A Fantasy
Bear with me for a few moments, please. I want to share a fantasy with
you, if only to try to stimulate a bit of thinking. The subject of this
fantasy is the future of the forests in our province, and, I venture to
say, I am not alone in having a fantasy about that future. However, mine
is rather different from those (including, most recently Opposition Leader
Shawn Graham) who dream of endless tree plantations that exist only to
provide fibre for all sorts of different paper products, for which there
may or may not be a market down the road.
I got dreaming my dream again one day a couple of weeks ago when
Carla, a friend of ours, and I were back in the Southeast picking
blueberries. Carla and I had returned to the same spot that we had visited
several days earlier, where we had picked a couple of gallons of
blueberries, all within a radius of about one hundred feet from the van.
On this day, the three of us gathered about five gallons more, from the
same spot. In all the time that we were there on the two occasions, we saw
five other people and none of them were picking with the same dedication
that we were.
I estimate that, in all, we picked blueberries that, at the depressed
prices that we might get for them locally, might have been worth $150.00.
If we had a way to get them to a big city market, they would have been
worth twice that. How many hectares of blueberry barrens are there back in
the Southeast? How many gallons might be harvested from them?
Some time ago, I took a walk west from home, over several properties
that have been harvested. As I stumbled through the debris left behind, I
could not help but notice piles of cedar logs left behind; they have been
there for five or six years now and are rapidly approaching uselessness.
Hardwoods - small sugar maples, yellow birch, and beech - were simply
discarded in other piles. In one place I came across several hectares that
would have had an extensive growth of Ground yew, that very unimpressive
little conifer that yields taxol - the agent that is proving to be so
valuable in fighting various forms of cancer.
Do you begin to see where my fantasy comes into all of this? What would
happen if we actually began to consider our forests and woodlots as
sources of all sorts of income, rather than merely as producers of wood
fibre or, occasionally, saw logs? What would happen if an agency existed
to do a thorough inventory of the forests to determine just what might be
there that, in turn, might be of sustainable and diversified economic
value.
Like just about everyone else in Pt. LaNim who owns a few trees, we
have been approached by several contractors to see about having our land
cut. We have never considered the offers because that is not our way, but
they have made me take some inventory of my own as I conduct my endless,
often aimless, rambles over the property and beyond.
That inventory has encouraged this fantasy as well - and I will
elaborate upon that next week.
