Description

[from the text] The long-time role of fire in the forests of eastern Canada is masked, I believe, by the history of Canadian forest management in the exploitive years since 1920. There is now more forest land occupied by Industry -- mainly the Pulp and Paper Industry -- than ever before and the minimum management effort is in the good use of the present crop of trees and protection for the next one....I wish now to introduce two examples in support of my belief that these three factors [balsam, budworms and blazes] combine sometimes to produce a domino effect, and in the past have contributed to a slow rotation of forest faces much as a farmer rotates annual crops....One continues to wonder if a rough and not particularly efficient forest face rotation did not in fact occur down through time. In my amateurish fashion I read the signs and say yet it is real. Nowadays outbreaks of insects continue. So does the lightning flash and balsam fir still abound in the right places. But now we must add in some man-induced effects -- his wood operations, his road building, his use of pesticides, his fire fighting, and many more.