There is one thing environmentalists and loggers agree on: Opening the boreal to logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other activities at the same time is not ideal.

Al-Pac is a good example. Under a long-term "forest management agreement" with Alberta's government, it is entitled to log trees across a nearly 15 million-acre swath of the boreal. Much of that land also is leased to oil and gas companies. One area may hold as much oil - in deposits called tar or oil sands - as Saudi Arabia, and is being feverishly tapped. (Most of Canada's oil and gas ends up in the United States too.)

"I'm comfortable with our own activities," said Al-Pac's Andries. "But when you start layering stuff - energy, agriculture, forestry - on the landscape, you wonder, 'Gee, maybe this needs a little more thought.'"

There also are concerns about accountability. Across the boreal, government environmental monitoring often is limited and sometimes left to industry. Even federal inventories showing that forests are growing faster than they are being logged rely in part on industry data.

Charles Caccia, who served as environment minister under Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s, said the reports cannot be trusted.

"There is no established manner to verify the data," said Caccia, now a member of Parliament. "In the absence of a reliable inventory, we do not know - and cannot claim - that we are on a sustainable path."

Starting in 1996, a Canadian Senate subcommittee spent 2 1/2 years examining boreal conflicts. It staged a dozen hearings and field trips and heard testimony from about 175 witnesses. Its report is a stark account of over-cutting and mismanagement.

"There is ample evidence to show that current forest management practices are destroying our legacy, that we are cutting too many trees over too large an area," the subcommittee reported.

And it added a warning: "There is a sense of urgency that, at least in some parts of the boreal forest, time is running out for saving some vital functions, such as wildlife habitat, watershed protection and carbon sinks."

Randall Bird, an Ojibwa, walks on a portion of his trapline clearcut by a logging company.
Sacramento Bee/José M. Osorio

One place the subcommittee stopped was Winnipeg, Manitoba, not far from a part of the boreal forest Randall Bird knows well: his "trap line" - 10 square miles near his native Ojibwa village of Hollow Water.

Bird, now in his 50s, has worked the area since he was a boy - laying out traps each fall, checking them by snowshoe and snowmobile, sleeping wrapped in fur blankets in remote cabins. Most years, he would harvest a pile of pelts - from beaver to lynx, weasel to wolf - now worth $10,000 to $15,000 Canadian ($6,500 to $9,750 U.S.).

Then, in the late 1990s, the Pine Falls Paper Co. began clear-cutting in the area.

Walking through a recent cut, Bird was quiet. A few patches of aspen remained, but large stands of black spruce and jack pine, from which newsprint is made, had been leveled. It looked like a bomb had exploded.

"Everything's gone," he said.

Bird inherited the trap line from his father, who inherited it from his father. He had long planned to pass it on to his sons. But now Bird says it won't be worth it.

"You won't get anything now. Fishers, martens - those animals like trees. They have no place to go now because it's all open," he said.

Left:
Garry Raven, an Ojibwa healer who collects herbs and medicines from the boreal forest surrounding his home in Manitoba, Canada, is trying to protect the forest area region.

Right:
Garry Raven holds red clover blossom, which is used in teas to sooth the nerves.

Sacramento Bee/José M. Osorio

Last summer, Bird joined his fellow tribal elders inside a large tepee. They sat in a circle and smoked a sacred pipe as Garry Raven, a traditional healer, prayed for help.

The logging industry "has killed off our rabbits, our porcupine, our otter and lynx," Raven told the Creator. "Most of the forest roads are blocked off. There are big gates on them so you can't get in."

Pine Falls Paper has since been sold to another company, Tembec, which plans more logging on lands where Ojibwa trap and gather herbs. But Tembec official Bob Yatkowsky said the cutting can be done without hurting the land and that he is proceeding cautiously.

"You don't want to end up with standoffs and roadblocks," he said.

Others have less patience. Asked about Ojibwa concerns, John Bulmer - a former superintendent who leads mill tours - said, "That's all fine and dandy. But what are we going to live on in the meantime? We can't live on nuts and berries. We can't turn the clock back."

Winding his way through a maze of stairwells and industrial machinery, Bulmer vigorously defended Tembec logging. "It's a system that works," he said. "We plant trees. We cut trees. And we keep a lot of people employed."

Tembec's newsprint is not just made from trees. A lot of recycled newspaper is mixed in, too. Over the years, the amount of newspaper born again as newsprint has grown dramatically. But newspaper companies generally prefer to publish on newsprint with some virgin wood fiber because the paper is whiter and photographs reproduce better.

Environmentalists say that leaves plenty of room for damage. And while most U.S. newspapers, The Bee included, routinely write about forest conservation and editorialize on its behalf, seldom if ever do they examine the environmental price of newsprint.

"The amazing lack of coverage is no coincidence," said Todd Paglia, campaign coordinator at Forest Ethics, a San Francisco environmental group. "When their own bottom line is on the line, newspapers tend to shy away from coverage that would reveal their complicity."

Bruce Meissner, who manages The Bee's press room, said four of the company's five largest newsprint suppliers make paper with 40 percent or more recycled content. "At times, they go 60, 70, 80," he said.

Only one supplier makes newsprint 100 percent from virgin old-growth trees: Abitibi in Mackenzie, British Columbia, which supplies about 6 percent of the 55,000 to 65,000 metric tons The Bee consumes annually. The paper is actually made from chunks of wood left over from cutting logs into two-by-fours and other dimensional lumber.

But even with 100 percent old-growth fiber, the Mackenzie paper has problems. "It tends to tear easily," Meissner said. "If I had my druthers, I wouldn't use any."

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Why, then, does The Bee use it? The company, Meissner said, prefers a mix of manufacturers to ensure a steady supply of newsprint and to get a good price.

The subject of newsprint was on the mind of U.S. Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth when he addressed the Newspaper Association of America, which represents the nation's newspaper publishers.

A transcript of Bosworth's October 2001 speech, released by the Forest Service, contains the following passage:

"Newsprint comes from wood and wood comes from forests. Just to produce the Washington Post takes the equivalent of three or four square miles of clear-cut forest per year. Multiply that by all the newspapers and magazines in the nation and you get some idea of the demands on our natural resources just to produce newsprint."

Tom Croteau, a senior vice president for the association, said Bosworth's statement was misleading.

"It suggests that all newspapers and magazines are printed on paper that has been manufactured from forests that were clear-cut," Croteau said. "And that's not true."