SUNDRE – Serving on a forest advisory committee over the past several decades – first as an elected official representing the municipality and later as a member of the public at large – has been an eye-opening experience that for a former Sundre mayor alleviated concerns about industry practices like clear cutting.
“Some people figure it’s terrible to cut down a tree,” Pat Toone, a former Sundre councillor who also served as mayor, said during a recent interview.
“And I probably was about like that when I first got on the committee,” Toone said, referring to the Sundre Forest Products Public Involvement Round Table (SPIRT) group that started in 1992 to provide the company with advice on forest management.
But the years proved to be not just a chance to serve the community by representing its interests, but also offered eye-opening insight into the forestry industry’s sustainability practices.
“I learned an awful lot,” she said, adding the experience overall alleviated any prior concerns she had about clear cutting.
“I didn’t realize how much work there was (going on behind the scenes) to reforest.”
Leading up to Toone originally getting involved with the committee was a government effort to elicit feedback on a development in the Ram River area that included a meeting in Rocky Mountain House with presentations from all kinds of people who wanted to use the forest.
“Access was the big thing that came out of that,” she said. “Everybody had different views on access of public lands.”
When Toone was elected to Sundre town council in 1992, the mill’s operator – formerly known as Sunpine – was developing a forest management agreement (FMA) with the provincial government and also sought community input to help steer the process.
“That was part of the deal, was that you had to have community input to write the plan,” she said.
Following about a year of participating in SPIRT meetings, Toone eventually decided in 1993 to step into the chair’s role when the position opened up. Although since then there was a period of about two years when she was not actively involved in the group’s activities, Toone eventually found her way back.
Employment opportunities
“I always thought it was very important to support Sunpine,” she said. “They are our biggest employer. Even though gas and oil are a big thing here, still Sunpine was the biggest employer we had.”
Fully cognizant of other important sectors in the area that provide beneficial economic ripple effects, she said the extent to which the mill has contributed to the local economy cannot be overstated.
“I know kids that came out of high school that retired last year,” she said, adding they had the chance to train and build careers at the mill.
“It was such a great opportunity for our community; especially young people that wanted to start a career and got trained on the spot.”
There are also plenty of indirect jobs such as truckers supported by the mill’s operations, she added.
That was a primary motivator that kept her committed to participating with the group over the decades. But after the better part of 30 years on the advisory committee, Toone for personal reasons recently decided to step down.
She spoke with the Albertan alongside Tom Daniels, a woodlands manager who for many years has been with Sundre Forest Products – West Fraser and has been involved with SPIRT since 1997.
Daniels said the 17-member committee – which includes representation for key forest values stakeholders such as grazing, trapping, hunting, angling, Indigenous, small timber operators, municipal government, motorized recreation, non-motorized recreation, forestry workers, oil and gas and tourism – was the first public advisory group in Alberta to deal with forestry.
“Pat’s advice and participation has been instrumental in the shaping of forest management in the forests to the west,” he said. “She understands the need for a balance of the values of the economy, the environment and socially.”
Not altogether unlike the Sundre Petroleum Operators Group, SPIRT offers members of the community and stakeholders an opportunity to engage with industry to express concerns, ask questions, or simply seek information, he said, later adding the advisory group also remains very much active in terms of ongoing efforts to monitor changes to government regulations.
“The thing with this committee though, they had to be part of developing the plan,” Toone said, adding the government at the time the group started was moving toward FMAs.
The original plan has since being completed been painstakingly revisited page-by-page in its entirety every 10 years to ensure compliance with any regulatory changes, she said.
Daniels said the next review is coming up in 2025.
While there have been plenty of meetings held in the past to discuss individual cut block plans, they are often lightly attended, said Toone, empathizing with concerns people have when they see a freshly cut section of forest.
Focus on reforesting to ensure future renewability
“But I also got to see how they re-planted it,” she said, adding that 10 to 15 years later, there are places that were clear cut when she first joined the board that since have rebounded with big trees.
That’s a crucial part of planning for the industry’s long-term renewability.
“They pick cones and send them off to a nursery so they can replant those trees in the same area that they came from,” she said. “If you want it to be sustainable, you have to do that. There’s so much planning into doing a cut block.”
Cut blocks vary in size, said Daniels, adding that while some can be fairly small, others can be about 371 acres, or 150 hectares.
Depending on the level of complexity involved in a cut block, the amount of time required to plan before a single tree is felled can take as long as five years, said Toone.
“You don’t want to see the forest disappear without a solution to bring back a nice healthy forest,” she said.
Indigenous archeologists even survey the sites of planned cut blocks in the event there might be historical ancestral artefacts, she said.
“That really surprised me, because I never knew that they did that,” she said.
It’s also thanks to both the forestry as well as oil and gas industries coordinating on developing access roads that the public can access the vast, largely untapped resources in the West Country.
“A lot of the roads are West Fraser’s roads; they have to look after those roads,” she said. “The government doesn’t look after those roads after they’re built. Yet people figure that they can travel anywhere they want. And really, they can’t.”
And whereas non-renewable resources are inevitably destined to be tapped out once fully extracted from the land, a well-managed mill has the potential to endure indefinitely.
“Theoretically, as long as there’s a demand for wood products, this operation will continue,” said Daniels, adding that anyone who might be interested in learning more is welcome to contact him at 403-638-6211, or alternatively by email at [email protected].
The group tries to meet four to six times annually, including conducted tours of various forest management activities such harvesting operations, planting camps, road and bridge construction or various other activities, he said.
