An important article about forest spraying

This is from David Ortin

In 1990 I wrote a Green Web Bulletin (#6) called “Opposing Forest Spraying”, giving a basic overview of forest spraying in Nova Scotia and its relationship to industrial forestry and how to fight it. (It was published in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology, 2 (1), February, 1991.) See http://home.ca.inter.net/~greenweb/Opposing_Forest_Spraying.html

This article is now being made available on the internet in the hope that it can be helpful for people who are today taking up forest spraying issues, and who may need an overview of what is at stake.

It is necessary for all of us who care about our ecology to oppose the destructiveness of industrial forestry AND to cast aside organizing illusions. There is a theoretical or ideological side to the anti-spraying struggle and a resistance side, as the “Opposing Forest Spraying” article points out.

Where I live in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and in other areas of the province, there has been an upsurge in opposition to the use of forestry biocides in 2007 by rural people who live in areas targeted for forest spraying. New voices have come forward to take up the fight, usually out of personal necessity, in order to try and stop herbicides being dumped on woodlands in the vicinity of where they live. But public opposition to forest spraying goes back in this province to the late 1970s. We are talking about 25-30 years of rural opposition, and the experience which goes along with this, plus opposition to the spraying of Christmas trees, blueberry fields, power lines, and roadside spraying.

After moving to Nova Scotia from the West Coast in 1979 with my family, I became involved in organizing around uranium mining/exploration and forest issues, although then living in Halifax and later Truro. Our own family’s direct personal involvement in forest spraying dates back to 1984 when we moved to our rural place in Saltsprings, Pictou County, and then found out, completely out of the blue, that there was an imminent forest spraying planned right alongside of us by the Scott pulp and paper company. With the help of our new neighbours, and after much scrambling, we were able to stop this spraying. Some twenty years later, on August 15th 2005, a helicopter with spraying booms suddenly appeared fairly close to our residence and started spraying herbicides – forest poisons – into the environment. Nobody had told us about the spray site, which is on land to one side of us, under so-called forest management with Neenah Paper, formerly Kimberly Clark and before that Scott Paper. So the forest spraying issue is a persistent one for many of us and not only of theoretical interest.

The article “Opposing Forest Spraying” is somewhat dated, but while the names of two of the three multi-national pulp and paper companies in the province may have changed (and Irving, based in New Brunswick, has now entered the province as the new kid on the block, having acquired large forest holdings in Nova Scotia which it clearcuts and sprays), the picture of industrial forestry remains, generally accurate for today. (Some mainstream environmentalists have lent their voices to praising Stora-Enso in 2007 for stopping herbicide spraying in 1997. However they seem to have forgotten that a Btk forest insecticide spraying program against the black-headed budworm was conducted in the summer of 2005 on crown lands in Cape Breton under lease to Stora-Enso by government agencies.) As my article notes, because all spraying is being done “legally,” stopping the spraying will be done illegally, at the actual spray sites, through people being prepared to put their bodies on the line. Past experience in Nova Scotia shows that no government agency is going to protect human and non-human environments from pesticide contamination. If anything is going to be done, people in their own communities will have to do it themselves. All political parties within the province, including the New Democratic Party, have in the past supported forest spraying.

What has changed since 1990, is accessibility to critical information on biocides is now much more easily available to citizens via the internet. This means that those who oppose forest spraying can more rapidly get on top of the critical information and have access to the experience of other anti-spray activists. This, plus the general rise in environmental consciousness within Canadian society around the dangers of biocide use, and the in-your-face evident destructiveness of industrial forestry which can be seen everywhere, means it is much more difficult for the forest spraying fraternity to claim any moral high ground — not that they do not still try to sing the forestry job creation blues. However, on the environmental side it remains folly today, as in 1990, to believe that having the right “facts” about the herbicides or insecticides being sprayed on forests and their potential impacts on people or ecosystems will determine the outcome of any particular spraying situation. Entering “dialogue” with the sprayers and their government accomplices — the “talk and spray” ongoing scenario — remains a mug’s game. However, if we educate ourselves and then others, AND are prepared to fight on our own terms, spraying issues can becomes levers for a paradigm change.

In particular, as my article notes, forestry spraying struggles can show the following:

• Humans must adjust to Nature and we must stop trying to make the forests of the world “adjust” to demands of unlimited economic growth. From such a perspective, it is we who must come into harmony with non-sprayed natural forest ecosystems, and not the forests that must adjust to us. Commercial pulpwood forestry spokespersons argue that growing trees is essentially an agricultural activity that produces “fibre.” A plantation of softwoods is analogous to a sprayed field of corn. To the view that a living forest needs to be turned into pulpwood producing woodlots, we counterpose a Land Ethic, inspired by Aldo Leopold: “We must, in our actions, make sure that we uphold the welfare of mammals, birds, fish, insects and other animals; uphold the well being of soils and waters; and uphold the interests of the diverse varieties of trees and other plants in our forests. The extraction of trees, whether for pulp, sawlogs or Christmas trees, must uphold such a land ethic.”
From a Land Ethic perspective, all forest spraying should be banned.

• The demands of the pulp and paper industry on the forests are open-ended, that is, the demands are for continual expansion, given the commitment to growth (grow or go under) of any pulp and paper company. The three pulp and paper multinationals in Nova Scotia, with the assistance of government grants, have “modernized” and improved their daily productive capacities and hence their demand for more “fibre” from the woodlands. Thus, there has been more pulp mill pollution, more clearcutting and pesticide use, more destruction of hardwoods and wildlife habitats, more groundwater contamination, and more plantation forestry, favoring a narrow range of softwood pulp species. Bringing the growth ethic of the pulp and paper companies out in the open for discussion raises the same basic growth values for the societies in which the companies operate, and shows how their values are incompatible with an ecologically sustainable society, given a finite world.

• Chemical use in forestry reduces labour costs. This makes “sense” from a capitalist corporate viewpoint, but the human costs, e.g., possible pesticide-related cancers or other illness, and ecological costs, e.g. killing of “non-target” wildlife or contamination of groundwater, are not born by the pulp and paper company — hence the need to move beyond “private property” considerations. Ecological rights must override private, corporate, state, or crown property rights. Landowners do not have the right to do whatever they want, when their activities impact on other humans and non-human species. Land cannot be “owned.”

• The alliance of the state apparatus at the provincial and federal levels — departments of the environment, forestry, agriculture, and health — with large scale industry like the pulp and paper companies and the chemical industry: The view that it is necessary to use chemicals in forestry and of their “safety” is shared by these various groups. I have attended many community meetings in Nova Scotia organized to air concerns about some local spraying situation. All the government officials, whatever the department, sing the same tune. The lead role is normally assumed by the provincial Department of Environment If they appear at all, politicians on such occasions shift and squirm on their seats. However, when the chips are down, the politicians will not publicly oppose the pulpwood orientation of forest policy or the use of pesticides which is part of this orientation. Hence, your political representative does not “represent” you; people must rely on their own activities to bring changes in forestry policy and eliminate pesticide spraying.

• The international nature of the pulp and paper companies and their role in destroying indigenous forests around the world.

For the Earth,
David Orton
<greenweb@ca.inter.net>