How Industrial Forestry is Making Our Forests More Flammable

Q: What first drew you to study fire in Nova Scotia?

Crossland:

I've always been interested in the forest. As a little girl growing up in East Dalhousie, Kings County, Nova Scotia, the forest was what surrounded me — forests and lakes everywhere. I used to go out almost every day, following the cow paths through the pasture beside our house, exploring and trying to understand more of nature.

When you love the forest, you don’t want to have anything destroying it like fire. But when I joined Parks Canada in 1993, I was soon asked to do a prescribed burn plan and to research the fire history of the eastern forests of New Brunswick, in and around Kouchibouguac National Park.

That’s when I began learning more about fire and asking myself: What is the natural role of fire? What have humans done to use fire or cause fire in the forest?

Through archival research, and with my dear friend, Dr. Elena Ponomarenko, who studies charcoal in the soil, we established that wildfire is quite rare in eastern forests. But human-caused fire saw a huge upswing during early European colonization. That isn’t something we’re taught in school.

When you look deeply into archival documents, you find fire after fire caused by humans — clearing forests for fields to grow food — and by many accidental blazes, often sparked by steam-engine trains. I examined old maps showing wildfires running along railway tracks, and of course those fires would spread. It even reached the point where a crew would follow each train to extinguish the fires it caused. None of this appears in our history lessons.

Suddenly I realized there had been a huge upswing of fire in the late 1700s and early 1800s. At that time, the only way to stop wildfires was to hope they ran into a natural firebreak — a lake, river, ocean, or bog. During droughts, we lost much of our forest not through axes and logging, but through fire in that era.

Q: We’ve heard that climate change and wind cause wildfires, but you’ve argued there’s a third factor—the forest itself. What do you mean?

Crossland:

Climate change is certainly causing fires — not so much wind, although the wind is drying out the forest — but climate change is definitely slowing the jet stream down. We’re getting these sustained, lengthy patterns of either intense rain or no rain, which we saw in the summer of 2025, when none fell.

Climate change is definitely exacerbating the frequency and intensity of wildfires. When we have periods of drought — which are linked to climate change — we can get these very intense fires that burn deep down into the soil. They can follow roots and then travel underground, popping up somewhere else. So it’s all intertwined.

The third factor is the alteration of forest composition, structure and age classes, which results in forests becoming more vulnerable to wildfire. We now have these ‘managed forests’ that are ‘cut to shreds.’ They’re highly fragmented with huge open areas that dry out very readily under hot sun and drying winds are more vulnerable to wildfire.

I feel like climatic warming is coming at us like some kind of huge bus, and we’re not going to step out of the way in time. And we’re not even talking about the bus — and it’s now just meters away from us — and we’re still not acknowledging that it’s going to affect everything: wildfires, how we live our everyday lives, human health, forest health. Everything. 

Q: How has industrial forestry altered fire behaviour? 

Crossland:

Industrial forestry has altered fire behaviour in a number of ways.

Our forests — what remains of them — tend to be much younger. Younger trees have thin branches and foliage with more surface area; they dry faster and ignite more easily. Branches closer to the ground can carry flames up into the canopy. 

Older forests lack these “ladder fuels.” But the forest industry has made our forests younger, and we have almost no old growth left in Nova Scotia.

They’ve also changed forest composition. The industry prefers to grow more conifers, especially from the pulp-and-paper era, when red spruce was the most sought-after species. Conifers are resinous and burn more readily than deciduous forests. 

I used to joke that for years, the pulp and paper industry would drive by deciduous forests and not know what to do with them. They were kind of an annoyance because they couldn’t make as much paper from them. So they tried to convert deciduous forests into spruce forests, which didn’t work very well. If the land wants to grow sugar maples, it will grow sugar maples. Even if you cut them down or spray them, it will still try to grow sugar maples because no one was paying attention to the soil underneath the forest.

So industry has changed the age, the composition, and the structure of the forest. And all this has altered the fuel load and made forests more vulnerable to fire. Instead of large trunks full of sap that don’t burn readily, we now have dense growths of smaller, thinner trees that burn easily.

I like to give the analogy that many of us have tried to light a campfire or a fire in a wood stove. We don’t start with big round logs, we start with kindling, maybe paper or bark. Fine, dry fuels catch fire first. It’s the same in nature. If you have fine fuels, it’s much easier to start a fire than with big, damp wood that’s still full of sap and shaded under a closed canopy.

Q: How do today’s practices produce those conditions?

Crossland:

We seem to be opting more for “quantity over quality.” Now that we’ve switched to a biomass economy, any tree can make a wood chip.

In the early 1800s, we prided ourselves on high-quality yellow birch and white pine — wood that was smooth, straight, and free of knots. [Large dimension square timber] was shipped to Britain to be sawn into fine lumber. Trees grew more slowly, the wood was denser, and it made better-quality material for building and working with.

Now, we’re very undiscerning. We harvest whatever’s in front of us. Many people working in the industry today don’t know the difference between a red maple and a sugar maple, or a red spruce and a black spruce and it doesn’t really matter. There’s no selective harvesting anymore; it’s indiscriminate harvesting.

Industrial forestry takes more than it leaves behind. It’s about taking all you can get now, without thinking of future generations or the forest’s future. Forests left behind are degraded and depleted.

The fact that so many of us live in towns and cities now — on our phones, removed from nature — means we don’t think about the flying squirrel that may be living in a hollow tree. We just cut the hollow ones and the crooked ones along with the fine trees. We’re not thinking about wildlife. We’re not with the ebb and flow of nature anymore.

It all adds up to terrible forestry.

Q: What happens to the carbon in a forest when it’s clearcut?

Crossland:

Two decades ago we didn’t grasp this. We focused only on the above-ground carbon — the carbon stored in wood and foliage. Now we recognize that about half of the carbon is underground. 

Expose that soil to the sun, the sun heats the soil, the microbes speed up their activity, and suddenly all that stored carbon is released.

What’s so terrifying now in Nova Scotia, and such dreadful mismanagement, is that this province was traditionally covered in forest. Most of it mature, much of it old growth. [These forests have been largely destroyed through early settler wildfires and logging.] And over the last 20 or 30 years, so much more of that forest cover has been lost.

After a clearcut, that exposed soil emits carbon for two to three decades. A clearcut isn’t just damage for today. It’s damage for decades to come.

That’s something to shout from the rooftops. We have to stop transforming what should be a net carbon-sequestering ecosystem into one that releases carbon for the next twenty or thirty years.

“We’ve transformed natural climate solutions into carbon emitters. It’s a crime of incredible proportions; the crime of humanity.”

Q: How do we see that loss at a landscape scale? 

Crossland:

Satellite imagery shows the true reality of the extent of forest cover loss. Red areas detect forest cover loss over the past 24 years. Staggering. Black areas show no change: protected lands like Kejimkujik, the Tobeatic, and Cape Breton Highlands.

When sunlight hits those cleared areas, soil warms, carbon dioxide releases. The loss continues for decades, yet [this contribution to CO2 levels is] omitted from our carbon models. 

Here’s another way to portray the same data. In the year 2000, you see just a few small pink patches, little spots of forest cover loss. But by 2023, you can see how those pink areas have exploded across the province.

Anyone, even without training, can see that this is not sustainable forestry by any stretch of the imagination. 

Even some “protected” zones were logged before designation, so they’re still emitting [carbon in many places]. Nova Scotia’s pattern has been “log first, protect later.” It’s always nature that pays the price. It’s not a wise approach, and it’s not a sincere one [for conserving biodiversity].

The worst part is that these carbon losses aren’t being reported. And we have to ask — why?

It’s beneficial for the forestry industry not to talk about it. The industry has a powerful lobby. And carbon is a nebulous thing — you can’t see carbon dioxide in the air, you can’t see methane gas — so it’s easy to ignore.

But this is critical. The carbon losses from industrial forestry are the second leading cause of climate change after the burning of fossil fuels. We should be reporting them — not just the losses from wildfires, but from harvesting, from clearcutting.

“Canada needs to get real about its carbon accounting.”

Q: The province recently approved more High Production Forestry Zones. What does that mean ecologically?

Crossland:

Just when you think it can’t possibly get worse — it does.

The Bill Lahey Independent Forest Review proposed a triad [model in Nova Scotia public forests]: plantations, an ecological matrix, and protected areas. HPF zones were meant to begin slowly, proving their economics. I’m not remotely convinced that they are economically viable.

When you really start dissecting how much it costs to plant and tend a plantation — to farm trees for decades — you realize it’s not likely profitable. Plantations cost huge sums to establish and maintain, and you’re farming for a market forty years away. Who knows what the world will need then?

Worse, plantations are appearing where citizens [proposed these areas for] protection. Instead of using already clearcut lands, they’re choosing new areas, which was not part of the agreement. Add a worsening climate and you get the perfect storm: dense, resinous, fire-prone forests. 

We’re more fire-prone than ever — you see how disastrous this is. 

“Plantations are the most fire-prone forests in Nova Scotia.”

The 2017-2018 Independent Forest Review needs an update [to manage forests for climatic warming]. 

Like all things, new information comes to light. Under the current stressors we’re witnessing with climate change — especially in 2025, with prolonged drought and fires that burned for weeks on end — we have to look at these proposed plantation areas and say: this is the worst idea of the century.

Economically, it never made sense. Ecologically, it’s catastrophic. We must stop trying to please an industry that’s clearly broken. 

Q: What can we do differently from here?

Crossland:

Well, the simplest, low-hanging fruit is this: keep forest cover intact wherever and whenever possible. That’s the first priority for conserving and sequestering carbon.

Ten years ago, I opposed assisted migration — helping tree species from other regions grow in our Wabanaki forests. I felt it was too intrusive, too much like farming; I don’t like applying an agricultural mindset to forests and natural ecosystems.

But things have changed. We’re going to lose eastern hemlock and American beech — two foundational species that make dark forests that can live for centuries. They’ll be gone, except in a few chemically or biologically protected stands. We’re losing black ash, white ash, green ash, too. We’re losing so much biodiversity. 

Meanwhile, the climate is changing rapidly — droughts, warming — and we have to ask: Can we grow Carolinian species here? 

The Carolinian forest is also endangered, and in Canada it’s mostly in southern Ontario. We might be able to bring some of those species north — American basswood, for instance, a fast-growing hardwood that can outgrow most of our hardwood. Or sycamore trees, etc.

“Desperate times demand rethinking. We have to change the essence of what we’re trying to do with forests.”

The government loves to talk about “managed forests.” I hate that term. Managed forests have belched the most carbon — they became the driest, most fire-prone. 

I prefer letting nature look after herself. If you give her all the pieces, if you protect her integrity, she’ll do the rest.

We’re tinkering with an incredible complexity that we’re only beginning to understand. And with the climate changing faster than trees can migrate naturally — and Nova Scotia being almost an island, with sea level rise perhaps making it one — maybe it makes sense to help do what the birds and mammals would have done, only faster.

I don’t have all the answers. I just hope the next generation will have the chance to continue learning, experimenting, and expanding on the science and ecology of our forest ecosystems. 

Q: What do you think is the most important thing for Nova Scotians to know about their forests right now?

Crossland:

Our forests have been overharvested after several centuries. They’re degraded, and not just the trees themselves, but the soil beneath them.

Nova Scotia’s soils are among the poorest in Eastern North America, more nutrient-depleted than those in Prince Edward Island or New Brunswick.

They’ve been weakened by acid rain, overharvesting, and early wildfires. Because of that, we have to step lightly on the forest now. We must allow it to recover. Any harvesting we do needs to be done very carefully and with a light touch.

That doesn’t mean we can’t harvest anything, but we have to keep the canopy as closed as we can.

Most of what’s growing now is early-successional forest, but what we need are late-successional forests: long-lived, shade-tolerant species that sequester immense carbon and anchor ecosystems.

Right now, we let young forests — the early successional trees that can grow — mature in open sun, then cut them, resetting the cycle. Forests are never allowed to reach the late-successional stage that was the hallmark of the Wabana’ki forest, with tree species that prefer to grow in shade and can live for centuries. 

That’s what we’re missing.

And we have to recognize that the most important role of our forests right now is to mitigate climate change. 

“Forests are a natural climate solution. We must keep forest cover intact — no matter what.”