SFMwha?

Sustainable Forestry Management is given the [working] definition from the United Nations Forum on Forests as:

“...the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfill, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social functions, at local, national, and global levels, and that does not cause damage to other ecosystems.”

In layman's terms, this means "don't be an idiot and cut down all the trees." Trees are more than just trees: they also provide homes for animals.

Just as a reference, here’s a map of Ontario's forested land.

Now, trees don't exactly grow quickly, so it's not exactly like people can just say "Oh, well we can cut down all the trees and then plant some new ones and come back next year for more!" It's not like they grow on trees, you know (although apparently cell phones, money, laptops, funk and shrimp do).

According to this report, entitled "Sustainable Forest Management in Canada: Clear Policy -- Questionable Practice", Canada is making a


P.S. This site has a lot of great articles about climate change. It's from CBC News, so you're probably guaranteed accurate information.

P. P. S. If you want to visit a great Ontario National Park, I highly recommend the Bruce Peninsula -- I visited this cliff last summer, and it is amazing.

Introducing... Robbie!

I realized the other day that I’ve done almost no posting in the last few weeks, so I decided to actually get my butt into motion. But first I wanted to drop a quick note introducing everyone to my new best friend, Robbie!



Robbie is a sugar maple tree. He was donated to our “green space” (more about that in a minute) by Angelina Pickering, but because he’s so tiny, he’s staying with me for a while until he’s big enough to hold his own against the lawnmowers and snowmobiles. He likes Dasani bottled water and car rides with the radio blaring. I’m not helping myself in the “I’m-not-insane” thing, am I? No, I didn’t think so. That’s okay; I love trees, and I'm apparently not afraid to broadcast it to the world.

For our final ISP project, our class was asked to choose an issue we think is important and then attempt to make a change in the school and community. Our group chose to plant trees at the back of the school in order to create a sitting are type "haven" for seniors wanting to get away from the terrors that are the grade nines and tens at our school. We've already put aside a crabapple tree and a red maple, but those are both well-established and able to go into the ground. Robbie, however, is about 25 cm tall, 3mm around and has some sort of disease that I'm not able to identify, but his leaves are yellowing and full of holes. He's getting plenty of water (yes, tap water too) and sunlight, so I really am stumped as to what I'm doing wrong.