control over.
Crown lands. Public lands. Stolen lands.
Perhaps the best starting place for change is to say, ‘This Forest Belongs to the Next 7 Generations.’
Msit no’kmaq. All my relations.
Read more of Nina’s and Others’ thoughts from and about “Lichen Camp” and the Goldmsith Lake Wilderness Area on this website under
The “Camps”/Lichen Camp and its subpages:
– Recent Posts
– Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area proposal