Editorial: Integrating traditional and scientific knowledge
by Dirk Brinkman

Canada’s tenth National Forest Congress’ focus was “Sustainable Land Management in the Boreal: A Global Challenge”. Many speakers referenced the World Resources Institute’s 1997 classification of Canada’s boreal forests as one of the last three frontier forests. A frontier forest is an extensive, intact forest ecosystem capable of supporting its large mammals. After 100 years of development, Canada’s boreal is the only frontier forest remaining in any developed country. The congress’ theme centred upon sustaining this intact ecosystem.
Stephen Woodley, Chief Scientist at the Ecological Integrity Branch of Parks Canada, amongst others, cited a global study Latent extinction risk and the future battlegrounds of mammal conservation, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in the US. The global assessment indicated Canada’s boreal was one of the main future hot spots for habitat fragmentation and degradation. 

The boreal crisis area is the Western Canada sandstone basin, home of Canada’s booming oil reserves. Brad Pickering, Alberta’s Deputy Minister of Sustainable Resource Development, highlighted this distinct area with a satellite night image of the world, in which Alberta, and especially the area of the boreal’s habitat threat, stands out brightly. The oil price has been high and the oil patch is booming. That light is a point of pride to some, but the DM highlighted it at the congress as a problem area for sustainability. 

Herb Norweigen, Grand Chief of the Decho First Nation in the Athabasca region of the NWT, declared that “hunger for energy…is…inflicting a cancer on mother earth.” Herb talked about the tar sands oil extraction affecting the region’s hydrology with formerly clean streams and lakes now brown and oiled. In response, the Decho First Nation launched a legal challenge to the largest capital investment in North America, winning the right to a new EA. Their writ also seeks to have clean water declared as a human right. 

Alberta’s response to the fracturing of habitat contiguity in its boreal by the twin disturbances of forest harvesting and oil and gas activity is to lead Canada in the development of Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) practices. ILM pragmatically attempts to reduce the cumulative impact of the booming energy and timber sectors by integrating their planning. However, neither Alberta nor BC requires that the energy sector comply with the same sustainable ecosystem-based land use practices to which the forest sector is held accountable. 

The Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) declared that its members go beyond regulatory accountability by being certified to independent standards like FSC and SFC. FPAC used the congress to declare its members will go still farther towards sustainability in a joint venture with the Canadian Boreal Initiative. All FPAC members (who represent 60% of forest tenure area in Canada) have committed to first consulting through formal land use tables with First Nations before reallocating or considering allocating their long-term forest tenures. FPAC’s partnership with the boreal Initiative may lead to a new level of accommodation of both aboriginal and conservation claims. It also lays the groundwork for integrating aboriginal and scientific knowledge. Conspicuously, the energy sector, whose added activity is fracturing the boreal to the point of distinguishing the region’s latent extinction risk, is neither involved in this initiative nor leading a parallel initiative.

The highest form of integrated land management requires integrating traditional knowledge into scientific and spatial planning. Valerie Courtois, Forest Planner for the Innu Nation, brought some clarity to this challenge: “Traditional knowledge is layers of knowledge. Traditional knowledge has a higher level of reliability than western science, with severe consequences for error and 3,000 years of evidence. It is embedded in the language. Spiritual and moral relationships are tied directly to the land. This does not integrate well with scientific planning systems.” 

Fiona Schmiegelow, professor UA and Biodiversity Leader within the Sustainable Forest Management Network, challenged governments and industry to join their large scale scientific conservation-matrix model, which would guide adaptive management referenced to benchmark protected ecological areas. “The boreal”, she said, “may be the last experiment in truly sustainable forest management, as such an endeavour is less likely to occur in Siberia or the Amazon, the other two intact ‘frontier’ forests, which are both in developing countries without the scientific communities or funding to undertake such a venture.”

Larry Innes, Executive Director of the Boreal Initiative, to characterize the peril of the Boreal, shared with us an Innu Nation word “meca-quinta”. Meca-quinta is what you say to someone going out onto uncertain ice. We could integrate meca-quinta into todays boreal cultural knowledge as we venture onto our uncertain scientific planning systems, which are characterized by theoretical assumptions. Like the uncertain ice caused by climate change now surrounding the Innu, the fracturing in the boreal by oil and gas disturbances have pushed the ecosystem into an unfamiliar state of change with new challenges in managing complexity. 

While we cannot avoid operating on unproven assumptions, failure, as the latent extinction risk analysis shows, will have severe consequences. The challenge of curing our energy addiction within the boreal will clearly take wisdom and traditional wisdom will be welcome. The highest scientific knowledge the deepest traditional knowledge will not be enough, we also need the complete commitment of all players, industry, communities and government, for Canada’s boreal to still be an intact Frontier Forest in the next century.