Every year, young people flock to BC’s forests to do what they think is a good thing.

IF THERE’S ONE CONSTANT in Prince George, it’s our influx of tree planters and brushers every summer.

They stick out like a sore thumb in our increasingly abandoned downtown. Young, fresh-eyed big-city-looking kids out on the frontier doing their big Canadian experience: Colonizing the landscape with industrial plantations of pine and spruce trees to starve out moose and make fires worse.

I highly doubt the majority of them know what it is they are doing. Not in the sense that they don’t know how to plant trees, but  more like what the big-picture result of their labour will be. I certainly didn’t when I started tree planting.

Last week we held our Deciduous Heroes event at the Q3 building on Quebec and Third to share more information about this. I talked with a few of the tree planters I saw downtown during the day of the event, and asked a few of them what they knew about aspen.

They rolled their eyes. “Oh, we know about aspen,” one girl said sarcastically. And what the average tree planter knows is that you don’t get paid money to plant them, and that in fact you get paid money to destroy them. They are “weeds,” first and foremost, an entirely Euro-centric concept at odds with the protein production these forests bestowed for Indigenous nations pre-contact.

Our forest industry is brainwashing entire generations of young Canadians about what has worth in our forests and what doesn’t. Many tree planters go on to have careers in journalism, literature, academia, and philosophy.  We should not underestimate how tree planting is contributing to the intellectual corruption of our elite.

I encouraged them to come down to the presentation and learn about their value, and one kid, all the way from the United Kingdom, did just that.

As MLA Mike Morris stood up and presented his experience on the trap line with the decimation of wildlife populations at the hands of industrial plantation clearcutting, I couldn’t help but think how confusing this must be for your typical tree planter, a class of people with a disproportionately high number of vegans and animal rights advocates.

You mean the industry we are part of is starving out animals at biblical proportions? And a big bad trapper is telling us we should be concerned about this?

Both are important questions for the tree planter to consider, but it goes beyond that.

The aspen forest type, an entirely legitimate forest type in its own right, will sequester way more carbon, snuff out way more fire, will absorb way less solar radiation, and will bring in way more snow and rainfall to create higher streamflows and moister conditions. It will do this while supporting way more food production through moose, deer, elk, grouse, cattle, and much else.

After the presentation, including Moose, Mushrooms and Mud’s Jen Côté and her incredible story of sprayed huckleberries in clearcuts north of town, the UK treeplanter told me he hadn’t heard this perspective before.

Of course he hasn’t. If there’s one fairy tale Canadians like to tell themselves and the world at large it’s that we know how to sustainably manage our forests. Facts that contradict this are stamped out.

We have a big job ahead of us to change our practices so that this claim may once more ring true. We all want this to be true. So let’s protect more primary forests. Let’s let more of our deciduous heroes grow.  Let’s lay off the herbicides and let’s lay off the brush saws.

James Steidle is a Prince George writer.

Originally published in the Prince George Citizen