Canada 360 | The man who planted trees

The man who planted trees, the short story by Jean Giono (1953) masterfully adapted for animation by Frédéric Back (1987), is extremely topical. We believed in the historicity of his story for a long time before Giono clarified that it was pure fiction. Today, humanity at least hopes that its fiction is realistic, but is it?

Recall that its hero, Elzéar Bouffier, patiently plants thousands of acorns over a period of some 40 years in a valley that was originally more or less desert. Thanks to his individual efforts, a lush forest, rich in biodiversity, eventually emerges, allowing the revitalization of the region.

This is the happy scenario that elites all over the planet are trying to reproduce by multiplying tree planting initiatives. China aims to plant 36,000 km^⁠2 of forest per year. The European Union is committed to planting at least 3 billion trees by 2030. As for Canada, the Trudeau government clarified last month how its government would fulfill the promise made during the 2019 election campaign to plant a tree. total of 2 billion trees by 2030. The initiative starts from the premise that trees sequester carbon and that by planting billions of trees we could substantially reduce our net carbon emission rates. Is it correct ?

Nothing is less sure. Scientists tell us that trees’ ability to sequester carbon appears faltering, being determined by complex variables, some of which continue to elude us. According to the most recent data from the federal Department of Natural Resources, Canada’s managed forests emitted more carbon each year than they sequestered between 1991 and 2018, in large part due to forest fires, unfortunately more and more. more frequent as the planet warms.

Considering their uncertain effectiveness in sequestering carbon, why are our elites relying so heavily on tree planting to reduce our net emissions? The enigma is not one: planting more and more trees allows us to maintain the paradigm of growth which forms the basis of our political economy. In the future, sustaining the growth of carbon sinks will suffice to sustain the growth of our carbon sources. In their 2019 platform, the Liberals are perfectly explicit on this, reassuring voters that the costs associated with planting trees will be covered by dividends from the Trans Mountain pipeline, then recently acquired by the Trudeau government.

However, conservationists across the country are sending the opposite message, urging governments more than ever to protect existing forests.

In British Columbia, the ongoing protests against the logging of the old growth forests of Fairy Creek are already the largest civil disobedience movement in Canadian history. Between May and December 2021, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police made 1,188 arrests as part of this movement.

In Nova Scotia, the fight to protect forests is less well known, but it is growing. In August 2018, Professor William Lahey released a damning report on the state of the forest in Nova Scotia, notably decrying the importance of clearcuts to the province’s forest industry. At the end of November 2021, faced with the provincial government’s inaction on this file, Lahey once again sounded the alarm. Since then, various environmental groups have jointly called for a full moratorium on logging on Crown land – representing nearly 40% of the province’s total forest – until all of the report’s 45 recommendations Lahey are implemented (only five are implemented at the moment).

Activists have established a protest camp dubbed the Last Hope Wildlife Corridor Encampment in crown land in the southwest of the province targeted by the WestFor company for impending cuts. As of this writing, the Facebook page of Nova Scotia’s Extinction Rebellion group reported that the camp, which received little media coverage even in the Maritimes, was in its 42nd period.^e daytime.

In this context of struggle, how can we not see the government objectives of planting trees as a diversionary enterprise? We may eventually need another model than Elzéar Bouffier’s to face the ongoing ecological collapse. Jean Giono’s short story has always been read like an environmentalist fable, exalting the harmony between man and nature. It may soon be reinterpreted as a literary manifestation of our propensity to overestimate our ability to manipulate our ecosystem.