Being a Registered Professional Forester means you need to go to school all the time. You have to ensure you know about the most up to date technology and science when you’re managing the public forests of Alberta. Yesterday I went to a technical session titled “Best Practices in the Oilsands”. I’m not one who thinks the Oil Sands are a bad thing, but I do question the scale. I don’t know if people really understand how large the area is. If you drive from Edmonton to Calgary, to Brooks, to Vegreville, you just drove around the area of the Oilsands. So if there were roads all the way around the Oil Sands it would take 10+ hours to drive around.
When we went to Suncor on a tour as a field school a few years ago I asked, “Where do 19,000 ha of animals go”. The representative said they were “naturally displaced”. What does that even mean? A big part of forest management and designing harvest areas is ensuring there’s places for animals. Only some can stick up for themselves.
In the end, I can’t complain too much about the Oil Sands, because I do like driving my big truck around and understand we need fossil fuels to live. Hopefully we won’t always, but I understand we do now. My biggest problem with the session I went to yesterday was when one guy was describing “innovative new ways to grow trees”. He said they had problems getting trees to grow in the wet areas where there was lots of grass and shrub competition. They used these cool new things called “mounds” to plant trees on. How innovative is this process? Check out the date on this article talking about how it works to grow trees.
This idea was barely considered innovative in 1990… I guess that’s what happens when you let engineers and geologists attempt to grow trees.
The end result of the learning session was that there is room for foresters in the Oil Sands which I now obviously agree with, but they are far from “cutting edge” up there (p.s. don’t ever watch the Cutting Edge movie) . I enjoy the challenge of growing a forest in the forest industry where you can’t just throw money at a cutblock and hope it grows. Being a silviculture forester is an art and a science that few people understand. At least it’s good to know the oil and gas industry is at least attempting to catch up to the forest industry. I’ll leave you with this video. Don’t leave things up to chance with the environment, and always use the best science available. The forest industry is.