EDITORIAL
A letter to the Right Honourable Prime Minister, Stephen Harper
by Dirk Brinkman

Dear Mr. Harper:
You have a historic opportunity to be the defender of the forests of Canada, a nation founded on people’s labour, investment and trade harvesting healthy Canadian forests. Forests are dynamic, ever-changing systems, but the normal range of variability is now being hurdled. Biological episodes in our forests present a forest sector that is in crisis in many parts of Canada. These systemic challenges can only be met through a cross-Canada strategy, led by the federal government. 
Our forests are icons of our Canadian identity and economy; you need no reminder of their importance or of their heroes. Canadian silviculturalists, however, have had less recognition. In the past decades, the Canadian silviculture industry has bridged the gap between the forest sector and ENGO community with practical forest solutions. Since 1990, each year more Canadians reforest what we reap than serve in the Canadian Armed forces. Over 100,000 young people and students served sustainability’s goals in muddy-boot bush planting camps this past decade. Having learned to work harder than any other physical work ever measured in ergonomics, they have emerged into other sectors of our economy as some of Canada’s most vital entrepreneurs.
Over-harvesting is no longer the threat to forest sustainability that it was in the 1970s and 1980s. By allocating long-term harvest rights to private corporations under sustainable management regulations, our provinces have nurtured and conserved the largest intact natural forest area in any developed country. The conservation covenant between provincial governments and the forest sector is globally unique, and good for forest health. Forest harvests mimic and integrate disturbance cycles and the remaining forests enjoy protection from historic extremes of fire and pests. 
However, the threats to sustainability now come from other directions. South of our forest tenures, private land cleared for agriculture and development leave very little forest. North of Canada’s tenured forests, wildfires and pests rage unchecked - the spruce bud worm infestation stretching from the Yukon through Alaska is an unfortunate example. Oil and gas fracture intact forests and climate change is also making our tenured forests vulnerable. 
One of the most evident symptoms of climate change is the unprecedented attack of the mountain pine beetle (MPB). While BC’s 20 million acres of pine mortality is well known, less widely reported was the gradual invasion into Alberta, capped by the vast number of the beetles that rained down unceremoniously between Grand Prairie and Fox Creek, Alberta on July 26, 2006. A massive strata cumulus updraft in BC must have lifted the beetles into a jet stream, which hurtled them across the Rockies. When they rained down from the sunny sky, farmers ran outside to see what was falling on their tin roofs and found gutters streaming with beetles. 
The MPB invasion into regions where jack pine stretches beyond BC and Alberta to provinces east, creates a vulnerability for the boreal forests, where deep snow is insulating too many of the invaders. The Alberta forest sector may salvage more aggressively than BC, but this alone is not the crisis. Research models predict this invasion will be among the first of many unprecedented predator/prey, host/parasite or plant/herbivore asymmetries arising from climate change.
Salvaging infested stands ahead of beetle epidemics shifts the forest sector into a regional boom and bust cycle, undermining Canada’s remote rural communities. Alberta has joined BC in this accelerated harvest, inviting US-Canada Softwood Agreement challenges almost before the ink is dry, while the US forest industry deals with its own abundance of salvage wood. 
The rapid appreciation of the Canadian dollar, US market access barriers, and increasing energy and transport costs have made Canada’s forest industry vulnerable just as global warming begins to take an accelerating toll. This combined assault on Canada’s timber/conservation paradigm requires federal government leadership, not only because these are trans-provincial environmental challenges, but because these changes threaten Canada’s future balance of trade and its international commitments. 
Canada’s political leadership must face the extreme events in Canada’s forests with strong protection, conservation, and restoration initiatives. I invite you, Prime Minister Harper, to champion a national initiative for forest carbon restoration, protection, and conservation, in the honourable tradition of the timber/conservation covenant through which governments and the forest sector have historically protected Canada’s forests. 
You are the chief international spokesperson for Canada’s well-earned reputation as a forest nation, and we in the silviculture industry expect a new forest carbon conservation covenant.

Dirk Brinkman, CEO
Brinkman Forest Restoration Ltd.