Giving up Glyphosate (Maisonneuve)
As anyone who’s spent time in a forest knows, the quiet in even the most remote stretch of woods is never complete. Absent the rise and fall of human voices, the thrum of traffic from a nearby road, the distant tear of a passing plane, there are still sounds—the rustle of some small creature making its way furtively through the undergrowth, the drone of insects, the fluttering of leaves.
But in the Northern Ontario forests Troy Woodhouse first started exploring as a young man, a new kind of quiet has taken hold. In his early twenties, Woodhouse worked as a forester and moved from mixed boreal forests to monoculture plantations of spruce and pine. On his trips to assess the quality of timber prior to harvest, Woodhouse eventually felt the relaxation of being in the bush slip away. In its place, a feeling of unease crept in—it was eerily quiet, he says, as if he’d stepped into a ghost forest.
These stark transitions weren’t his first encounter with a changing ecosystem. As a teenager, Woodhouse, a member of Flying Post First Nation who grew up west of Timmins, Ontario, would go out in the bush to hunt moose. He had seen death inequitably distributed in the woods—dead or dying shrubs here, seemingly untouched conifers there. The inexplicable contrast struck Woodhouse as strange, and not only because these forests looked different: with the flutter and rustle of forest life silenced, the forests sounded different, too.
It was only after training to work in forestry that Woodhouse was able to identify the culprit: glyphosate, a herbicide used to suppress the growth of deciduous trees, like poplar and birch. This suppression, in turn, promotes the growth of the conifer plantations that are valuable to commercial forestry operations.
In the public conversation about forestry in Canada, much of the angst is sparked by concerns about clearcutting or the felling of old-growth trees. But forestry isn’t just a matter of what’s being taken out—it’s also about what’s being put in. And in ecosystems ranging from the boreal forests of Northern Ontario to the Acadian forest of New Brunswick—provinces where glyphosate spraying is reportedly happening at the highest levels in the country—community groups and Indigenous knowledge holders say the application of glyphosate is changing the soundtrack. Now, after decades of advocacy, work is underway to find new ways forward, before the sounds of the forest are lost for good.