The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz
September 6, 2011
It’s hard to believe as one drives through the lush Ontario landscape that it was not always this way. That’s why the photos in John Bacher’s Two Billion Trees and Counting: The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz (Dundurn, 2011) come as such a shock to the reader.
I looked in amazement at pine stumps standing on skeletal roots high above the drifting sand below. In another photo a sand bank gradually engulfs an apple tree. In 1885 a main road near Picton was buried under 30 metres of sand. A brick factory had to be abandoned due to the sand invasion.
In other photos the Oak Ridges Moraine appears as a vast, sand wasteland, fissured with deeply eroded gullies. The photos show the gritty reality of what happens to a rich landscape when it is plundered without care.
At the turn of the twentieth century, unfettered logging driven by the railroad led to the destruction of much of the forest which covered Ontario. Slash from the timber cutters was left where it fell, turning to tinder in hot weather. Sparks from steam locomotives caused fires of such frequency that the topsoil burned or blew away along the railway lines. In the Canadian Shield the land was burned right down to the rock. In Southern Ontario the underlying sand became a desert over large tracts.
But the loggers and the locomotives were not entirely to blame. The myth of the Ontario pioneer shows the immigrant struggling with his axe to fell the tall trees, then burn them for potash to provide income prior to planting a first crop of wheat in the few acres of the homestead tract the family was able to clear each year. According to Dr. Bacher, over vast tracts of Southern Ontario and on into the Canadian shield, the reality was one of reckless burns of the forest for the ashes left in the wake of the fires. There was more money in supplying the soap factories with potash than in subsistence farming on marginal land, so the squatters would often move on to another patch of virgin forest and try again.
It was a war against the landscape. Railroads, logging companies, prospectors and squatters raced to gobble it up. Politicians looked upon the receding forest as an impediment to progress, and the market in its products as a patronage opportunity.
Catastrophic floods, droughts and fires followed. The history of pre-1925 Ontario is one of devastation.
In his book Bacher traces how a single man, Professor Edmund Zavitz, convinced Ontario that there was a better way. Zavitz was a bureaucrat who used the technology of the time to convince landowners and legislators alike that the future lay in controlling the waste caused by degradation of the environment.
His friend J.H. White’s photographs documented the “railside burning of forests down to bare rock (108)” which led to federal regulations on railways in 1912. “In 1915 Zavitz’s inspectors found 36 fires which were caused by settlers starting fires in dangerous seasons and not controlling them… Such dangers, they believed, had to be accepted as the price for living in Northern Ontario (109).”
The Matheson Fire on 1916 burned twenty townships across Northern Ontario with 243 deaths. Cochrane burned out for the third time. 89 died in a sudden firestorm in Matheson. In all, 6% of Ontario burned. The Haileybury fire of October 4, 1922 caused 40 deaths and destroyed 6000 homes.
Through the use of air power, tougher laws, and changed public attitudes, Edmund Zavitz pioneered the control of loss from forest fire in the Canadian north. Working with Premier Drury and later Premier Ferguson, he ended the threat of uncontrolled forest fires in the north.
Zavitz brought similar stability to Southern Ontario with reforestation programs which eventually ended the threats of drought, flooding and spreading deserts as the consequence of deforestation (144).
Fire protection and reforestation programs pioneered by Edmund Zavitz over his life have largely shaped Ontario’s landscape and climate. Bacher’s book details the stages by which this Ontario Agricultural College professor and visionary public servant created and preserved this rich legacy of tree planting on private lands.
After it had been severed by the lack of understanding and subsequent cutbacks of the Rae and Harris governments, the link to Zavitz’s tradition was reestablished in 2007 by the McGuinty government. With minimal funding and support from a wide variety of organizations and individuals, the 50 Million Trees Program has quietly restored the link to this proud tradition in Ontario.
UPDATE: October 29, 2011, The Globe and Mail offered the following concise review by William Bryant Logan:
Two Billion Trees and Counting: The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz
By John Bacher
Dundurn, 274 pages, $26.99
John Bacher, an environmentalist and historian living in St. Catharines, Ont., has rescued Edmund Zavitz (1875-1968) from undeserved obscurity. Zavitz was appointed Ontario’s chief forester in 1905, when vast stretches of Ontario were deforested to the point of desertification. Beginning with the Oak Ridges Moraine, which was rapidly becoming a dust bowl, he instituted reforestation projects all across to province, establishing tree nurseries and bylaws and educating politicians and the public about the dire consequences – flooding, erosion, sandstorms – of over-cutting. He went on to become Ontario’s deputy minister of forests and director of reforestation. One month before Zavitz’s death, Ontario premier John Robarts planted the billionth tree on Zavitz’s watch, and more than a billion have been planted since.
Westport grocer Neil Kudrinko has earned the Green Party nomination to run in the March 4th by-election to replace Leeds-Grenville MPP Bob Runciman.
Property values in Westport are higher than in Smiths Falls. What’s going on in North Leeds?
Let’s face it. North Leeds is a great place to live. An increasing number of retirees look to the area around Westport, so increased demand has driven up the value of property.
As a business owner what concerns me about rising market values is the increased assessment which can lead to higher property taxes.
We need to ensure that people who have lived in the community all their lives don’t suddenly find themselves unable to afford their homes. We need also to be careful not to penalize owners for making improvements to the energy efficiency and comfort of their homes.
For example, in order to reduce the environmental impact of our grocery store we have recently spent a half million renovating and retrofitting to reduce the carbon footprint of our business by 26%. This was a long-term investment in local jobs and our ability to service the community. A tax increase because of the improvements would hurt.
We shouldn’t penalize businesses and homeowners through property taxes for making good decisions.
Mr. Harper and Mr. McGuinty have jointly created the 13% Harmonized Sales Tax. Its implementation weighs heavily on voters’ minds. What’s your take on this tax reform?
Quebec and the Maritimes have the HST now. Under its rules businesses can claim exemptions on investments on equipment and supplies that we can’t in Ontario. Ontario Farmers are exempt from the 8% PST but other businesses are not. This puts Ontario businesses at an 8% disadvantage right off the top, so the business community in general is very excited about the HST because it will reduce in some cases their cost of operation.
However, as a small business owner I don’t think the HST will create day-to-day savings that we will be able to pass along to the consumer.
For most people in Ontario the greater concern is the extra 8% on their heating oil bills and services from electricians and contractors. The Green Party position on the HST is that it cedes the province’s power of taxation and puts it into the control of the federal government. We feel as a party that is too important a role to leave up to another level of government.
What are the implications down the road? If we are so tightly integrated with the federal government that we have no leeway, we won’t be able to make changes in how we collect sales taxes without the approval of Ottawa.
Mr. McGuinty’s 50 Million Trees Program sponsors the planting of trees on privately owned land in Ontario. From your perspective as a candidate to represent Leeds-Grenville in the Legislature, what do you think of the plan?
We need to make reforestation of marginal land a priority in this province, but we need to avoid monoculture, the planting of a single species in a field, because we need the mix.
You’ll soon hear more about ALUS, or the Alternative Land Use Services Program in Norfolk County. This new program compensates farmers for taking marginal land out of production so that it can be replanted to extend the Carolinian forest in the area to widen woodlots and improve setbacks along river banks to create natural filtration systems.
It’s important that we make landowners partners in the process, and that we get the mix right.
Should there be a bounty on coyotes?
I like to eat wild game and I help my friends cut up their deer, but I wouldn’t personally go out and participate in a cull of a species I couldn’t eat. The coyote population is currently high, but nature has an interesting way of keeping itself in balance. We’ve all been concerned about fishers over the last few years. The coyote population will correct itself. There’d have to be a lot of science behind a large-scale cull of the coyote population. We shouldn’t leave this one to anecdotal evidence. That said, we must recognize and keep in mind the need for farmers to protect their livestock from predators.
What issues do you see emerging in Leeds-Grenville over the next ten years?
A continuing issue is energy costs and other costs of operating businesses in small towns. We need to make sure that we as a community — that includes municipalities, businesses, and home owners — are making the investments that are going to ensure that we can compete with larger centers in years to come.
All too often a small business ends up subject to regulations that were originally intended for big corporations. We need smart regulations that will differentiate between the two and not unnecessarily penalize small operators who were never the intended target of a regulation like the Nutrient Management Act. Take the example of Forfar Dairy. It had to stop cheese production because it could not comply with the Nutrient Act. And yet the true target of that regulation was not the small producer, but the large industrial scale producer like Parmalat or Kraft. The loss of Forfar cheese production has resulted in one less source of production for local dairy farmers.
The problem with the McGuinty Government’s approach to regulation is that it is focused solely on standardization. It fails to take into account the needs of individual producers.
You don’t own it.
February 23, 2009
This week I flipped back to The Day the Earth Stood Still and the only memorable line of movie dialogue from a pretty dismal year. American secretary of state Kathy Bates asks the alien, Keanu Reeves: “Why have you come to our planet?”
His terse response: “You don’t own it.”
This line jars the viewer because to a great extent our culture still draws its attitude toward the environment from the first three chapters of Genesis. The Lord created man and placed him on earth and gave him dominion over the earth and its creatures. This assumption causes grave harm when it becomes the freedom to destroy and pollute without cost, but for those who recognize the duty of care which comes with such “ownership”, it is a call to do what we can to restore the health of the small patches of the planet we call our own.
Gary Nielsen, MNR Climate Change Project Co-ordinator, spoke at the annual woodlot conference in Kemptville this week. “Earth ice cover is currently at its lowest point in 100,000 years. Climate change is real. It is serious, the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. We have seen significant change already, and it is accelerating. The people who will bear the brunt of its effects are in school right now.
“Charles Keeling was a graduate student in the early 1950’s when he showed that while carbon dioxide levels in water vary widely depending upon where the sample is taken, CO2 levels in air are consistent. What happens in China or India happens immediately to us in North America. We’re all in this together.
“Trees take in CO2 and give off oxygen in an annual cycle. The Keeling curve traced the cycle and year over year, atmospheric carbon dioxide has been increasing on an exponential curve since the Industrial Revolution increased the population capacity of the planet.
“In our solar system Venus suffers from a runaway greenhouse effect. Mars has no atmosphere and is glaciated. Earth is the Goldilocks planet, neither too hot nor too cold. This is a precarious balance. The best thinking today holds that the tipping point comes if temperatures increase another 2 degrees Celsius. Above that point positive feedback develops: tundra stripped of ice will attract much more solar heat and accelerate the process as the frost melts.
“So far world temperatures are up .7 degrees globally, and 1.3 degrees in Ontario.
“We can’t control climate change, but we can restore forests. Trees sequester carbon dioxide. A sustainable landscape is the goal. The United Nations has begun the Billion Trees Program, and Ontario has made the single largest commitment: 50 million trees in the ground by 2020.
“One of the major instruments to resist climate change which lies within our control in Ontario is afforestation, that is, returning land to the forest. Creating a healthy, diverse and sustainable environment will create the resiliency needed to face the coming challenges.”
A major problem with the forests of Eastern Ontario is the fragmentation of the tree cover. Stewardship councils, conservation authorities and the MNR are working actively to reconnect the scattered woodlots by retiring farmland to provide the kind of density and wildlife corridors needed by many species.
The trees will be planted by contractors at a charge of 15 cents per seedling. Landowners in Leeds and Grenville who have at least 5 acres of open land available for tree planting can contact the following agencies for assistance:
Rick Knapton: Cataraqui Region Conservation Authority – 389-3651
Martin Streit: Leeds County Stewardship Council – 342-8526
Jack Henry: Grenville Land Stewardship Council – 342-8528
Eastern Ontario is a priority in the planning. A major project was completed last year in the Toledo area.
According to the Kyoto Protocol, trees planted after December 31, 1989 will count for carbon sequestration projects. The current thinking holds that 1 hectare will produce about 4.5 tonnes of offsets each year, worth about $89/ha/year gross. Obviously with tradeable units of 10,000 tonnes each, there will be administrative costs, but tree planting does show some actual income potential for the land, as well as the tax advantages of returning acreage to the forest.
So what the 50 Million Trees Program offers is the chance for landowners to do their bit to fight climate change with the help of cheap trees, free planting, and reduced property taxes.
Gary Nielsen concluded his address to the landowners with a few key points. “We don’t know how people will behave in the next 100 years. Will the economic forces or the environmental forces carry the day? Fighting climate change is like slowing down the Queen Elizabeth II. It doesn’t stop on a dime.”
Another interesting development emerged at the Kemptville Woodlot Conference in an address by Robert Lyng, Director of the Ontario Power Generation Biomass Initiative. Lyng spent a lot of time with graphs and I tend to be skeptical of such presentations, but the bottom line for OPG seems to be that they plan to burn wood pellets in their coal boilers for hydro generation as soon as the law requires them to do so. To me this looks like a potential shot in the arm for the pulpwood industry.
UPDATE: February 17, 2010 Robert Lyng came back for an update at this year’s Kemptville Woodlot Conference. He detailed plans to burn wood and plant fibre pellets at four coal-fired generating stations, two on the shore of Lake Superior, one in the Lake St. Clair area, and one on Lake Erie. He identified areas of crown land as the source of the wood fibre for the initial stage of the project. I may have spoken too soon when I suggested this has potential to boost the pulpwood industry. Distances are too great. There’s nothing set up for Eastern Ontario.
Another presenter who runs a large sawmill in Eastern Ontario explained that it is the market for low grade wood fibre which makes or breaks a sawmill operation. The depressed pulpwood market leaves all sawmills on the edge of survival. Even worse, American companies desperate for cash are dumping surplus wood products in Toronto. In some cases lumber is available for sale in Toronto for less than Eastern Ontario landowners are currently getting for standing timber.
the Walnut Diary 