Stop logging Ontario's old-growth forests NOW!

Ontario has old-growth red and white pine forests with 400 year-old trees that were seedlings when Indigenous peoples were encountering Samuel de Champlain. Incredibly, these extremely precious and rare old-growth stands are treated the same way as pine stands planted in 1900. Instead of protecting these precious trees and forests, the Provincial Government is allowing forestry companies to log them. We need to stop this.

Government and the forestry industry see the trees as nothing more than “crops” to be harvested and replanted on a regular basis. But old-growth trees are not crops and the forests surrounding them are not ...

Ontario has old-growth red and white pine forests with 400 year-old trees that were seedlings when Indigenous peoples were encountering Samuel de Champlain. Incredibly, these extremely precious and rare old-growth stands are treated the same way as pine stands planted in 1900. Instead of protecting these precious trees and forests, the Provincial Government is allowing forestry companies to log them. We need to stop this.

Government and the forestry industry see the trees as nothing more than “crops” to be harvested and replanted on a regular basis. But old-growth trees are not crops and the forests surrounding them are not fields. Old white and red pine trees are part of an old-growth pine ecosystem that includes dead standing snags, great logs, and organic debris which support a vast network of largely unseen mycorrhizal and other fungi.

After a century of cutting, these surviving old-growth pine stands are now rare. Some are protected but most are slated for cutting.

We cannot lose one more tree.

The Provincial government has the power to save Ontario’s old-growth forests. Your government will only do this if they hear from you. Please send this letter now and help stop the destruction of Ontario’s old-growth forests.

Photo credits: Rob Nelson (banner image) & Gord Miller (image below)

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Send an email to stop the logging of Ontario's old-forests!

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Send an email now to the Honourable Graydon Smith, Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry.

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Dear Minister Graydon Smith,

I am requesting that you commit to stopping the logging of old-growth pine stands in Ontario. Ontario’s old-growth trees and forests are not crops in a field that can be replanted and replaced. Rather, they are an important part of Ontario’s natural heritage and must be permanently protected. That’s why I am asking you to:

1. Immediately stop the logging of all red and white pine forest stands identified as older than 125 years.

2. Determine if the pine stands are significant elements of Ontario’s natural heritage by developing and then deploying screening criteria that identify old growth characteristics (similar to what is used to identify protected wetlands).

3. Designate those pine stands as Conservation Reserves under the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act (2006) to protect them for future generations.

We have to stop treating our old-growth pine forests as if the trees in them were crops in fields that can be replanted on a regular basis. They are not. Trees are part of an old-growth pine ecosystem where the oldest trees that dominate the forest are often 300 to 400 years old. These trees were establishing when the indigenous peoples of the land were first encountering the explorations of Samuel de Champlain.

The big trees that are the most visible component are only one functional element of the old-growth ecosystem. Other necessary parts include the dead standing snags that grew and thrived there for centuries and now are contributing important cavity habitats to a wide variety of birds, mammals and insects. And after standing dead for perhaps the greatest part of another century these snags fall and become the great logs forming the dominant component of the coarse woody debris of the forest floor. This organic debris supports the vast network of mycorrhizal and other fungi that are the largely unseen matrix which weaves the ecosystem together into a functioning unit.

After a century of cutting, these surviving old-growth pine stands are now rare on the landscape. They exist as scattered and increasingly isolated refugia for endemic species and a genetic and ecological heritage dating back thousands of years. While some are on protected lands, most are slated for cutting.

We cannot lose one more tree.

That’s why I urge the Provincial Government to act today by stopping logging of all red and white pine stands, identifying the stands that are truly old-growth and then designating them as Conservation Reserves.

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