In the winter, Drew Monkman made room for columnists Katie Krelove and Carling Dewar whose article on the Catchacoma logging appears on the P.E. site.
Since then, the Catchacoma Forest Stewardship Committee - the CFSC - has been formed in an organized effort to stop the logging by the Bancroft Minden Forestry Company of what, by all accounts, is a hemlock forest that is totally unique in all of Canada.
There has been much communication with both the BMFC and the MNRF geared to learning the forestry company's mandate and intentions, and what may be done to save both species habitat and old growth hemlock in this unique and important ecological preserve.
Earlier this summer my wife and I hosted two biologists from AFER, Ancient Forest Exploration and Research, who were sent to study and report on the forest by CFSC member Dr Peter Quinby. Dr Quinby is AFER's Chair of the Board of Directors and Chief Scientist, and his biologists' reports are forthcoming.
Each time anyone with expertise in forestry studies it, concern for the forest escalates. The forest and the animal life it harbours are unique. And logging in our backyard is not just a local concern. Cutting any tree, as Tricia Clarkson recently noted it in excellent P. E. letter, has global significance. And just north of here, adjacent to the Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park, the BMFC is cutting hundreds, every one of them a carbon sink.
To be clear, the BMFC is not clear cutting. But below is a photo from this spring of one of many similar stacks of old growth hemlock logs cut by the BMFC.
