Editorial: Plant Trees. Plant Lots of Trees. An Inconvenient Truth
by Dirk Brinkman

For 10 years the silviculture contractor’s cruel reality was a declining forest sector driving lower prices, fewer trees per hectare, and less tending funding. Prices in shrinking markets fell and experienced contractors, field supervisors and planters left. Reduced forest funding and expertise has placed Canada’s forest health at risk. 
Canadian Silviculture magazine’s contribution was to promote 2 new market drivers for forest management: carbon funded reforestation and bioenergy - 2 challenging initiatives with a current federal government supported by oil interests. 
This magazine’s causes were just joined by a potent movie called An Inconvenient Truth. Expertly set in the tragedy of Al Gore’s unsuccessful life mission to prevent climate change by becoming the US President, it tells the story of his subsequent years of penance - giving his climate lecture ‘over a 1,000 times’. The lecture encapsulates Gore’s learning journey to make the science accessible. Content is honed by his awareness that only indisputable facts can survive the cynical reception given to a known presidential aspirant. 
A refining cauldron for simplifying the science was urgently needed for this complex issue. It resulted in a powerful and compelling presentation of the facts underlying the science and risks of climate change. Gore’s most persuasive image is his summary of last year’s report on 650,000 years of ice core data (see graph below). 
“At no point in the last 650,000 years before the pre-industrial era did the CO2 concentration go above 300 parts per million. The grey line shows the world’s temperature over the same 650,000 years. And within 45 years this (2050 & 600ppm) is where the CO2 levels will be if we do not make dramatic changes quickly. There is not a single part of this graph - no fact, date or number - that is controversial in any way or in dispute by anybody. If we allow this to happen, it will condemn future generations to a catastrophically diminished future.”
A second champion has also joined the fray. Gaia system discoverer James Lovelock, now in his late 80s, published The Revenge of Gaia: why the earth is fighting back - and how we can still save humanity” in April 2006. Gaia is the term he gave earth’s amazing self-regulating capacity, which over the past 4.5 billion years maintained stable conditions favouring life. In changing circumstances earth’s equilibrium phase shifts into other stable, self regulating states - not necessarily as supportive of our present civilization or population. 
Last year’s severe droughts in the Amazon basin fit scientists’ predictions that it may dry and burn up. If the Amazon burns, because surface temperatures will be over 25°C, they predict all soil moisture will transpire until it becomes a desert. Losing the Amazon’s dynamic carbon pool is predicted to add 300 ppm to atmospheric CO2. 
Borneo’s 1997-1998 fires released 40% of the total greenhouse gas emissions that year. Last month I flew over a 5 million hectare 1998 Borneo burn. Some areas are still bare rock, soil, or savannah. The recovering forests are nearly monocultures without the abundant bird life evident in the intact rainforest. 
Lovelock does not give much cause for hope. “Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia…We are no more qualified to be stewards or developers of the earth than are goats to be gardeners.”
But forest gardeners are what we need. The credits for An Inconvenient Truth end with the words “Plant trees. Plant lots of trees.” To add a forest area the size of the Amazon and reduce atmospheric CO2 by 300 ppm would require the engagement of all nations and all potential forest gardeners. It requires 2 things of Canada: afforest between 20 and 50 million hectares of our own marginal farmland, and facilitate afforestation in developing countries by supporting carbon trading through the UN Clean Development Mechanism. 
As forest gardeners we can bring hope by reforesting and afforesting for the future of humanity.