If you think that's bad, wait until you here about what the Canadian government wants to do with the vast taiga forests.

My (unscientific) observation is that some Canadians get stuck in a frontier mentality, kind of thinking that the resources and resilience of their huge and sparsely populated landmass is inexhaustible. Especially with forestry, they do stuff all the time that would never fly in the US.

Forestry is a disaster here. Especially when you consider how integral those forests are to our water cycle. Deforestation has direct and significant impacts on local and global cycles.

As models become more detailed we only discover more ways this matters. It’s unsettling to see here in western Canada. Knowing we’re doing things like cutting trees to turn into pellet stock to get burned in the UK… and we justify it as “it’s not like those trees were valuable as timber”. No, they were valuable for capturing moisture, encouraging rain, and keeping our watersheds working.

What’s the plan for the taiga?

Another thing I’ve been considering is that we take this position because the bleak reality is that our rate of resource extraction is not scalable, but it’s the only thing that has ever allowed Canada to become relatively wealthy. We are not good at producing things of value. We do it, but not nearly as much as we should.

If we pull back on extraction, we can expect to live poorer lives unless we can participate in the global economy in a way in which we create things of value rather than just mine, deforest, frack, drill, and so on at huge scales.