Customer Reviews

At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis in Canada's Forests

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Elizabeth May has written a who-dunit for Canada's forest industry -- a book filled with intrigue and suspense, villains and backroom deals, shady characters and conspiracy. "At the Cutting Edge" is a fierce critique of forestry management in Canada, of both the industry and government.

If you aren't an environmentalist already, "At the Cutting Edge" will certainly convert you. Written in a straight-to-the-heart style, this book is a page-turner, with an incredulous tale of industry greed and government duplicity.

But the book is also an unparalleled piece of journalism. May is an unrelenting journalist, dissecting forestry management across Canada and province-by-province with a surgeon's skill and attention to detail. Yet she always manages to keep readers focused on "the big picture" -- the upcoming shortage of Canadian wood.

She does this by focusing on how each province calculates its Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) and showing how governments include essentially unusable land to inflate the AAC for industry's benefit. May also makes sound economic arguments against the technique of clear-cutting, and shows how governments subsidize industry and undervalue forests through low stumpage rates.

"At the Cutting Edge" is essential reading for politicians, journalists, investors, environmentalists -- and every citizen who has ever thought that perhaps we may be cutting down too many trees.

Elizabeth May has done a much needed job of making sense of all the double-speak that surrounds the forest industry in Canada. When all is said and done, the facts that she uncovers stand as damning evidence regarding the unsustainability of logging in all of Canada's provinces. As such, this book will no doubt be unpopular with the Canadian timber industry and its spin doctors.

This book consists of three parts: an overview of Canadian forest policy, a review of each province's policies, and then an all-too-brief summary. May is very well-read on the topic, and summarizes a large amount of material. For that reason, it provides good resource for future study of this topic. At the same time, the book includes a fair amount of repetition - - many provinces aren't all that different from other provinces, and the material in the middle part overlaps that in the first part on Canada as a whole.

At least for those of us south of the border, it's interesting to see the United States praised for having a more enlightened policy on the environment than other rich countries, but this book provides a lot of praise. In comparison to Canada, the perverse incentives and hidden subsidies of the US Forest Service seem eminently sensible.

As an environmentalist, May emphasizes environmental criteria when evaluating forest policy. As a result, her book is vulnerable to criticism based on other criteria, such as economics. I wish that she had tried to make her assumptions explicit and tried to justify them. For example, "corporations" and especially "international corporations" are bad words. "Small sawmills" are always good, as are "First Nations." These assumptions are never argued, though there's enough information to start to make the case - - apparently small mills have trouble getting access to subsidized wood from large-scale leases on Crown land, while large mills thrive on this wood. Thus, the growth of large companies at the expense of smaller mills does not reflect a competitive advantage but a political one. I would have liked to see her make that argument explicit.

As this last point suggests, May does not attempt to explain the policies that Canada and its provinces pursue. Why does Canada pursue such short-sighted policies? Why are they so different from the US? Why do the provinces differ in some respects but not in others? Understanding the political economy of logging would seem to be an essential piece of the puzzle if you want to reform Canada's forestry policies, but this book does not provide much help on this point.

For that reason, May also doesn't have a convincing alternative vision for how Canada can continue to harvest timber while managing its forests better. Clearly, smaller-scale mills relying on market-rate timber from publicly-owned lands would be central to her vision. There's no evidence in the book on whether this alternative is economically viable either in Canada or for export to world markets (which are themselves highly distorted by foreign subsidies).

Maybe it's a nice vision, or maybe it isn't - - I can think of small companies that are nastier than large companies - - but it seems that you have to take the economics seriously if you want to propose an alternative model of forestry. If you don't think through the economics, then neither business nor labor will take seriously any policy changes that you might propose.

When will the 'environmental movement' start to put energy into the real battle we have but do not want to fight? Chemicals in our food. The forest industry of Canada is working very hard to meet the publics insatiable demand for forest products. This same public wants 97 cent toilet paper but they don't want to cut a tree to get. The time to take responsibility for our actions is now. As long as we are able to blame an industry for our own greed we can sit back and feel good about ourselves as if we are not the problem. Wake up folks. If we were willing to pay the real value of forest products we would not have to cut as many trees. The 'save the forest battle' is not to be fought with the industry but with the real culprit, the public! One more thing. Canada's forest are growing. We have more forest today than we did one hundred years ago. Hats off to an industry doing it's best to meet public demand AND manage our forests.