New book features Upper Miramichi’s dream for a community forest

“Deep in the heart of the New Brunswick forest in a place where a mighty river flows is a dream of a community forest,” opens the chapter by the Conservation Council’s Tracy Glynn about the efforts by Upper Miramichi residents in a new book on community forests in Canada.

Growing Community Forests, edited by Ryan Bullock, Gayle Broad, Lynn Palmer and Peggy Smith and published by University of Manitoba Press, brings together Canada’s leading community forest researchers, practitioners and advocates to share experiences and analysis with a forest management model that involves local control over forests for the greater benefit of local communities.

The chapter on Upper Miramichi traces the community’s efforts from its early days of approaching the Conservation Council for support in 2009 to being part of the formation of the New Brunswick Community Forestry Alliance.

The possibilities of community forestry in Upper Miramichi inspired a flurry of activity that produced maps of the forest within that region, assembled public opinion on what residents desired in a community forest, held popular and fun forest festivals and educated policymakers.

Old growth Acadian Forest in New Brunswick

The book describes the important role that forest researchers such as Tom Beckley and Ron Smith, practitioners such as Eel Ground Nation’s Steven Ginnish, Menominee Nation’s Chris Caldwell and BC Community Forest Association’s Jennifer Gunter and organizations such as Fundy Model Forest and Falls Brook Centre have played in informing the community forestry movement in New Brunswick.

The Upper Miramichi chapter also details how forestry policy in New Brunswick continues to fail the forest and people in New Brunswick and eliminate alternatives such as community forestry, including the controversial 2014 forestry strategy that allowed forestry companies to clearcut more and spray more glyphosate.

“Critics of the forestry strategy, including conservation groups, First Nations, woodlot owners and smaller mill owners, are particularly concerned that the increased softwood fibre supply granted to the forestry industry, mostly to J.D. Irving, will come from lands set aside for conservation, will further harm the province’s already struggling woodlot owners and will shut out other economic opportunities such as community forestry,” Glynn writes in the book.

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The calls for modernized forestry legislation in New Brunswick that respects public priorities for forest management, including optimizing local benefits from the use of local resources, is noted. The book shares the experiences of community forestry in different parts of Canada, including in British Columbia, where modernized forest legislation allowed communities access to a sufficient amount of the resource, which was key to enabling community forests to get established and multiply in that province.

The book is a needed antidote to the crisis facing forests and communities across New Brunswick and Canada. While some may say that community forestry is a far-off dream in New Brunswick, the Upper Miramichi effort is not forgotten. Recently, on Nov.2, 2017,  the Member of the Legislative Assembly representing Upper Miramichi, Jake Stewart, praised the community forest effort in his riding in a speech against glyphosate spraying of the forest in the New Brunswick Legislature.

The appetite for a different kind of forestry in New Brunswick, one that is more democratic and respectful of the forest, is growing. The Upper Miramichi story in Growing Community Forests gives readers a sense of the possibilities that can come when locals have a say on their forest.

Growing Community Forests can be purchased here.

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