During August of 1995 I had the honor to be a part of an Earlham College sponsored canoe trip through Canada's north western wilderness. We spent a month exploring both ourselves and our environment while working to help protect and conserve the land we traveled through. One of the main reasons for our trip was to help our guides, Bruce and Bruce, in their fight to turn the area we were traveling through in to a national park. This would stop the logging industry from cutting down any more trees and possibly save the woodland caribou from extinction. In the past few years the park has been growing but the amount of land that is still being used for timber purposes is huge. One of the worst things I have ever seen was during a day about three quorters of the way through our journey when we were forced by our route to traverse a large clear cut. This was a fairly recent clear cut and yet it was already turned in to a desert. Nothing could hope to live in this barren land any more. The soil had already washed away in many places so that we were forces to walk through unnaturally empty, dead, rocky terrain which was once moss covered and teeming with life.
Let me give you a few facts about the land I travailed through
43.5% of Ontario has been divided up into 90 geometric timber management units (TMU)
We were in the Domtar/Armstrong TMU
This unit is about 2.390 square miles in area of which about 267 square miles is water. The state of Delaware has an area of 2,057 square miles. Indiana covers 36,291 square miles of which 106 miles is water
The Domtar/Armstrong TMU is licensed to Domtar Inc., which produces liner board (the stuff used for the corrugated center of cardboard boxes)
If you would like to help in the fight to save these quickly dwindling forests please write to either and tell them that they need to do something about preserving our wilderness and our world.
Premier Mike Harris
Premier of Ontario
Legislative Building
Queen's Park
Toronto, ON M7A 1A1
OR
Ron Vrancart
Deputy Minister
Ministry of Natural Resources
6th floor, room 6320
Whitney Block
99 Wellesley street west
Toronto, ON M74 1W3
And for more information please write to:
Bruce & Bruce
704 Holly Crescent
Thunder Bay, ON P7E 2T2