EDITORIAL: Mobilizing Canada
by Dirk Brinkman

The Canadian Institute of Forestry’s (CIF) 100th anniversary edition of the Forestry Chronicle inserted an irresponsible promotion of Fred Singer’s book disputing human causes of climate change and solutions to it. Fred Singer, formerly employed by the tobacco industry to deny the connection between smoking and cancer, was recently engaged by the oil and gas industry to use similar pseudoscience to seed doubt about global warming by denying it is unusual, denying that fossil fuels and deforestation have caused climate change, or denying that anything we can do will prevent climate change.

The largest global community of the best natural resource scientists ever brought together on a single project has confirmed that climate warming is caused by the emissions-intensive way of life of the wealthiest people on the planet, which, of course, includes all Canadians. To promote this book seems to fly in the face of the Forestry Chronicle’s tradition of peer-reviewed science, though perhaps not its tradition of stimulating debate. 

In the economic boom before the Great War, naturalists and conservationists recognized the threat of North America’s addiction to consuming its abundant forests. In 1906, in response to the conservation movement, Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier chaired the first Canadian Forestry Congress. One outcome of the congress was the formation of the CIF in 1908. The organization was introduced to both certify professional foresters and create a forum for the debate that would lead to more responsible harvest decisions, including reforesting the more valuable species, which were disappearing. The conservation movement’s leading thinkers, like Henry Thoreau, articulated the emerging public conservation ethic, while political leaders like Laurier and pioneer foresters created huge national parks and crafted the debates that started the CIF.

One hundred years later, global warming has been identified as the greatest threat ever faced by Canada’s forests. Climate change projections predict current forest stands and their progeny will be exterminated from most ecosystems within their current rotation. As a first management response to this emerging catastrophe, BC began a debate on the best replacement stands with its Future Ecosystem Initiative. Because the future climates will not be those in which trees growing today once thrived, BC has also begun to experiment with adaptive Climate Seed Transfer guidelines to better anticipate the kinds of geo-climatic zones in which new trees will find themselves. This small beginning suggests the direction required in a national forest response.

The global warming threat today resembles the threat of industrial forestry 100 years ago, as once again, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” But the formation of a professional institution like a future climate ministry to oversee a rational solution is inadequate to match the scope, scale, and pervasive challenge of climate change. That is because, unfortunately, the consequences of climate change are far more severe than the destruction of Canada’s forests. Those who will suffer the most are the poorest people, populations that live in subsistence with marginal lifestyles. The consequences of warming are so severe that some US congressional members have suggested that climate deniers like Fred Singer and those who finance them should be investigated and charged with the harm they may cause by postponing action to prevent climate change. Anyone who has read the Pentagon’s briefing note on the “global geopolitical chaos” that will follow from climate tipping, or has read With Speed and Violence by Fred Pearce, will share this sense of moral responsibility.

Climate deniers like Fred Singer are not Lord Haw Haw, the last person in the UK to be shot for treason. Lord Haw Haw’s daily radio broadcasts from Germany alternatively cajoled and consoled his (the British) people throughout the war to prepare them for the unstoppable Nazi domination. The world has not yet declared war on climate change. The other difference is the pure evil of Hitler’s deliberate industrial genocide. Most climate change activists are not suggesting that today’s energy addiction is more than a curable pathology of an immature civilization. But there is one important thing that is the same: the scope, scale, and intensity of the response to climate change will have to match how Canadian society responded to the Second World War to have any hope of success.

Canada’s Juno Beach memorial opens with a quote by Prime Minister Mackenzie King musing on the employment benefits of Nazism. A year and a half from the moment Canada decided to act, the Armed forces grew from a few thousand to one and half million strong, and all Canadian society and industry, including the forest sector, was mobilized to support them. The response to the challenge of climate change will have to be far more powerful than the vision embodied in the CIF 100 years ago, since climate change is a challenge that permeates every aspect of our way of life.

Canada’s historical leadership qualities must once again be mobilized, but this time to converge within all of the interlocking challenges to exorcise the devil from the details of climate solutions, and again rise to become a new exemplar mobilized society for the world.