Donahue

I was born and raised in New Brunswick and grew up there in the 1940, and 50’s. In 1960 I left home and spent 11 years at sea. Of those years 8 were spent on commercial fishing boats. While I was growing up there was an abundance of wild life and fish (both fresh water and salt water). In fact N.B. was famous for it’s salmon rivers and abundant wild life. I remember very well in the 1950’s when DDT was mixed with diesel fuel and sprayed by air plane to kill off the spruce bud worm. The after effect it had on fish and wild life was devastating. And so were the clear cut logging and the use of fresh water rivers to drive the logs down to the booming ground. Needless to say the salmon rivers were in a crises, and by the 1980’s there wasn’t very much natural forest or wild life left in Northern N.B.

As a commercial fisherman I fished on the West Coast as well as on the East Coast. It was in the 1960’s that the big draggers, seiners and factory ships came on the scene. One of the fishing boats that I fished on could catch 1000 tons of fish in a single pass. Too much fish were caught in too short a time to sustain a healthy population. Plus there was a divers effect that those huge drag nets and seines had on the sensitive spawning areas. So the rest is history. The fish stocks collapsed.

In 1972 I resigned from fishing and moved to Alberta where I bought a homestead and trap line. I married and my wife and raised four children. We were very self-sufficient and raised and preserved a lot of our own food plus all the wild food we gathered. I managed my trap line very well and only harvested the surplus animals and always left big reserves, (places that I wouldn’t harvest for several years). I would catch an average of 150 beaver, per year plus other types of animals.

My trap line, up until the 1980’s, was virtually a pristine area. Although areas were logged you couldn’t really notice them, because of select logging and only the bigger trees were cut with hardly any impact on wild life. Then in the 1980’s the oil and gas industry started to move in… massive amounts of seismic cut lines were made, oil wells drilled, roads, pipe lines, power lines, phone lines and big pumping stations and generating plants were put in. The result was a lot of wild life and their habitat were destroyed. My own trapping trails were destroyed and I had to abandon several cabins. I thought this was just happening here in this area, but I was wrong. It was happening all over northern Alberta.

Then in the beginning of the 1990’s the forest industry moved in and started to do massive clear cut logging. I couldn’t believe what was happening before my very eyes… wild life and wild life habitation began to disappear at a frightful rate. I couldn’t manage my trap line because most of my line was destroyed. I decided to start an ecotour business but even that is threatened by massive clear cuts and the oil and gas industry. After a statement by Lindsay Banks (timber development officer for Tolko Ind. of High Prairie, to me that Tolko would "leave some trees around my cabin" for me, I decided there and then that I would fight with all I have to put a stop to the destruction of our Boreal Forest. Yes, we need forest products and jobs and so does the next generation and if we don’t do something to conserve our Forest now and get back to select logging, five years from now will be too late. Most of these forest companies are foreign-owned and they don’t care about our forest or our future generation. It’s all for greed for the here and now generation.

In conclusion I want to compare logging with fishing. What do they have in common? For one thing they are both a very important part of our economy and they are both renewable resources. Prior to the 1960’s fishing was done with small to medium size boats. Most of the economy in Eastern Canada was based on fishing and there wasn’t any shortage of jobs… Until big multinational fishing companies came on the scene with greed and high tech equipment and massive fishing vessels. That put a lot of people out of work and caused the demise of the fish stocks in our oceans. Small boats prior to that didn’t tear and rip up the ocean floor and destroy sensitive spawning areas or dump mega tons of unwanted fish on the ocean floor to pollute and destroy other types of fish habitat. There were plenty of fish for every one at very reasonable prices. Fish dumping isn’t even mentioned and very few people know that was happening. I myself have seen as much as a hundred tons of dead herring dumped at one time because the boat couldn’t hold any more fish. And this just didn’t happen rarely, it was a common practice in the herring fishing back in the 1960’s.

Prior to the 1990’s logging was done with the method of select logging. There were lots of jobs in the forest – trees were hand felled and skidded with small line skidders and horses. The other parts of our ecosystem weren’t destroyed and the impact on wild life and habitat was very minimal, very few trees were wasted. Enter the age of multinationals and greed and high tech logging equipment. Only a few people were required to do the jobs of hundreds of men in the past. No regard is given to wild life and their habitation. Multiple thousands of bird nests, bear dens, squirrel dens, beaver dams and their habitations are destroyed every day that the feller buncher and grapple skidders operate. And the waste of immature trees is phenomenal. After the trees are cut the whole forest floor is completely rooted up and genetically engineered trees are planted. And to add insult to injury everything is sprayed with poison to kill of any undesirable vegetation. Tree farming it’s called and soon there won’t be any natural forest or wild life. These so called forest experts come from the same old school that said there will be cod forever. Now they are trying to farm fish and the result is that disease is spreading among the fish and affecting the wild species and soon all fish won’t be fit to eat. The same thing will happen to the tree farms. All that poison they use will end up in our water sooner or later. These so called experts want to play god and can’t stand to see things in the beauty that God made them.

I for one will not let up, back up, or shut up, until this mass destruction of our forest is exposed and changes take place.

I can back up any statement that I made here and I welcome anybody that wants to see for themselves to come take a tour of our forest with me.

I am devoting most of my time and efforts to conserve our forest and to keep it natural. I also provide ecotours.

You can contact me at the above address or by phone 1-780-751-2239 or e-mail: ecotour@canada.com and I am available to give a talk or presentation on how our forests are harvested.

Dave has spent most of his 60 years in the forest of Canada. Growing up in northern N.B. he saw that part of the province ravished by clear-cut logging and a great demise in the wildlife and fresh water fish population due to heavy impaction of the forest industry.

Coming to northern Alberta in 1972 he lived in the boreal where he raised a family, self-sufficiently, on a homestead. The boreal forest was 95% pristine in that area at that time. Until it started to get impacted by the oil and gas industry in the mid 1980’s when seismic lines and oil roads began to forge into inaccessible areas. Then in the early 1990’s the forest industry moved in and began massive clear-cut logging. Huge tracts of forest were completely knocked down and only the best was taken – the rest was left and heaped up to be burned. The shear waste of timber and the loss of wildlife and wildlife habitat was shocking. As far as he could see there would be no stopping, until the last tree was cut down and the animals that lived there would be extinct.

Dave decided to do something about it. He confronted the forest industry head on by having a protest in front of a big mill in the area, public awareness campaigns, (at the Alberta legislative in Edmonton, forestry show, country fairs), many letters to the news media and many were printed. He was several times on national T.V. (CBC and local CFRN), radio, National Geographic (June 2002 issue), Sacramento Bee, (April 27, 2003 (see<sacbee.com/denial>), Edmonton Journal (July 7, 2002), and many local and regional newspapers.

Dave gives slide presentations and talks about the boreal to any and all groups that are interested. He also does wilderness survival trips, where a person can still see a part of the boreal and experience it before it is too late.

Dave believes that the only way to conserve our forest is by informing the public, and having them put pressure on the forest industry and by consuming less. It’s the consumer that drives the wheels of industry.

Does the Alberta Government own our Boreal Forest or is it public forest? If it is the former then they can do what they please with it. But they do not own it! The people of Alberta own it… as well as all the rest of the public lands in Canada. If this is the case why do we just sit back and let our Alberta Government give huge F.M.A.’s (Forest Management Areas) away to international and mega forest companies to do what they pretty well want to do with them? They treat our forest like it was a piece of dirt to be trampled under foot and machine and give no regard to God’s beauty in it.

They rape, plunder, and waste our forest and wildlife for big profit and don’t give a hoot about the future generations. Our Alberta Government is built on pride and greed and it is just for the here and now generation. The Government supports this plunder all for the sake of tax dollars. And how do we, the people, benefit from all this destruction while the mega forest companies boast of profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year? I am not against profit or logging, but it has to be done in a more civil way. These mega forest companies have gone hog wild – it’s like a feeding frenzy. The clear cutting is devastation to our forest and wild life. The forest harvesters have no respect for any tree – be it 2 inches or 2 feet – everything is knocked down and smashed. And any wildlife and their habitat that stand in its way – be it a moose or mouse – are destroyed. No animal is safe and if this kind of carnage keeps up the only place that you will be able to see any animals will be in a zoo. What can we do? I have talked to our local Alberta Forest Service in the past and they won’t do anything about it. Neither will the Alberta Fish and Wildlife or our local Biologist. They all work for the same outfit and all feed out of the same trough. Our Alberta Government is controlled by big business and they are just too cowardly to stand up against them and are afraid to lose the almighty tax dollar. We, the people, can and will do something about it. We will bring the plight of our forest and our wildlife to the European Union and ask that boycotts be put on all Alberta forest products until a more civil and humane way of logging takes place. We will bring the plight of our forest and wildlife to the forest products buyers in the U.S. and ask them to put boycotts on all Alberta forest products until positive changes are made. Did you know that the Forestry Producers Association and all the mega forest companies belong to A.F.P.A.? They teach the students just what they (the mega forest companies) want them to learn. Just recently I took two local Alberta Forest Officers out on my trap line to view some of the damage to our forest. One of the first questions I asked them was if they were ever in the forest before they went to forestry school – the answer was no!

Some of the excuses that these mega companies have for clear cutting immature trees are these: The trees stopped growing. (Since when do trees stop growing?) The trees are beginning to fall down because they are dying. (There will always be dead and dying trees in any healthy forest, it’s only a natural process of thinning for trees to die off to make room for the healthy ones.) The trees are endangered because of flooding by beaver so we have to cut them before they drown out. (About four years ago Zeidler Forest Products of Slave Lake, now Alberta Plywood, cut a very major clear cut on my trap line because they said that they were endangered by flooding…funny a year or so later they replanted seedlings in the very same area, so why are the seedlings not endangered?) The trees might burn up by a forest fire. (So how do they know where a fire will start next?)

Another fallacy is that the forest is much healthier after clear cuts than before, and that clear cuts provide lots of feed for wild life. What good is all this feed for wild life when they don’t have any cover to protect themselves in? And pray tell what did all the wildlife do for feed before all the clear cutting took place? There was a lot more wildlife back then than there is now.

Did you know that all the wildlife and forest studies that are done are paid for by big business? And when any problems with wildlife are found they blame it on trapping and hunting. (Trappers and hunters are the watch men and women of our forest and they know what is going on). The real culprits are the mega forest companies.

The so called forest experts claim that there will be forests forever. These experts come out of the same school as the experts that claimed that there would be Atlantic cod fish forever back in the 1960’s. (I could write another page on the Atlantic fishery – I have seen it all because I was a part of that industry back in the 60’s and saw the depletion of the scallop beds in the Bay of Chaleur and the depletion of the herring stocks in the same bay as well as in Newfoundland and other parts of Atlantic Canada. It was a real feeding frenzy for the multi-nationals with the big seiners that could catch up to 1000 tons of herring in one night of fishing. Now those days are long gone as will be our forest if nothing is done about it now.)

Why are Canadians so quick to respond to the plight of the South American rain forest and the Taiga in Siberia and yet sit back and do nothing to conserve our Boreal Forest?

As a person that has spent over twenty-five years in our forest and have seen the diverse effects that clear cutting is having on our wildlife and the waste of immature trees, I urge you to do something now. Please join us now so that we can bring the plight of our Boreal Forest to International attention before it is too late.

Canadians Conserving our Wilderness is about conserving our wilderness for future generations. Anyone that has a concern about conserving our wilderness for future generations is welcome to help. And you can help right now by writing letters to your MLA, your MP, your local newspaper, and the forest companies denouncing clear cutting and demand that our forest be treated and respected – for now and future generations and not like some tree farm that only grows the trees that they want; leaving no room for wild life or other plant life.

And last of all I need your support as I bring the plight of our Boreal Forest to international attention. I plan on doing just that by public awareness campaigns and by making post cards of the clear cuts with the companies name on them and giving them out to people that are concerned so they can mail them out to the MP’s, MLA’s, and the forest companies to protest this plunder of our public forests. As a supporter I will send you updates on our progress.

So far since I got started on this in June of this year I held a protest in front of Tolko’s Mill in High Prairie. I had a display set up at the North Country Fair in Joussard, I spent two days in front of the Alberta Legislative Buildings in Edmonton. I wrote numerous letters to the newspapers, I had over 3000 pieces of information printed up for free distribution. And I wrote an essay on the aspect of logging as seen in the eyes of a trapper. I hope to get it published in some good outdoor magazines.

David Donahue is a long time outdoors man and offers ecology and survival trips to the Boreal Forest.

This is a public awareness campaign to expose to the Canadian public the unethical logging practices in our Boreal Forest. What right does our government have in giving away our public forest in the form of huge Forest Management Areas to big multinational forest companies that don’t give a hoot about the forest and the wildlife that live there but just Rape, Plunder and Waste it? And all the green that they can see is the US dollars.

I have operated a trap line here in Northern Alberta for over twenty-five years and have seen, first hand, the diverse effect that clear cut logging is having on our forest and wildlife. I have seen my one trap line devastated by Weyerhaeuser, Zeidler Forest Products (now Alberta Plywood), Tolko and local timber permits in the last five years. I have appealed to the Alberta Forest Service in the past and also Alberta Fish and Wildlife and they all told me the same thing: that this is progress and you can’t stop industry. They say that our forest is sustainable, but this is not true in this area, and this is happening all over Alberta. It seems like our government is only built on pride and greed and gives no consideration for future generations and is willing to let big industry destroy, pollute and poison our public forest. Too much timber and oil and gas is taken out too quickly in too short a time. Trees do not grow back in twenty years like they would have you believe – it’s more like ninety or a hundred.

--Moose population is down by over fifty percent and no hope of it recovering. Their habitation is gone for the next hundred years or may never recover.

--Bears, squirrels, and beavers: their dens and dams are completely destroyed in the winter with the mothers and their young in them.

--In the spring when mother animals like mink, marten, fisher, and lynx venture out on the clear cuts looking for food they become food for all sorts of birds of prey because there is no cover for them.

--How about all the bird nests that are destroyed during clear cut logging? Some of those nests have been in those same trees for generations – they are all destroyed. Just recently a BC landowner was fined $4000 for cutting down trees on his own property that had bird nests in them, while the forest companies can destroy multiple thousands of them and get away with it.

All the wildlife studies are paid for by the mega forest companies and our government and when they find anything wrong they blame it on the trapper or the hunter when in fact they are to blame.

--Do you know that Canadian taxpayers pay to put out our forest fires? To save them for what? Our children? No – so that the mega companies can rape, plunder and waste them for big profit here and now. They should be made to pay the cost of fire fighting.

--Do you know that Albertans have to pay $5.35 to get a permit to cut a Christmas tree? The mega forest companies destroy multiple thousands of little spruce and pine and get away with it.

--Do you know that on most of the clear cuts here in Alberta over 50% of the trees are wasted? These forest companies should be made to take all the wood out of the clear cuts. If they cut or knock it down they should take it to their mills and use it. Most of the large trees in this area are only six to eight inches in diameter but all the smaller trees are knocked down and left to rot. What a waste of our forest! The old growth aspen stands are only good for wildlife habitation but they are all knocked down for 30% of the good wood.

--Poison spray is another thing. After the spruce and pine are harvested, plowing or scarifying takes place. Every bit of moss, shrubs and other plant life is completely turned over – it looks like a battle field. Then new trees are planted. But in order for them to grow well all the other plant life is sprayed with the pesticide VISION and any wildlife that happens to be there gets sprayed as well. A lot of that poison leaches out into our water system and in turn is consumed by us humans.

--The mega forest companies want to turn our boreal forest into a tree farm where only the tree species that they want to grow will grow there with no competition from any other species or wildlife.

--Why do Albertans have to buy bottled water? Our pristine creeks and rivers and ground water are all polluted. Why are the fish not fit for human consumption in over twelve major rivers here in the Peace River area? Could it be because of all the spraying that is going on in our boreal forest by the mega forest companies?

All this stuff that I am talking about is taking place right now and I can back up anything that I have said here. My plan is to make this issue known internationally and to urge you citizens of Canada to put pressure on our government and the mega forest companies to change their method of logging. Select logging worked in the past so why shouldn’t it work now?

After all, these public lands belong to the people of Canada and not the foreign and mega forest companies that don’t give a hoot about Canadians and our heritage. Please write a letter to your MLA or your MP and also to the forest companies and denounce this destruction of our boreal forest.

DAVE DONAHUE IS A LONG TIME OUTDOORS MAN AND OFFERS ECO TOURS TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.

The feller buncher and grapple skidder are the two main pieces of heavy forest equipment used to clear cut our forest. The feller buncher and grapple skidder are responsible for more wildlife deaths in one season of logging than a trapper would harvest in 10 years of trapping.

There is nothing safe from a feller buncher – whether it be a moose or a mouse or a tree of two inches or two feet, everything in it’s way is smashed down and destroyed. The only thing that is salvaged is the merchantable timber. There is a fantastic waste of our young trees plus all the other species of trees that are of no use to the Mega Forest Companies. The destruction of our wildlife is phenomenal. The only defense that young moose, deer, elk, and caribou have against these machines is to lie down. When danger approaches these animals, the mothers get the young to lie down and they won’t move until the mother comes back from trying to lure the danger away from her young. Only she returns to find that her baby has been run over the by the feller buncher or grapple skidder. No wonder our woodland caribou are on the brink of extinction and our moose populations have dropped by 25% in the last year. (Industry would like you to believe that it’s from hunting.) Cub bears, young lynx, young fisher and young martens’ only defense is to climb a tree to defend themselves. But there is no safety there, the feller buncher grabs a hold of the tree, cuts it and slams it into the ground and those young animals are history. Beaver dams are completely logged over and not one green tree is left standing for beaver feed. Those beaver dams are destroyed for good and all the wildlife they supported are destroyed too. So are all the nesting places for all sorts of birds, ducks, geese, woodpeckers, hawks, owls, and eagle. This happens all the time when clear cutting is taking place in our Boreal Forest in the summer. The same thing with the squirrels – their den trees have been established for 100 years or more and they are completely destroyed forever. Nesting trees are completely destroyed and when the birds come back in the spring to their ancestral nest, they are no longer there. Those birds become completely disorientated and probably won’t hatch out any young. Another thing after a winter of clear cutting when the ground is bare, mother fisher, marten, mink, lynx and their young forage out on those clear cuts looking for food…only thing is that these young animals become food for hawks, owls, and other birds of prey. The mother can’t keep an eye on all her young and the birds of prey pick them off one at a time. No wonder that there are so few young animals any more.

Don’t ask a forest biologist about that…they won’t give you the real fact because most of them work for BIG INDUSTRY and they tell you what industry tells them to tell you (if they want to keep their jobs).

These huge pieces of equipment have got to be removed from our forest and these mega forest companies have got to go back to a more civil way of logging like they did in the past (select logging).

This information is compiled by David Donahue, a long time trapper who knows first hand what is going on in our Boreal Forest. July 21, 2001

I want to go back a bit in Canadian history and just touch on a few things pertaining to our economy and the way things were handled in the past.

I believe God made enough of everything for everybody to use wisely, but what happened? A thing called greed was and still is applied to everything where man can make the almighty dollar.

Some renewable resources we had here in Canada in the early days just don’t exist any more. Take for instance the Great Auk (a big flightless bird) that inhabited the coasts of Newfoundland – exploited to the very last bird. The east coast walrus hunted to the brink of extinction or maybe it is already extinct. The passenger pigeon: huge flocks that would darken the sky when they flew over head – exploited to the very last bird. The Plains Buffalo – multiple thousands, brought to the brink of extinction where only a few survive on farms now. The sea otter is still struggling to survive. The beaver…rival fur companies, Hudson Bay Co. and the North West Co. sent their men up every creek, brook stream and river to kill off every last one so that the other company wouldn’t get them. They trapped summer and winter and it took a hundred years for the beaver to recover from that onslaught. Those were renewable resources. What happened?

I want to touch on the gold rush in the 1890’s in the Yukon. Gold is not a renewable resource. When gold was first discovered men flocked to the gold fields with their gold pans and pick and shovels, and many made a good living from gold panning. Some didn’t make it but it created a small economy in the north and there were a lot of spin off jobs, things were booming. Enter the big corporations and their big hydraulic gold dredges. There wasn’t a creek or river that they didn’t go up to exploit the last nugget of gold. It didn’t take many men to operate those big dredges and only a few made any money. Within a few years those boom towns were ghost towns. Every creek and river was ruined for fish habitat and you can see today the big mountains of tailings left over from the dredges – a monument of mans greed. Gold is not a renewable resource.

Commercial fishing. I spent eleven years at sea and 8 of those years I was a commercial fisherman, before coming to Alberta in 1972. So I have some knowledge of what happened to the East Coast fishing industry as well as the West Coast salmon and pilchard stocks.

Prior to the 1960’s fishing on the east coast was done with a big fleet of small boats that used hand lines, long lines, and drift gill nets. Fishing was done in a selective way and only the fish that were targeted were caught. Everybody that was involved in the fishing industry made a living. Enter the age of big fishing companies with the high tech fishing boats and equipment, the closure of many out ports in Newfoundland and the opening of mega fish plants in central locations. Many fishermen were forced to give up their small boats and worked on big company draggers or seiners, or had to find work in the fish plants. Many others moved away to other parts of Canada.

There wasn’t any more select fishing… when a drag net was dumped on deck only the preferred fish was taken and the rest was dumped back into the sea, dead. One of the boats that I fished on for National Sea Food, (The Canada Park) could load up in a single night with a 1000 tons of herring. All incidental caught fish (cod, hake, ling, tuna, salmon, squid, and many so called trash fish) were dumped back into the sea, dead, because only the herring was wanted for their oil. (The price for herring at that time was $18. per ton).

A common practice at that time was the dumping of perfectly good fish back into the sea because the boat couldn’t hold any more. Spawning beds and scallop beds were ripped up by the huge drag nets and seine nets that dragged along the bottom.

Needless to say that by the end of the 1960’s the herring industry was in a state of collapse and many boats were hauled up never to be used again. The same with the big fish plants—many were closed never to open again. Not long after that the cod fish stocks collapsed, and the so called "experts" said that there would be cod forever. Now they have fish farms to try to supplement a natural resource.

So enter the age of high tech logging. What happened to all the small mills that used to operate in Northern Alberta? I think that they went the same way as the small boats went in the fishing industry…to make way for the mega mills and the multinational where only a few will make all the money and leave our forest in the same way as the passenger pigeon, buffalo, gold fields and the fishing industry.

When I see first hand what has happened on my trap line, and every trap line, I am convinced that our forest just can’t take that kind of punishment that is being inflicted on it. I am not a scientist, or a biologist, but I believe our boreal forest is made up of almost three equal parts. Muskegs, bogs and wet lands, (creeks, rivers and lakes) and old and new growth stands of timber (of which maybe 50 percent is merchantable). What I have seen happen in old stands of aspen is that the whole blocks are completely knocked down for about 30 percent of merchantible wood. The rest – half dead, crooked, and small immature aspen are left to rot along with all the willow, birch and other trees that are of no use to the mills. Why can’t these old stands be select cut and the young trees left to grow? In the cutting of young stands of trees where the size varies from two to eight inches, what happens to the smaller sizes? Five inches and under…they are all piled up and burned. If our forests are supposed to be sustainable why don’t they let these stands grow to be mature?

What effect is this having on our wildlife? Plenty as far as I can see. Fur production is way down compared to what it was before all this high tech logging started. How can anybody expect wildlife to flourish when all the habitat is gone?

I was told by Weyerhaeuser from Slave Lake in 1995 that their logging operation on the east part of my trap line wouldn’t have any effect on the wildlife population. They were dead wrong – I can go for miles and not even see a track of any fur bearing animals. Now they can come back again when the clearcuts regrow to a height of 10 feet and cut the remaining blocks that are left. Tolko’s logging in the summer of 1998 left quite a few beaver dams without one green tree for feed… result- all those beaver died off and the water in the dams dried up. All that wildlife habitat is gone. They did the same thing again this past winter.

Now tree farming is the "in" thing and only the desirable trees are planted and all the rest are sprayed. Soon there won’t be any natural forest – just one big garden of rows of trees. That is a very poor substitute of what God created for the enjoyment of all mankind and the animals that lived there.

I want to conclude with a question. What kind of heritage are we going to leave for our children? I am quite sure that there won’t be many buffalo hunters, gold diggers, commercial fisherman, trappers, or loggers. When it’s all over it will be too late to do anything about it.

	Dave Donahue
	Grass roots conservationist and naturalist fighting to conserve our boreal forest and to keep it natural, for future generations. Photos of Boreal Forest