With the public comment period coming to a quick halt March 8, Madawaska Valley Township council is making one last ditch effort and hoping the local community will chime in too over the proposed Algonquin Provincial Park Management Plan to lighten the footprint of logging there.

  With the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) posting its final calls for comments, mostly available over the Internet, but also in person at the offices in Whitney, MY has gone the traditional route to save its traditional industry, setting pen to paper and circulating the document throughout town for supporting signatures.

  The draft letter was at MV council Monday night for final approval of the wording and is being circulated throughout town as a form letter, allowing people to sign their own names and make private notes to the powers that be as council attempts to sway the MNR away from further lumber limits in the park.

  CAO PAT Pilgrim said she has about 1,300 copies available at most of the local sawmills, in local businesses and at the township office. Concerned lightening the logging footprint will mean a severe loss of jobs in a community already hard hit by the current economies, MY is appealing that the current proposed plan will have negative impacts. While the hope was Mayor /John Hildebrandt would be able to hand-deliver every signed copy to Minister Linda Jeffrey personally, council decided Monday night to send it via priority mail to ensure the deadline is met.

  The letter states that "we are writing to ask your ministry, again, to defer any further action on the implementation of the Lightening the Ecological Footprint of Logging in Algonquin Park recommendations until a full economic impact analysis has been conducted (e.g. loss of fibre, loss of jobs, impact on local communities)."   Attacking the province's supposed public consultations on the proposals Mayor Hildebrandt said no local industry insiders were part of the process nor were local municipalities that cohinual1y request to have their say in a meaningful pubic forum.

  "They always make reference to these public consultations it wasn't with anybody in the industry," he said. "It was in Toronto with the environmental groups."

  As such, the letter continues, "Minister Jeffrey - the only people that I have seen support this initiative is associated with special interest campaign organizations in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) that are using this issue as a fundraising campaign. I do not believe the report reflects the input of an)1 organizations or communities that will be impacted by the recommendations and that will have to live with the results.

  "As a citizen of Ontario, and more specifically as a citizen that will be impacted by these recommendations, I am very concerned with the social and economic impacts of this initiative As stated by the Algonquin Forest Authority (AFA), a co-author of the report, in the report itself 'The AFA has expressed reservations about the Proposal, as they are unable to say with certainty that this Proposal will not negatively impact the forest industry and local communities '."

  Council hopes anyone interested will pick up a copy and sign .it so there will be a swath of responses from the local area. Mrs. Pilgrim pointed out the real crux of the letter is that there is some form of evidence produced to support the MNR's proposal.

  "There is no documentation to support this and that is our argument," she said.

  Mayor Hildebrandt was at the Ontario Forest Industry Association convention in Toronto last Thursday when the new minister, Linda Jeffrey, addressed the Algonquin logging issue with the organization. He isn't overly confident, having heard her speak last week.

  "I got the impression she was very much in favour of what they are suggesting. It didn't appear to me we're going to change her mind; she pretty much said that," he said. "But its another step in the right direction, so I support it (the letter)."

Just like growing a healthy child, it takes a community to raise a healthy forest too.

  Planted some 44 years ago by the Stuber family, along with friends and neighbours in the Augsburg region, a major 85,000 red pine tree stand on Silver Lake Road has been getting some much-needed, tender loving care for just the second time in those four decades. Drawing great attention from the curious surrounding community the last few weeks, like seeing something from veritable days of yore, three tall and proud teams of Belgian horses skidded out the worst of the lot, leaving behind a healthy again red pine tree stand in its place.

  Property owner Wesley Stuber, who inherited the Silver Lake Road lot from his father, John and will pass it down to his son, Darrell when the time comes, watched proudly as a project he began almost 45 years ago begins to bear fruit. It was the scrawny, flawed and sun-deprived trees the Will O'Brien Horse Logging crews of Eganville were hunting for this trip to be used in flooring, furnishings or scrap through both the Herb Shaw and Sons and Lavern Heideman and Sons mills. But the main goal was to clean out the bush lot of the runts, so the remaining trees can grow to their limits.

  "There will be hydro poles coming out of here one day," Mr. Stuber said this past Wednesday, watching as the O'Brien crews slugged back and forth from the woods to the main drive where modem trucks awaited their four-legged, historic counterparts. "It won't be in my life time, but I knew that when I started this 44 years ago. I just wanted a healthy forest that I'll pass on to my son and with the incredible work they're (the O'Brien family) doing, it looks like that's what we'll have."

  "It's something to see," he added, as the O'Brien family ferried red pine from the woods to the front lot for loading. "They (the O'Briens) do an incredible job of clearing out the waste, they know what they're looking for and do an incredible job."

  Thought to be the last full-time horse logging operation still thriving in the Valley, the O'Briens actually have five teams of Belgians, using three for this several-week long project. Owner Willie O'Brien said for him, there is no substitute for the old-fashioned way when treating a forest. As an added bonus, several of his children and brothers are involved, handling the horses that too, are just like family.

  "They (horses) make a much better job of the bush," he said. "It's cleaner and they do a great job getting into most places." Operating his horse skidding business full-time since 1997, Mr. O'Brien said they go year-round, even in the  blustery cold of the last few weeks, and little can slow their pace. Recently, although not the coldest by any means of recent days, the O'Brien crew and their three teams skidded out three full tractor trailer loads of scrap pine before the noon hour alone-- that's about 32 tonnes to a load.

  "Machinery won't get you there any quicker and the horses don't damage the bush," Mr. Stuber explained. "Plus they're so majestic, so calm; just beautiful to see. A perfect winter scene."

  The 85,000 trees were planted as part of a forestation program to create healthy wood lots for harvest. A life long worker in the bush, Mr. Stuber said he first learned the tricks of the trade from his father, John from the ripe age of 16.

  "I learned to respect the woods," he said. "A lot of these trees are stunted now so we need to clear them out ... the rest should be able to grow another 10 feet." Mr. Stuber's son, Darrell, fondly recalls the day they planted the lot, he no taller than the knees of the horses working away. The family had friends and neighbours over and with pails in hand, hitting what was once a plowed and gently rolling field, "jumping over the garter snakes", the junior Mr. Stuber said.

  He added that a small portion of the lot had suffered with a parasitic worm problem, and by opening up the thick canopy it allows a little more cold air in to help kill off the blight. The worms can't survive in temperatures in the minus 30 to 40 range and by removing the surrounding trees, they've also helped stop its spread and have it under control.

  Mr. Stuber said this is just the second time in the last 44 years the lot has needed trimming out. He said the first time, however, was only a minor trim, and done with machinery; he wasn't nearly as pleased with the results. "This time it's perfect though," Mr. Stuber said. "Now we're creating a healthy forest. I think the community will be happy with what we've been able to do here."

"With a competitive cost structure, there could be a future for Elk Falls mill and to that end we presented employees with a proposal that could lead to the restart of two specialty paper machines at the mill," said Richard Garneau, president and chief executive officer. "Nonetheless, we also recognize that electing to take severance is a personal choice.

"We hope the remaining employees want and will be given the chance to return to work and to continue to live in the community. We appreciate the Campbell River Mayor has shown strong commitment to preserving jobs through an agreement in principle that would address Class 4 property tax sustainability. And, while there are no guarantees that we will be able to overcome fibre supply shortages or acquire the customer orders necessary to restart, we know the outcome for this mill and community if nothing is done," he added.

Hourly employees at Elk Falls are represented by Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) locals 630 and 1123. Approximately 225 hourly workers have taken this option with an average severance payout of $57,000 per employee.

Davis Forestry Ltd has been appointed Sole Canadian agent for the full line of Binderberger Forestry equipment, from Austria .

Last month, a band of resolute preservationists issued a public call for “at least” half of the entire landmass of British Columbia to be turned into parkland or protected space in order to both combat global warming and protect plants and animals that are threatened by warmer temperatures.

The report, titled A New Climate for Conservation and prepared by a “forest ecologist” on behalf of seven well-established eco-groups, including the David Suzuki Foundation and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (also known as Y2Y), paints a bleak picture of environmental collapse and species extermination due to global warming. This, despite such recent grudging admissions from others in the alarmist camp that no statistically significant warming has actually occurred over the past 15 years.

The doom-and-gloom purveyors allege that climate change “will likely cause more dire consequences for fragmented or degraded ecosystems” in B.C. Their report is accompanied by a letter from several scientists to B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, which goes a rather significant step further by declaring: “The forecast warming of the Earth’s climate threatens life as we know it for all species — including humans — in British Columbia and across the planet.” Act now or we all die!

Thanks to a massive preservation initiative two decades ago, about 15% of B.C. is already locked up in eco-preserves and parks. But today’s greens want to more than triple that amount so that upwards of 50% of the province’s 945,000 square kilometres — or an area about the size of Sweden — will be off-limits to human habitation, exploitation and development — all broadly characterized as “industrial activity.” But, surely, no price is too high to save the province and the world from global warming, right?

But wait a minute. Haven’t groups such as the Western Canada Wilderness Committee been calling for this sort of immense preservation project for years now and, more tellingly, haven’t their calls been based, not necessarily on fighting global warming, but on the more ephemeral desire to foster biological diversity by “re-wilding” the province?

The short answer is: Yes. There has, indeed, long been a campaign by some of the more entrenched eco-groups in North America to freeze a massive amount of land throughout the continent on the broad grounds that a healthy ecosystem needs far more space in which to stretch its wings than is currently allotted by us greedy and land-hungry humans.

One gets the sense, then, that the New Climate report is actually a fresh and convenient coat of green paint slapped on an old preservationist campaign which, while portraying itself as earth-friendly, also has deep and disturbingly anti-human roots.

Consider this: The original organizers of, for example, the U.S.-based Wildlands Project (now called the Wildlands Network) were clear about their ultimate goal. “Does … the Wildlands Project advocate an end of industrial civilization? Most assuredly,” John Davis, editor of Wild Earth magazine, notoriously declared. “Everything civilized must go.”

Less inflammatory but equally provocative was this declaration from the Wildlands Project’s Reed Noss: “The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.” Today’s Wildlands Network puts on a more civilized face, but the general aim is the same: to create gigantic areas of green space, linked by broad corridors of natural pathways.

Perhaps the most ambitious proponent of this re-wilding and re-connecting movement has been the aforementioned Y2Y organization which, as its name suggests, has as its goal the creation of a gigantic wildlife superhighway linking Yellowstone Park in the U.S. to the Yukon Territory in Canada.

When presented simply as a way to enhance the flora and fauna, such a grandiose and economically destructive plan would and, indeed, has already failed to gain traction.

But wrapped in a convenient, although increasingly discredited, cloak of climate-change rhetoric, the likelihood of its success undoubtedly increases, even as the likelihood of growth for such vital wealth- and job-creating industries as mining and forestry decreases.