Voices From The Vault — The Green Planet Monitor

These are the Earth Chronicles, recorded voices from a warm, wet planet. How Earth formed, her twistings and turnings.

The origin of the Earth and the origin of the oldest rocks.

The continents are continually in movement.

The thin film of life enveloping her.

We were alive and well 3.8 billion years ago.

But we're not at the top. There's always other beings that are considered higher than us.

And there's birds, there's insects.

The extraordinary activities of one life form.

A couple cities or entire towns' water supplies are being poisoned and people were drinking it.

What we've done is we gave industry a carte blanche.

People think they can always take Take and take.

These people are behaving like dinosaurs. If humans left Canada, the trees would be very happy indeed.

What some humans are doing to preserve their planet, their home, their mother, themselves.

People don't give a damn what happened billions of years ago, really, except for curiosity. It's going to take a cultural change.

There isn't another world anywhere that we know of that we could just move to.

Mother Earth.

But people are very concerned what will happen in the next 50 years.

These are the Earth's chroniclers. They will tell their own stories without narration.

You know, every now and then you see a farmer and he's taking out the trees and digging up the roots and twisting them over and starting them on fire. And like, well, you know, he's just trying to make a go of it, I guess, but I don't know why they wouldn't just burn it.

We should treasure the trees we have rather than knock them down.

The trees are coming down much faster than they are regenerating, and I'm very concerned.

They can sink their saws into these trees and topple them within an hour and apparently feel no regret.

We are teaching our children to regard the natural world as an enemy that we make war with.

You can only do so much.

You can only destroy the earth so long, or till it gets back at you.

I guess I don't see trees as being there to be cut down. I think it's much more useful as it is standing and being admired by us and also used by us as shade. And the animals as it is to just show the power of a human over nature.

When you think of how big trees are and how big they get and how long they last, and you think that some of those seeds are maybe as big as a peppercorn, something like that, it's amazing.

I'm Graham McQueen. I'm associate professor of religious studies at McMaster University. Buddhist studies, my main area. Also director of the Center for Peace Studies. You look at a little tiny dry dead-looking seed sitting around on the earth looking most unimpressive, looking pretty close to nothing. It's indistinguishable from dirt, in other words. And yet from this, under the right conditions, a little green growth happens. Happens, and from that growth something else, and eventually you get this astonishing tree which is sucking in gallons of water and birds are landing in it and it's exchanging gases within, helping to create the atmosphere and so on. Well, see, that fits very closely in Indian thought. They would say, yes, that process where you see this— the seed is not non-being, it exists, it's being, and the tree is in some sense latent. Unmanifest in that seed. So it's not a question of creating a tree, it's a question of that tree becoming manifest. And then after it's manifest for a while, of course it will die. It will give off other seeds, life will continue, but that particular tree will go back into an unmanifest, you know, it will be reabsorbed back into the earth.

There is a pretty rapid cycling of nutrients through this forest and carbon along with them. The leaves which are still on these trees but are soon to come down. In the next month, basically all these leaves will be dropping and in a blaze of color and glory just before they do. And they hit the ground, and so on an annual basis there's all that organic material that lands on the forest floor that decomposes fairly quickly. The deciduous leaves tend to do that. And over the course of 2-3 years they become humus.

The forest in Shakespeare, as compared usually with not so much the town but the court, was a place of freedom. It was a place where you could be free to think, be free to say what you really meant, where you were not constrained by what you had to wear, by the form of address of who you were speaking to. And you get this particularly, for example, in As You Like It, where the two dukes— I mean, the forest-dwelling duke and the court-dwelling duke— and there was this incredible— in contact with nature, being surrounded by the trees, being in a sense protected by the overhanging trees, you were freed from all the constraints of the church, of the barons, of the, the kings and the, and the royalty, of the court, of the, the constraints on, on your entire behavior. And not only that, but the way you thought. So you go into the forest and Well, people still feel it today, actually. When you go into a forest nowadays, you feel, you should feel, a freeing of the spirit.

For a large part of the Aboriginal cultures, the trees were like a marriage between the earth and the sky. And that's a nice concept, and it sounds kind of romantic, But if you're even to look at that scientifically, the trees draw the moisture. They're— and the moisture carries a charge. If you have charged particles, water droplets that are all charged in one way, or they're negative or positive, they won't rain. It won't rain. In order to create the rain, you have to have the negative and positive charges in the atmosphere join together to condense those droplets to make them big enough to fall as rain. And the trees carry a charge and they relate the charge of the earth to the charge in the sky and they can create, in a sense, the climate. So that marriage is a productive one.

Old-growth forests are past the point at which they're growing. Quickly. Some, in fact, are decreasing in volume. I mean, that's again the old thing, is that these are decadent forests, they're losing wood volume, and therefore the best thing we can do is just cut them down now and plant a thrifty second-growth forest. I'm Chris Fletcher, I'm a timber supply analyst working for the Ministry of Forests in Victoria. So forests are basically timber. The mandate of the Ministry of Forests is to manage— British Columbia Ministry of Forests is to manage for all forest resources. That's one section of the Ministry of Forests Act. The other sections of the act, or subsections of the act, speak more specifically at maintaining a healthy industry.

The only thing decadent about forestry is the decadent brains we have playing around in forestry, frankly, because forestry is— forestry is not decadent. Even a forest that's been completely untouched and has a lot of dead trees in it is not a decadent forest. You have, like in a family, you have a good, well-balanced family, eh? You've got mum and dad and 2 or 3 kids, and you've got a couple of grandparents at the end of the at the other end of the chain, eh? That's a family unit, and everybody's functioning, eh? Right up until the time the old folks die, they're functioning. They're babysitting or they're doing something in the scheme of things. Okay, basically you've got what you've got is about 20% of a normal forest going downhill, gradually going downhill, but still doing the things that forest trees going downhill do. Enhancing the environment in many ways, providing habitat for the wildlife, providing seed right up to the last minute. At the other end of the scale, and this is taking place underneath the old trees, there's 20% of it that's growing up very quickly, and you've got the other 60% that is fairly stable, but still all adding volume. That's where this one falls into it right now. At nearly 1,800, it's a very stable tree. It has grown in the last 15 years. It has added 4 inches to its diameter. It produces a lot of seed, judging by the amount of cones around here. And the squirrels like these cones just as well as they like the cones off other trees. That tells me there's a lot of seed in them.

The reason the term decadent is used is because there happens to be a very significant portion of dead wood wood in the old-growth forest. And this dead wood is in the form of logs that are on the forest floor and snags, or dead standing trees, both of which provide very significant substrate for— or habitat for wildlife species, some of which we probably haven't even cataloged yet or don't completely understand. My name is Peter Quinby. And I live in Chisholm Township, which is about 20 kilometres east of Powassan, Ontario, which is just south of North Bay, Ontario, located in the central portion of Ontario. The known ancient forests of Ontario are located in various parts of the province. The ones that I'm most familiar with are the red and white pine old-growth forests. and we're now aware of a few of these stands in Algonquin Park. There are a fair number of these stands in Quetico Provincial Park, and there are quite a few large stands of old-growth white and red pine scattered throughout Central Ontario in a band, let's say, running from Tamagami across to Sault Ste. Marie. And north of Sudbury in that region. And I would say that across through that band from Sault Ste. Marie to Temagami, probably the finest, largest stands of old-growth red and white pine in the province, and possibly— I should say probably within Canada. And we do know that there is one old-growth white and red pine stand located in Temagami, in central part of Temagami at the north end of Lake Obabika, that is the largest stand of old-growth white and red pine left in the world.

My name is Peter Edward Steele. We're in Nipissing, on the Nipissing Ridge, overlooking Christian Valley. Right now, I don't have any cash money, per se, dollar bills. And I could sell this to someone, or the rights to log this, for $20,000 or $30,000. And they'd come in here and take all these big trees that we're walking by, especially this big one right behind us. This one goes back to 300, 400, 500 years old it's been standing here. It's a maple, hardwood maple, northern maple. It must be 3 feet across at the bottom. I'm not quite exactly sure, I just know it's been here a long, long time, longer than most human beings are gonna live. And yet, those people don't see this. All they see is a dollar bill. If I cut that down, I can have money. That's all they see standing there. You know, and they don't see the oxygen coming off the top of it. They don't feel it, they don't know it. The living earth. I always looked at the trees as the hair of the Mother Earth. And I myself spent, as all human beings have, 9 months inside of a female, our mothers. Now we are all walking on her, and we have to treat them both with equal respect immediately, or nobody's going to have anything left to walk on, male or female. Listen to the birds here. They've been here for how many thousands and thousands and thousands of years with these same trees. That's what makes me cry inside when I think that as a little boy I sat in forests like this in southern Ontario that aren't there anymore. Bulldozed it all down and turned it into city subdivisions. All the trees, same as this. I can get $20,000 or $30,000 tomorrow for these trees, but there'll be nothing left. It's taken 300, 400, 500 years for this to get here like this.

Feel it.

You can touch it and you can feel it. You can feel its life force and its energy. And how many Indian natives have walked by this since it was a baby? How hard did it fight to get this big? You know, out of all the other little ones around us, everywhere you look, only one of them's gonna come up through like this. As long as I can stay alive here on this place and protect it, this tree's going to be standing here. So I can come and sit on it, me and my grandchildren.

Bon, c'est encore Daniel Laure, professeur à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi dans le domaine de la biologie, plus spécifiquement de la biologie végétale. Mes intérêts de recherche sont liés à la régénération de la forêt boréale et moi, plus spécifiquement, je m'occupe de l'aspect régénération artificielle le reboisement. Au nord du Canada, en URSS également, dans les pays scandinaves, on va continuer d'appeler cela de la forêt boréale. C'est une forêt qui est caractérisée par une certaine monotonie au niveau des espèces, en ce sens qu'on retrouve sur des vastes portions de territoire peu d'espèces arborescentes. Exemple, au nord du lac Saint-Jean, on va retrouver des des grandes étendues d'épinettes noires, de pins gris, de sapins baumiers et également de feuillus, de trembles, peupliers faux-trembles ou de bouleaux blancs, mais en mélange parfois et parfois monospécifiques. Surtout lorsque l'on parle des conifères, on va retrouver des grandes étendues d'épinettes noires de plusieurs centaines d'hectares avant de retrouver de façon de façon importante un autre type d'espèce. C'est une espèce de mosaïque végétale, la forêt boréale. Le feu est essentiel au maintien de la forêt boréale telle qu'on la connaît actuellement. Le feu va, par exemple, brûler un peuplement mature d'épinettes noires et la première chose que l'on sait, c'est qu'on a un nouveau peuplement d'épinettes noires. Si on parle de l'épinette noire, qui est un peu l'espèce que l'on étudie le plus ici à Chicoutimi, notre espèce vedette, l'épinette noire a à sa tête un paquet de cônes dans lesquels on trouve des graines, et ces graines, pour plusieurs d'entre elles, vont résister au passage du feu, même dans le cas de feux intenses, vont résister au passage du feu. Donc, immédiatement après le feu, et À l'intérieur d'un an ou deux après le feu, les graines vont tomber au sol, les graines vont germer parce que pour des raisons que moi je connais pas encore, en tout cas, le lit de germination est tout à fait favorable à la germination des graines d'épinette noire. Donc on va retrouver très rapidement après le feu, en l'espace de 2-3 ans, un paquet de jeunes semis d'épinette noire qui sont —La forêt de Domaine.

Did you notice, anyone who goes through the boreal forest, like sitting on a bus crossing Northern Ontario, it's almost all conifers. You don't see too many deciduous. There's one exception, and that's aspen. If this was a really optimal growing region, we wouldn't have any conifers. The deciduous trees outcompete conifers right, left, and center. They're much better at doing what a tree does than conifers. Because for a variety of reasons for that, they've got those wide leaves. They've got some sexual reproduction mechanisms that save a lot of energy. And they probably evolved because of dry spells. They would drop their leaves in dry spells. Then they adapted to the cold. So they have been able to move up into these temperate cold climates, but they have not been able to move up into the boreal region. And that's because there's just not quite enough energy in the summer in order to support them for the whole year. Except for aspen. The next time you stand in front of an aspen tree, take your thumbnail or your fingernail and scratch the bark a little bit, and you'll find that it's green. Underneath. It's sort of got a white, a beige sheen to the surface. If you scratch that off, it's green. And it photosynthesizes right through the bark. And that's one of the small advantages that it gives it. During the warm days of spring before the leaves are out, it can actually do a small amount of photosynthesizing. And there aren't any other trees that can do that, but it needs it. It needs every advantage it can get. Let me introduce myself. I'm Peggy Tripp-Noles, and I'm a forest geneticist at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, sitting on the north shore of Lake Superior. I heard a wonderful quip from a forester, a dear forester colleague of mine, I might add, who was commenting, he was criticizing actually, an article in the paper that was written by an environmentalist about the forest, who thought that the forest was, the article in the paper mentioned the forest was being taken down at too rapid a rate, and that we should be concerned about not having many trees, having our trees disappear, and the forester said, "I don't know what this person is talking about. We've got more trees than we know what to do with." And I thought that was a wonderful quip because it's indicative of the mentality that those trees are there for us to do something with.

Manna. I thought it cried. I would have cried had I been there where it was. I looked around at the desolation. Another tree stump among thousands. Roots showed bare over pitted rock, crumbling under my hands. I felt the standing trees watching, awaiting where their broad Father's hat stood. I felt them missing the warm touch and protection of those woods. I leaned against the old stump and cried, and I feel him still wild in there. Energy can change forms, he said, but it cannot be destroyed. And the earth rises, and the earth rises, and no one can take away her power. And the Earth rises, and the Earth rises, no one can take away her power. And the Earth rises, and the Earth rises, no one can take away her power. "Look, look around you now," he said, "under the form of these withered stumps. Feel the earth beneath you now and don't, don't lose heart. She will rise again one day, she will rise again, my friend. So sing strong and reach out and remember till the end that the earth rises." And the earth rises. And no one can take away her power. And the earth rises. And the earth rises. And no one can take away her power.

We came across this tree that I stood at the base of it so that my friend could take a picture of it. The tree lying down was taller than I am. I'm 5'6". I'm 5'6.5" and the tree was in its width much bigger than I, and there it was sitting right at the side of the road. And I thought, you know, it took somebody a couple hours to cut this down. This tree's been growing here for the last 1,200 years. Took it 1,200 years to grow, an hour to cut it down. What kind of ratio is that? Kind of sad.

My name is David Suzuki. I'm a professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia. You just have to fly high above British Columbia as you come from Alberta towards the coast to realize that what we're doing is literally creaming these magnificent forests along the province. It's especially striking in the wintertime when you can see the white-covered, the bald areas of the mountains now coated in white, and you see a checkerboard pattern. And you see everywhere there's a road, everywhere there's a a river bottom. We're just— it's like taking a giant scythe and clearing the forests. And of course, if you fly lower to the ground, and this is especially striking if you fly along Vancouver Island, you see clear-cut areas that are absolutely massive. And where the roads go along the sides of often very steep mountains, You see landslides everywhere, and it's a kind of devastation. I remember a veteran of Vietnam said, you know, in all of the exercises he'd ever been involved with where there had been heavy bombardment for day after day after day, he'd never seen devastation of the kind that you see in British Columbia.

This sort of forest growth and yield theory that backs up this so-called liquidation or conversion policy is that old forests are either decreasing in volume because they're decaying, or they might be more susceptible to disease or insects, or they're at best not growing at all. And that if we cut them down, replace them with, you know, a new forest, those trees will will grow up and they'll produce more wood over time. We tend to use the forest, the word forest, a little bit loosely. They're tree plant, would be tree plantations.

Hello, my name is Don Dowling. I'm a Woodlands Manager for MacMillan Bloedel, Manager of Estevan Division based in Port Alberni, covering operations out of Port Alberni and on the west coast of Vancouver Island. For the first year 2 or 3, most of us would agree it's pretty ugly. But after that, when it becomes green, when it has vigorous trees growing, when it has everything coming back, I don't think it is. And in fact, a lot of the people who don't like clearcut logging, very strongly don't like it, have driven through second growth for 2 or 3 hours going to the west coast of the island and then see a recent clearcut and say, "Oh gee, that's ugly. Why don't you leave it like what I just drove through?" and they've been driving through second-growth forest for 2 hours. So it's a short period of time that it's ugly, and if you add up all the factors and the benefits to society, you have to ask, is managed ugly better than the alternative? And we don't really know right now, but until we get someone to come and really help us with selection logging and really make it work, or at least make a real true effort to make it work, It's really difficult to say. Look at this.

Now we're standing on a tree that's 3 to 4 feet in diameter. It's 8 feet long. It was cut and left here. It's terrible. Why did they cut it? I thought birds were supposed to live in it. Look at this one. Beautiful wood. What a waste. But there's one thing it's got missing. It doesn't have the quick buck in it. But I think I could make quite a bit of money milling that and making shakes out of it and doing this and doing that.

It's a wasteland here.

Hi, I'm Julie Draper, living out here in Tofino, trying to protect what's left of the remaining ancient rainforest. It looks like absolute devastation, and if there was a hell to believe in, I would call that hell. There is— the mountains have been stripped of the trees and There is such an amount of waste, you'd be sick if you could see how much waste was left on the mountainsides.

Visually, a clearcut is, is not very appealing. I think there's a real biological question as to whether or not a clearcut is damaging, and I think a lot of scientists will say it is not damaging done right, in the right sequence, in the right pattern, and with the right equipment. One of the biggest problems environmentally is the road building, which has to be done. It disturbs the land quite a bit, particularly on steeper slopes. So road building is probably the, the biggest potential to create environmental problems, but it's also an extreme necessity because to get access to these inaccessible areas. So you're dealing with a question of how fast do I build the roads, how much area do I build roads through. The roads are very expensive. So if you build a road and don't recover some return, which to us is timber, you're tying up a tremendous amount of capital. So one of the things we look at economically is we have to recover some timber from those roads fairly quickly and a fair amount to get a return on that investment. And one of the best ways to do that is a clearcut.

Raven flies high, rests on mossy branches, finds his shelter in the boughs of carmela. Cedar, Sitka spruce soaring higher than the pinnacle of man's desires. Desire. Every living breath of tall sacred trees feeds the world again, fuels the breeze. Ecosystem fine beyond the grasp of man frees the soul and lets the mind expand. Carmela, Carmela, Carmela Valley, you must Could not bow to the acts of man. Carmana, Carmana, the beginning, endless source of air for all our children. Our past is riddled with violence, our past is stained with greed. Trees become dollar signs, it's as far as we can see. A billion bucks in profit does not enter in without corruption of the simple soul within. And I am shocked at what we humans have become. My stomach turns at sight of what's already gone, and no man's job or profit could ever justify the damage and destruction they try their damnedest to disguise. Carmelo, Carmelo, Carmelo Valley, you my not fall to the acts of man. Carmana, Carmana, the beginning, endless source of joy for all our children.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can't you see that we are dying from ourselves? The oceans poisoned, sacred trees are numbered. Work, watch TV in our concrete jungle. Some people's children never know the forest. And we play games, take Pills to relieve all our stress. Trusting our governments to act on what is best. While we sit idly by, virgin growth is stripped away. And Carmela shall be just a raven's memory. Carmela, Carmela, Carmela Valley. You must not fall to the acts of man. Karmanna, Karmanna, the beginning, endless source of peace for all our children. Karmanna, Karmanna, Karmanna Valley, you must not fall to the acts of man.

Karmanna, Karmanna, [SPEAKING IN NATIVE LANGUAGE] My name is Garth Lenz. I'm a nature photographer, and my specialty is dealing with environmental issues. The boreal forest is, I'm sorry to say, being devastated. All across, across the— I managed— I ended up traveling 5,000 miles in my van documenting what's going on. And it seems there's this whole sequence of events. There's a deforestation of the boreal forest by huge corporations, the majority of which are foreign-owned. Mitsubishi is right now building what will be the largest pulp mill in the world, the ALPAC mill in the Athabasca. And they've just been given an FMA—that's a forest management area equivalent to a TFL in BC terms, of 60,000 square kilometres, which is 1/10 of the province.

As you see here across here, this is sand. How many years will it be before it gets back to its normal stage there, you know? It's going to be— how many generations, let's say like that? I'm just wondering, you know, the sand, the wind. The temperature has changed and the, you know, the climate has changed and the water has gone down. And it seems to me, you know, it's not the same after the clear-cutting has been started, you know. I'm Leon Iron from Canoe Lake and I'm 68 years of age. This used to be one of the prime land for caribou. It was the kind of land that we pick berries, live on the land, berries, trap, and we've hunted in this area for many, many years. And so our grandfathers, my Great-grandfather's trapped and hunting here, and this was one of the best lands that I knew in northern part of Saskatchewan. But right now you just have to look around here and see there's just sand, sand all over. And when the wind comes in here, you know, strong winds, it's a dust storm here, sandstorm. They made a mess out of this land here. They are Middle Western and I guess North Saskatchewan Forest Product, that's the two giant sawmills they have in Meadow Lake, and they are the ones that's harvesting trees from this area.

High up on the mountain's southern slope, a forest of tall old trees that has been dreaming in sun and rain for years and years is being bought and slashed to serve the greasy hopes of 3 or 4 moneyed little men for firewood and space to build pink condos and weekends for the rich. In oily lingo they talk of sustainable development. The vast clearing gapes, a raped corpse's sprawl. Machines crawl over the ripped and open hill. They have their permits. What they can, they will. Heads nod in the ministry. Progress is all. Hidden we watch from a torn edge, green yet, helpless in shadow. This is the way of the planet.

Last night I went to the valley Long road through a dark sky. Looking out of the window at the rain passing by. I thought I heard my mother screaming, oh, mother, oh, oh, mother, oh, how can I put my hands in all the places you are hurting? Oh, mother, oh, oh, mother, oh, how can I put my hands in all the places you are hurting? It was dark out and hard to see. A friend had to point it out to me. You must come and see this someday, someday. I walked the roads late, helpless, so helpless. I thought I heard my mother screaming, oh mother, oh, oh mother, oh.

In the case of a forest, we've got to consider not only these big trees that we're looking at, we've got to consider the under the undergrowth, the understudy, the bushes, the shrubs, the ferns, the moss, and the mushrooms, the whole bit. And what is under the soil that you and I can't even see. There are microsystems and biological systems and fungal systems under the ground, absolutely essential to produce a tree like you're standing in front of right now. I'm Merv Wilkinson, as you probably have gathered by now. I'm a sustainable selective logger. Working between Nanaimo and Ladysmith. I have 137 acres of active forest land, that is actively forest-producing land, eh, that I'm growing trees on for commercial purposes. I've gone through 9 cuts. I cut approximately every 5 years. I harvest the accumulated growth. That is the only thing you can harvest from a forest and not go into into a bankruptcy situation. You can harvest your annual growth rate. Now, how do I decide? First, if there's been any windthrow, that is trees that have blown down, since the last cut, you take that tree out. It's blown down, you take it out. Next category, if you have a tree that is showing stress, that is dying, or has actually died. And trees do die for very peculiar reasons, no reason at all seemingly at times. That's the next category. Then your forest is growing all around you while this is going on, while these trees are dying, while one is blown down, your forest is growing like crazy. Okay, looking at these two here right in front of us, eh, just for the sake of it, I have a nice young cedar coming here, I have a grand fir there, Now, it would benefit— I don't want to cut the big monarch there because he has a specific purpose. That's a big old tree that I have left for a particular purpose, either as a seed tree or as a cover tree. I could take this young grand fir here out. It's big enough to be worth cutting. It's a nice tree. It's grayed up well in material. And then that lets the cedar take off, eh?

I'm Yanakumi. And I'm a manager of the Land Use Planning Advisory Team with MacMillan Bodelle in Nanaimo, British Columbia. It interests MB, and it's a model for what we can do here on the east side of Vancouver Island near communities where obviously people are not going to want to have a clearcut, and they're kind of used to having that second-growth forest around. Will it take the place of traditional clearcutting? I don't think so. It's a very intensive, very labor-intensive, cost— not very cost-efficient form of regenerating a forest using a selection-type cutting. For Merv, I think he's got 148 acres. He's a one-man show. I think he brings in contractors to help him manage that. And on a small scale, you bet, it's the way to go. I'd do the same thing if I was I was Merv and I had a woodlot. On a larger scale, will it sustain our economy in terms of jobs and money? No. And I think the experience in Germany has shown that. It's very, very expensive to manage a forest on a tree-by-tree basis.

Jaques in As You Like It is when he— that marvelous speech where he, with tremendous excitement, he says, "I met a fool in the forest, you know, a motley fool." And then he goes on. I actually played Jaques but I can't remember the lines now. But he goes on about the enormous excitement of this man who was obviously a fool because he was dressed in motley, but in fact was incredibly wise, and he had the wisdom of being natural, of saying what he really meant. And Jekyll gets more and more jealous as he goes on with this speech and says, I am ambitious, I think, I am ambitious for a motley motley coat he would like to have. The motley coat is really the forest. It's the sort of freeing garment which enables you to behave like a fool. Fool in Shakespeare doesn't mean quite what we mean nowadays, like an idiot, does it? But it's the wonderful freeing up for wearing a motley coat, so you can be natural, you can say what you really think.

I believe that today we should ban clear-cut logging all over British Columbia. Actually, I think we should stop it all over the world.

I think that we should maybe leave these forests. After all, they've been standing for thousands of years.

It's scandalous. What Canadians are doing to their forests, absolutely scandalous. Hi, this is Peter Quinby again. People can do a number of things to protect ancient forests. They can become more aware of the situation, particularly in their own local area. Learn about what kinds of forests you have in your local area. Spend some time there, get to know who the experts are, join a local naturalist club or environmental organization and become active, become involved. And I also believe that civil disobedience, in some cases, is absolutely necessary. There's no way that the Tamagami issue would have come to the forefront like it did if some of the civil disobedience hadn't have taken place, including the arrest of of the now Premier of Ontario, Bob Rae. It is indeed. Take it away.

Yeah? Yeah. Alright. I wandered up the West Coast Trail, gonna save me a big tree now. I climbed up into a tall fir tree, no longer can I let my blow run free. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed on tight and I won't be moved, gonna save me a big tree now. Gonna save me a big tree now. A passin' bird called out to me. Gonna save me a big tree now. You left me no place for to build my nest. You're a blight on the earth and you failed the test. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I lashed on tight and I won't be moved. Gonna save me a big tree now. Gonna save me a big tree now. The whittle and speecher spoke to me, gonna save me a big tree now. It's us that are dying, we'll have to agree, but yourselves that you're killing, now one day you'll see. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed on tight and I won't be moved, gonna save me a big tree now, gonna save me a big tree now. The spawnin' salmon cried to me, gonna save me a big tree now. We'd love to find a place for to drop our row, but your silt fills the rivers and we no place to go. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed on tight and I won't be moved. Gonna save me a big tree now, gonna save me a big tree now. That living tree, it spoke to me, gonna save me a big tree now. I'm a thousand years old but still quite young, yet I'm due to be cut Tinderbone to be hung. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed on tight and I won't be moved. Gonna save me a big tree now, gonna save me a big tree now. The company man, he cursed at me. Gonna save me a big tree now. You're hurting our profits, but oh, you won't starve. It's the name of the loggers on a grave you'll carve. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed untied and I won't be moved. Gonna save me a victory now, gonna save me a victory now. The policeman, he read to me, gonna save me a victory now. From a fat book of laws that he swore were true, they were written by wiser men than me and you. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed untied and I won't be moved. Gonna save me a Gonna save me a big tree now. The hangin' judge, he scowled at me. Gonna save me a big tree now. It's for your own safety we do this, you know you're a terminal case, so to jail you'll go. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed on tight and I won't be moved. Gonna save me a big tree now. Gonna save me a big tree now. Gonna save me a big tree now. The grieving earth cried out to me. Gonna save me a big tree now. It's not for myself that I weep, you fools, for I will survive, but without a lot of you. Hey ho, I'm an ordinary Joe, but it's time to make a stand so my kids can grow. I'm lashed on tight and I won't be moved. Gonna save me a big tree now. Gonna save me a big tree now.

There's a passage in the Chandogya Upanishad which talks about a tree. It's using tree as a metaphor here for human life, but it says— it just assumes that trees are alive like we're alive, and that they share something which it calls the jīva with us. Jīva is often translated as a soul. Or spirit, but what it really— it comes from the word jīva, which means to exist, to live. So you could call it the life principle, you could translate it as a soul, whatever. But trees have them and we have them. That's very, very clear, and most people within the whole tradition of Indian thought would agree with that. And by the way, most people I think in most cultures would agree with that. It's only the modern West that has somehow made made trees kind of insentient and semi-dead and all the rest of it. But this passage says, "If you hit a tree with an axe, it will bleed, but it won't die. Even if you hit it in the root, it won't die unless the jīva, the life principle, begins to withdraw." So there's this picture of a tree as somehow pervaded by this pulsating life principle or soul, and the tree is enjoying. The passage says the tree sits there sucking up moisture, enjoying its existence and living. And although it will bleed, it will not die until its jīva, its soul, decides to retreat. And if the soul retreats from the tree, then as it withdraws from the branch, the branch will wither. As it withdraws from the trunk, the trunk will die. As it withdraws from the root, the root will die. This is a very different picture of trees and plants than the one that we currently have in our culture, but it's one that Indian thought shares with people all over the world. And it's really a conception of this life principle which we can't see but which is there all the time in an unmanifest way, occasionally manifesting itself and taking on matter and becoming this beautiful visible tree, and then becoming unmanifest again. And then later becoming manifest again as another tree or some other kind of being.

The tree when it dies goes on living in a way that it sustains the forest where it falls. Eventually when it rots it brings out the plants, flowers, and provides more food and more forest growth, which is quite wonderful. All sorts of things will grow there and be sustained by that old tree which is— you thought its life was over, but by no means is its life over, really.

Hi, my name is Mary Lou Kelly and I am in Aurora, Ontario, and I stand before the tree that I call the Tree of Hope. I'd like to share it with you by describing that it's the most incredible tree I've ever seen. It represents life and death. The trunk is completely dead when you look at it, but obviously there's life there because when you're faced in front of this tree, on the right-hand side is the most glorious living branch. It's a maple tree. It's just so huge. It's, it's actually two I'm too round to hug so that my hands meet, but I try my best. And the branch, the living branch that comes out of this dead trunk is horizontal, and it's just, it truly is a work of art. I wish, I hope that my words are describing it and doing it the justice it deserves. It's incredibly beautiful. That no matter how bleak something may appear, there is life beyond.

I remember as a child being told, "Oh, this world is so huge that there is hardly anything man can do to destroy it. Man is but a little speck on this earth." And, you know, I used to believe it. So don't worry about things like that. I used to worry about that when I was a little kid. Hey, like, you know, the things that are happening, the cutting down of trees and everything. You know, what's going to happen to the earth? You know, the animals that lived in those forests, you know, one time.

My name is Dan Weisenberger and we're on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. The trees are looking real green against the grayness of the sky today, I'll tell ya.

In today's episode of the Earth Chronicles, you heard hammer dulcimer from Paul Haslam. Old Tree Stump and Clear Cut were written and performed by Vanessa Le Bourdet in Tofino. Carmena was written and performed by Colleen and Kelt Eccleston. Big Tree Shout was written by Timothy Webber and performed by Straight From the Kitchen, a group from the Sunshine Coast. Of British Columbia. This instrumental was performed by Dan Weisenberger and Leah in the capital of the Sunshine Coast, Roberts Creek. Sonnet 12 was written and read by Richard Sommer in Abercorn, Quebec. The Earth Chronicles is funded by the Environmental Partners Program of Environment Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Environment, Canadian artists and programs on satellite Canada Trust's Friends of the Environment Foundation, McMaster University's Centre for Peace Studies, Local 6 of the Canadian Union of Educational Workers, and the Conservative Society of Hamilton and District. Canada travel passes were generously donated by Greyhound Canada. Tour passes were donated by Voyageur Colonial Limited. The Earth Chronicles are created by Dave Catton Dave Kattenberg and Peter Hutton. Executive production by Dave Kattenberg. At the studios of CFMUFM, McMaster University Radio, Hamilton. Join us again next week, or in two weeks' time, depending on where you're listening. Bye-bye.