♪
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♪ [voices harmonizing]
Just go.
♪ EVERGREEN, OH, EVERGREEN ♪
♪ HOW FAITHFUL ARE YOUR BRANCHES ♪
♪ EVERGREEN, OH, EVERGREEN ♪
♪ HOW FAITHFUL ARE YOUR BRANCHES ♪
♪ GREEN BENEATH THE SUMMER'S GLOW ♪
♪ YOU BLOSSOM IN THE WINTER SNOW ♪
♪ WHEN ALL THE DAYS
♪ ARE DARK AND COLD
♪ YOU ARE A HOPE WE CAN BEHOLD ♪
♪ EVERGREEN, OH, EVERGREEN ♪
♪ WHAT JOY I FEEL TO GREET YOU ♪
♪ EVERGREEN, OH, EVERGREEN ♪
♪ WHAT JOY I FEEL TO GREET YOU ♪
♪ WHEN ALL THE DAYS
♪ ARE DARK AND COLD
♪ YOU ARE A HOPE WE CAN BEHOLD ♪
♪ THE EVERGREEN WILL ALWAYS STRIVE ♪
♪ AND EVER KEEP OUR FAITH ALIVE ♪
♪ EVERGREEN, OH, EVERGREEN ♪
♪ YOU CHEER US WITH YOUR PROMISE ♪
♪ EVERGREEN, OH, EVERGREEN ♪
♪ YOU CHEER US WITH YOUR PROMISE ♪
♪ [voices harmonizing] AH... ♪
♪
[wind gusts]
[Diana] The trees in the Boreal forest...
take oblique sunlight and make oxygen.
It's like a miracle for the planet.
♪ [ethereal]
[Edmund] We have a certain relationship with the trees...
Because of their living essence.
♪
The tree has been here for a long time,
standing in the same spot, but watching.
Being blessed with time.
♪
[birds chirping]
There are older relations.
We're just little things flipping around, you know,
showing a different person here and there.
♪
♪ [rumbling drum]
♪
We're very happy and secure...
that they're there, that they're still standing,
watching over us.
♪
Some of us have heard them sing,
which happened to me one time.
♪
A combination of sounds in the natural environment and,
the wind on the trees...
made for a song that I haven't been able to forget.
It's still with me.
♪ [ethereal]
[Diana] The design of nature is music.
♪ [bird calls]
If you listen to the trees, you will hear a song.
♪
And some people actually hear
an individual song for certain species.
♪
As a scientist, I should say, "No, that's not possible."
But as a human being,
I understand what these people are saying.
♪
[Edmund] Within that moment, the environment was
a community, a village, a living thing.
♪
[birds chirping]
[Diana] The trees of the Boreal,
you just have to respect them just because they survive.
[birds chirping]
It's the general respect for all things that
are on the margins of life.
[bird chirping continues]
[Christian] The Boreal Forest region is one of the
last regions in this world
where nature dominates, prevails.
Still in many, many places very wild.
[Gerry] It's a land of extremes.
We can go from very cold to very hot,
dry summer days and the Boreal Forest survives.
♪
[birds chirping]
The trees and the animals have found a way to
deal with that rhythm.
The processes that allow them to do so can be complicated.
But they're also mystically amazing.
♪
[rushing water]
♪
[birds chirping]
[thunderclap]
[wind gusts & birds chirping]
[Diana] I am in awe of the design of the forest.
In awe of the magnitude of it.
Its eternal ability to replicate itself.
[rolling thunder]
[Edmund] Thunderbird, we call it "Okema Bieso"
in our language, "Okema Bieso".
He's the one that shoots fire down to the earth.
The forest needs to regrow, needs to replenish, you know.
[rolling thunder]
[thunderclap]
[crackling]
[Mike] These are the three types of fires.
There's surface fires.
They start and spread along the surface.
And flames can be from anywhere from a millimetre
to many, many, many metres.
[crackling flames]
And then there's what we call ground fires.
And they're smouldering fires that burn into the ground,
common in peat bogs.
And these fires can burn for weeks, months, years.
[crackling flames]
There are crown fires...
which engulf the crowns of the trees and
can be hundreds of metres in height.
[loud, roaring flames continue]
[Mike] Very energetic fires inject material just like
a volcano into the stratosphere.
And it will take months for it to get back down.
And once the fire is up and running,
it self-perpetuates.
It's called pyro cumulonimbus,
so it's a fire generated thunderstorm.
♪
[thunderclap]
♪ [suspenseful]
♪
[croaking]
♪
[rolling thunder]
[rainfall patter]
[Gerry] After the fire, that organic material that was
on the forest floor had been fuel and has now consumed,
leaving these exposed skeletons of roots.
That was a biological community...
composed of the building blocks of life.
[Diana] In the carbon cycle, they're reduced down
to carbon again, but that's a good thing.
Carbon is never lost.
It is the greatest element on Earth.
It is the basis of all life, really on Earth.
[howling wind]
[bird cawing]
[bird calls]
[bird calls & insects buzzing]
♪
[Stan] You know, many might view fires as this sort of
devastating disturbance to the Boreal Forest and,
how do organisms cope with it?
The ability of these animals to get out of the area
is actually astounding.
[Mike] Our Boreal Forests have survived and thrived in
this regime of semi-regular stand renewing fire.
♪
[bird calls]
♪
[Diana] The Jack Pine cones will only open on fire.
The resin needs to be melted off the cone and then
they shed their seeds.
♪
[Gerry] Spruce, on the other hand,
most of those cones are right at the top of the tree.
And there's enough heat to open the cones,
but not enough heat to burn them up.
♪
[Gerry] White Birch, you look at it following fire,
it looks like it's dead.
And when you look around the base,
you'll find stump sprouts.
[Mike] Another example is Aspen.
Fire goes through and above ground,
trees are killed, but the roots survive and then
sends up thousands of new suckers.
♪
[Diana] The Aspen can survive because
they can live underground. They can clone.
One Aspen can produce a forest.
♪
[Gerry] You're also amazed that species like Fireweed...
where did those seeds come from?
How did they take off so quick?
♪
[Diana] It's a regeneration of the forest.
The new saplings come in...
and then it takes 17 to 20 years for them
to reach a certain height.
[Gerry] You see the initiation of a complex
story of succession, which is going to be unfolding
over the next hundred years.
[insects chirping]
Jack Pine gets off to a really good start.
It's a sprinter.
The Black Spruce are starting to come in and
growing much slower, but might very well be there
long after some of the Jack Pine have started to die out.
♪ [ethereal]
The strategy that Birch and Aspen use is to
maximize the exposure that the leaves have to sunlight.
♪
That gives them the greatest ability to
conduct photosynthesis,
to produce food and grow quickly.
♪ [ethereal]
[Diana] That base of the food chain is
manufactured in the leaf that farms the sun.
The leaf is a green molecular machine.
The green chlorophyll recognizes the light of the sun...
and it can manufacture all kinds of chemicals.
♪
On the under part of the leaf,
you have rows and rows of stoma...
and those are all little breathing mouths.
♪
Stoma on a leaf is exactly the same as your mouth.
There are all kinds of things coming and
going out of that mouth.
[Gerry] They're taking in carbon dioxide from the air,
producing oxygen, producing carbohydrates
that help keep the tree alive during the growing season.
♪
[Diana] It is pumping oxygen
and you and I right now are breathing that oxygen.
[rustling leaves]
[Gerry] As the new forest grows,
it changes its environment.
♪ [piano]
That log that's laying on top of the rock...
forms a substrate on which various lichen species and
moss species can become established.
♪
They get their moisture from the air.
They don't have roots and therefore they can live in
areas where virtually no other plants can live and thrive.
♪ [choir singing]
♪
It can develop an environment within which
trees can grow and reoccupy what was previously
exposed bedrock after the fire.
[Edmund] This is what the mice see.
This is where they live, under the moss.
♪
You find all these roots...
radiating and touching each other.
And these are what I call 'holding hands'.
They share nutrients. They give nutrients.
♪
This is what the forest floor is doing.
It's just saying, "Here, let me hold your hand.
Hold your hand so that I can support your living.
Let's live together. Let's use what we can get.
And we'll share it with one another."
♪ [choir singing]
[rustling leaves]
[Nadir] The trees cannot survive by themselves.
They always associate with the community.
They also associate with understory plant species,
mainly mycorrhizal fungi.
♪
[Sandy] There's fungal mycorrhizal networks that are
under there to allow trees to exchange chemical compounds.
♪
[Diana] So the mycorrhiza produce long,
tangly arms called hyphae.
And they can get all kinds of goodies out of the soil.
The tree tries to get minerals in exchange for the sugars,
for the mycorrhizal fungi.
♪
[Isabelle] They're massive fungal networks,
essentially, like the Internet in a way
where it's allowing information to pass through,
but then it's also allowing physical things like
nutrients to be moved from one tree to another,
one plant to another.
[Diana] Their conversation is chemistry.
[rustling leaves & wind gusts]
[geese honking]
[wind gusts]
[geese honking]
[birds & insects chirping]
[Gerry] Through the life of the tree,
as the tree goes from being a seedling to a sapling and
into maturity...
carbon dioxide has been taken in by the tree.
Oxygen has been released.
The by-products of that carbon that has been
captured by the tree goes into the construction of
the tree itself.
[Kajar] The young forest, the young trees,
they are taking a lot of carbon in to grow because
the small trees, they need to grow a lot because otherwise,
they will just not survive.
There is a huge competition inside the young forest.
[birds chirping]
[Gerry] As the trees grow, together,
they're intersecting the light before it reaches further down.
They've been seeking out the moisture.
They've been seeking out the nutrients,
battling each other for the few resources that
are available on the site.
[insect buzzing]
[Diana] For some species like your Aspen,
it just sits and waits.
Paper Birch have the ability to actually survive under
great shade and shadow, and they will wait and wait and
wait until that tree dies and then it grows like hell.
[bird calls continue]
[Gerry] Over the next 10 or 20 years,
we'll see a lot of these trees die.
And the remaining trees will fight for resources
all over again.
This is the fight for survival with the trees
as they start becoming a more mature forest.
[bird cawing]
[loon calls]
[Diana] Up in the Boreal north,
because it's so mean and tough and because the
land is not rich at all, you really shouldn't have
trees growing up there.
They're almost desert species up there.
They get lean and tight with water.
[David S.] The Boreal is in a very close
water balance, actually.
Most of it has precipitation,
which is only a little bit higher than evaporation.
[Ted] One of the things that we've looked at is the question
of how does the vegetation feedback on the weather.
So, what we often see is that in early May,
we get very little rainfall. It's quite dry.
And then when the Aspen leaf out and other types of
green vegetation, you know, the humidity goes up.
♪
[David S.] They're sucking water up with their roots and
it's going up carrying nutrients and water to
the leaves and needles and so forth.
[Sandy] They have a phloem system and
a xylem system that's moving water up, nutrients down.
[Diana] If there's very little water for the tree,
the tree will stay closed.
If there's a lot of water in the tree,
it can open its mouth at any time it wants to.
♪
[David S.] They let water loose into the atmosphere and
it can be as great or greater of an evaporation.
♪ [ethereal]
[thunderclap]
[David P.] That has two consequences.
It drops the temperature and that moisture has to
come down as precipitation somewhere else.
♪
♪ [rainfall patter continues]
♪
[rushing water]
♪
[David S.] Things rot in the forest and fall down,
and things that are decomposing
slowly break down in aquatic systems,
producing bacteria which are in turn
eaten by small crustaceans and rotifers and things.
Work their way up the food chain.
♪
[Diana] Without the trees, there would be no great
feeding foundation in the ocean and
the whales wouldn't exist.
♪
[snorting]
♪
[bird calls]
[trickling]
♪
[loon calls]
[Edmund] There is a certain way of activity
for the maintenance of a system.
They all have their function.
[creaking & crunching]
To survive as long as they can,
but also to have the reward of nourishing somebody else.
[creaking & cracking]
♪
[squeaking & grumbling]
♪
[birds chirping]
[David S.] These levees that contain all these ponds,
some of those are sealed off from the river by beavers.
Now, those pools maintain a surprising variety of things
from fish to waterfowl of various kinds.
It's a whole niche that wouldn't be there if it were dry.
[birds chirping]
[squeaking]
[croaking]
[birds chirping]
♪ [faint bird chirping continues] ♪
♪
[Nadir] Plants have a memory.
I'm a really strong believer of that.
Memory means their experiences make them
who they are, what they are.
That's a part of evolution.
That's a part of the survival mechanisms.
They learn.
The things about the trees, at their different life stages,
they are attacked with the different enemies.
When they're young, they might be attacked by rabbits.
But when the tree becomes tree,
they're not attacked by rabbits,
they are attacked by something else. Right?
They all have a different mechanism to dealing with
all the different enemies of the plants.
Remember the plants, they cannot run away.
[chewing]
[howling wind]
[birds chirping]
[Stan] So, Spruce Trees are the typical evergreen trees.
It takes many, many years to become a mature tree,
and they produce their seed in these cones.
[squeaking]
Red squirrels really rely heavily on conifer seed
produced by the Spruce Trees.
The Spruce produce these cones and the seeds are
locked inside the cones under these,
each bract of that cone.
[squeaking]
The squirrels are really efficient at husking them,
and it's just like you eating a corn on the cob.
[squeaking]
When the cones are mature, the seed is ready to be dropped.
The squirrels clip the cones before that happens,
drop them to the ground.
The squirrels dig holes and shove the cones down
inside there and cones and stay nice and moist and
cool down there and then they don't open.
And over the years, they husk the cones
to get at the inner seeds, which is what
they use for the food.
[squeaking]
Clearly, the tree is not too keen on the squirrel chewing
all this seed up before it can drop to the ground and
produce more baby trees.
♪
So, the trees synchronize when they produce
big crops of cones.
When that synchronization takes place,
we call it a mast year.
They make so many cones that even the
best-equipped squirrels can't clip all of them and
store them before the cones open.
So a lot of the seed escapes.
But once that seed is shed from the cone,
the squirrels are totally inefficient at harvesting it.
They can't go around the ground and scoop up
every little individual seed and consume it.
They're just not built that way.
[squeaking]
However, the squirrel says, "Well, just hold on here,
I'm going to try and combat that."
[squeaking]
The mothers can sense that a big mast is coming and
they crank up their reproduction
before they get access to those cones.
[squeaking & chirping]
And so, they're back and forth,
these two species playing games with each other over
a lot of evolutionary time to try and outwit each other.
[squeaking]
The trees, for the most part,
I must admit, win.
♪
♪ [ethereal]
[Isabelle] The forest provides food.
The forest provides medicine.
♪
Solitude, peace of mind.
[birds chirping]
It's just this abundant living,
beautiful organism that offers us whatever we really need.
Spruce, because of the essential oils,
the sap is used as an aromatherapy tool.
Bunchberry.
They have an antiseptic anti-inflammatory property.
So this is a lichen.
There's a lot of lichens that grow on Spruce Trees.
You could brew it into a tea and use it to
treat strep throat specifically.
And then wild strawberries, which are obviously
just delicious and for eating.
[birds continue chirping]
[Diana] All species on the margins of life produce
the greatest amount of medicine.
So the greatest medicines we have are found in the Boreal.
[Thomas] These medicines are like all over the forests,
all over the bush.
This is clean, you know.
This is the cleanest place.
When you sleep here, you sleep good.
You know, you're...
you're smelling all that medicine and all that clean air.
You smell like trees, you know.
[Tuukka] If you walk in a forest,
you smell the forest.
Trees are emitting vapours as a side product of photosynthesis.
And the smell of the forest is coming from these vapours.
For example, Pine Tree is mostly emitting
a compound called alpha-Pinene.
There's many purposes.
One of them is to repel insects.
♪
[insects buzzing]
[Roger] Every species has its nemesis.
The mountain pine beetle is the primary pest affecting
Lodgepole Pine and Jack Pine.
♪
[Sandy] So, the female beetle comes in and
she starts chewing.
She sends chemical signals out to attract
other males and other females.
Trees can defend themselves fairly well.
With conifers, the first and the basic strategy is
resin production to prevent them from getting in.
[gurgling]
If they can produce enough resin,
they can pitch out or suffocate beetles that are attacking.
[fluttering wings]
[creaking]
[Tuukka] Coming from the damages that the insect
has been doing, the tree starts to emit more vapours.
♪
[Diana] They deal in chemistry.
The conversation is based on alarm and response.
They're giving a message to their siblings that
there is trouble on the way.
[Nadir] That means that those unattacked healthy trees
have already stronger defences build up
before beetles arrive.
[Roger] So they can produce an extra amount of resin to
really pitch out these mass attacks when they occur.
They'll pitch those beetles out, no problem.
And it won't really affect the tree.
♪
[Nadir] They can't even release anything-- they die.
Because the compound is so toxic.
♪
[Isabelle] When I walk into the forest and
I realize that these trees are communicating,
that's so affirming to me that
we're not alone in this experience.
♪
[bird calls]
♪
[wind gusts]
[Gerry] As it approaches fall,
the trees receive a signal from the shorter day length
to start going into dormancy.
♪
The tree stops producing chlorophyll...
making it appear as if something new is happening.
It's actually just the green disappearing,
which has revealed the yellow that was there previously.
♪
It is this annual falling of the leaves from the
deciduous trees that helps to recycle
the nutrients very quickly.
The brilliant colours are as much a pledge of things
to come as they are of a thing that once were.
♪
[rustling]
♪
When a Boreal Forest gets old,
what you have are the trees that have managed to
escape fire for many years, maybe several hundred years.
Those are mostly Black Spruce,
the Jack Pine are getting old and ragged looking.
Jack Pine and Black Spruce needles help acidify
the landscape and slow down the decomposition.
So we have an old Boreal Forest,
you have ground fuel and you've got fuel in the crown.
And given the right source of ignition like a
lightning strike, the old Boreal Forest is ready to burn.
And we don't know when that's going to happen.
Could be tomorrow.
It could be 30 or 40 years down the road.
♪
But over time, in the absence of fire,
there becomes less and less nutrients available for the
support and growth of those Boreal Forest conifer trees.
Many of the mosses on the forest floor are
ready to take advantage of that.
And they build up a moss layer on the forest floor,
which is the bank in which these nutrients and
some of the forest carbon is stored.
♪
Sphagnum mosses can gradually build upon themselves
and accumulate to many metres of depth.
It's called peat.
♪ [ethereal]
[David P.] And of course, the peat tends to freeze
in the far north.
Large areas of northern Canada is permafrost,
frozen organic soil.
Peat accumulates over thousands of years to be very,
very large stores of peat and other organic material.
A layer of moss and other vegetation provides insulation,
which means that the permafrost itself is protected from melting
in warm years because that layer of sphagnum moss and
maybe the shading provided by the trees
help to keep the temperature below zero.
♪
[Kajar] We have been working a lot on permafrost areas.
When fire occurs, the temperatures inside
the flame can be 700, 800, 900 degrees.
But if you are going a couple of centimetres below the ground
into the soil, there is almost no changes
inside the temperature.
So actually the permafrost doesn't know that
it burns up there.
♪
[Isabelle] I like the calm that comes over everything
as it's preparing to go to sleep.
♪ [choir singing]
[Gerry] We call conifer trees, evergreens.
And they are indeed always green as long as they're healthy.
[Diana] They have the ability in their genome to
withstand great cold, which makes them unique
because they are still photosynthesizing and
they're still sequestering at very low temperatures.
[Gerry] There is a great advantage to the architecture
of coniferous trees having branches that
readily shed snow.
♪
Trees are incredibly adaptable.
Poplar and Birch both have white bark.
The white bark reflects sunlight as a form of insulation
against premature thawing of the tree.
♪
[rustling branches]
[Isabelle] All winter long, there's still berries that
have frozen and they just stay beautiful and bright and red.
And then they have these perfect layerings of snow.
The snow is so soft, and pillowy, and insulating...
It creates this wonderful, cozy feeling.
♪ [ethereal]
[Edmund] There's a peace there and
there is a presence there.
They're very gentle, they're very kind and
they're very understanding and very happy when they see you.
Everybody has a certain personality,
and so, the same thing with the world.
The elements within the environment,
they have their own rules to follow and their own needs.
[Gerry] That's something that we need to be thinking about
when we start talking about how we as humans
interact with the forest.
[snorts]
[roaring snow machine engine]
[bird calls]
[insect buzzing]
[Ben] I am a trapper.
I use the forest for other forms of recreation like
fishing, hunting and berry picking.
All kinds of things that I do in the forest.
I'm a big user.
[snow machine engine rumbling in the distance]
[creaking trees]
[bird calls]
When you come here on a nice day and it's so beautiful...
you seem to forget about all the problems in the world,
the killing and the mass murders.
The mass shootings. I'm not gonna get bombed.
I feel safe here.
[creaking]
[animal calls]
I've noticed a decline in certain species over the years.
But that's understandable because of
the harvesting of the forest.
[indistinct buzzing & bird chiriping]
[loud crack followed by flapping wings]
[indistinct thud & buzzing]
[chainsaw & rumbling machinery]
[loud rumble & boom]
[chainsaw]
[crash]
♪
[saw buzzing]
♪ [suspenseful]
[saw buzzing]
[bang]
♪ [suspenseful]
[chainsaw buzzing]
[creak & crash]
♪ [suspenseful]
[machine clang]
[saw buzzing & grinding]
♪
[rumbling & creaking of metal]
♪
[Robert] So, the primary conifer species in this area
are Black Spruce and Jack Pine.
The average age is, I want to say,
85 years of age.
And that's generally where the forest will reach the
highest quality of timber and the most amount of timber.
♪
The round logs were processed into two-by-four studs.
Of course, there's also full tree chipping.
Those chips are sent to a nearby pulp mill.
Pulp is used for everything from the paper you write on
to material used in diapers.
[saw buzzing]
[creaking]
[saw grinding]
[rumbling & boom]
[saw grinding]
[rumbling & boom]
♪ [somber]
After a harvest we'll assess what competition there might be
there for conifer species that we want to regenerate.
We do use glyphosate.
The herbicide targets deciduous species:
Poplar, Birch as well, competing vegetation
such as raspberry.
The herbicide is absorbed in the leaf and into
the plant system, and then it dies.
♪
[Edmund] We are very careless.
I suppose that when the trees look at us,
they say we're very careless.
We throw things around.
♪
[bell chiming]
[Isabelle] There are so many roads
and they go for...
I don't even know where they stop.
It seems like they just continue forever.
♪
[David S.] There's roads, there's seismic lines...
there's well pads,
there's lines to connect the well pads...
roads to service them.
A toxic waste treatment centre right in
the middle of the Boreal.
And then the oil sands, which are all in Boreal areas.
♪
[Ben] You see more development, subdivisions.
You wonder sometimes if they're going to run out of bush.
But I mean, the way I look at it,
we're all users of the forest.
♪
♪ [suspenseful]
[truck honking]
♪ [suspenseful]
♪ [energetic]
[cameras clicking]
[truck honking]
♪
[Mike] People love to be in the woods.
People love wildlife, and this is normal.
[Erin] People want to buy or build and be directly
adjacent or close to the forest.
[indistinct radio broadcast]
[Mike] But recognize that, you know,
some of these areas are extremely fire prone.
[thunder]
[lawnmower whirring & indistinct chatter]
[Erin] I knew that there was potential for forest fires.
I never personally thought that it would breach the city limits.
[thunderclap]
♪
[Christine] At the beginning of May,
the fire started several kilometres to the west of us.
The fire spread very rapidly towards the community.
[Erin] We ended up losing everything,
our house, our personal belongings,
the trees, everything.
♪
[Christine] As a biologist, I understand that
the wildlife and the plants need fire.
But the community was really devastated by the fire.
Some of them are still suffering, mentally.
[Erin] We still look around and see burnt forest
every single day that we're here.
♪
[helicopter chuff]
[Mike] We found that the warmer it gets,
the more fire we have.
There's three reasons for this.
The first is the warmer it is,
the longer the fire season.
The warmer it gets, the more lightning we see.
As we warm, the atmosphere's ability to suck moisture
out of the fuel increases almost exponentially.
We're seeing more fire because of
human caused climate change.
And we're going to see a lot more fire.
♪
[Erin] I think you can kind of get opinions from both sides.
People who believe that the climate change is
what helped create this fire.
But there's so much reclamation happening
around the community in the oil and gas industry as well,
trying to make it green.
♪
[hum of machinery]
[Jessica] This was formerly the mine.
It was mined out about 40 metres deep.
Oil sands were removed
and now we use it to pour composite tailings into.
Once a tailings deposit is up to an elevation where
we're ready for reclamation, we come in and
we do landform grading.
Create the hills and the valleys,
and streams and channels.
We need to mimic what Mother Nature's done.
[digital feedback]
And then this is seven years after planting.
It's a young forest-wetland complex.
We hope our research will help us to learn
how to build wetlands and peatlands.
♪ [electronic]
Some of our researchers that do climate change research...
specifically carbon research,
they're monitoring the ability for reclaimed sites
to sequester carbon.
♪
Carbon is sequestered when plants grow.
Young plants grow much faster than older plants.
So a mature forest is actually sequestering
less carbon on a yearly basis then a new forest.
So we're actually doing well because
our forests are so young.
♪ [ethereal]
[David S.] Scientists worry that they don't know exactly
where the tipping point is, where you've got enough CO2
added to the atmosphere, that it will trigger those
natural carbon cycles to where they'll accelerate
what's going on.
The burning of forest is one classical one.
Another is the melting of permafrost.
[wind gusts]
[Kajar] Soils are getting warmer.
Now, constantly warmer soils
will actually start to melt the permafrost.
[Sam] When the permafrost melts,
everything sinks.
♪
You will find fields of trees that are dead...
and they start falling over in different directions and
they actually look drunk.
♪
The vegetation is rotting.
It creates methane through the process of peat rotting.
It's emitting methane gas, causing a greenhouse effect.
[Kajar] Methane is one of the greenhouse gases...
and actually if you're talking about climate change,
the methane is a much stronger gas than CO2, carbon dioxide.
It's almost 20 times stronger.
♪
[David P.] It's all about the feedbacks.
It's getting warmer and the higher CO2 concentration
will stimulate more growth.
[Sam] We're on the south shore of Hudson Bay.
There was not even one Poplar here when I was a kid,
nothing but grass and no trees.
But now the whole coast is getting infested with
all kinds of Spruce, Tamarack, Poplar.
♪
[David P.] One of the limitations to the rate at which
forests can expand northward is just
how fast they can produce seed.
The shift in the climate zones will be so much more rapid
that the forest will not be able to keep up.
The northward extension will not be as dramatic,
I suspect, as the southern dieback.
♪
[groans]
♪
[rustling leaves]
[David P.] The general trend for the Boreal Forest,
I think, in the south, is definitely browning down.
[rustling leaves]
[Ted] I mean, we've been working on Aspen since the
early 90s because there were some early episodes
of Aspen decline.
What's new is the extent of the decline is
much greater than it used to be.
And part of it is the change toward drier conditions.
This isn't just a normal drought,
but it really is a prolonged dry period.
Aspen's adapted to things like fire.
The Aspen will regenerate from its roots.
But what's happening is that we're getting repeated
droughts in combination with insects and diseases.
♪
So, the root systems are becoming unhealthy.
♪ [ethereal]
So that when the trees die, quite often,
little comes back.
You'll see these dead Aspen trees and you see green things
growing underneath and it turns out to be other shrubs,
things like chokecherry or hazelnut,
instead of Aspen.
The effect will then be more of a shrub land than a forest.
♪
[Stan] Everyone worries about how climate change is
going to affect these systems.
♪
You get a mismatch between when things should happen
versus when they actually do happen.
[squeaking]
We wonder if that would happen with the red squirrels...
and the neat relationship that squirrels have
with the Spruce trees.
This mast year was a bumper crop of cones.
The squirrels had all the signals of this big mast year,
so they've been breeding like crazy.
So, the mothers have been busy trying to tend to babies.
And so, they've done no caching at all.
And then we had some extremely warm, sunny days.
All of the cones have opened up on the trees prematurely.
[rustling branches]
So, it's all working perfectly for the tree.
All of this seed has escaped from the squirrels.
[squeaking]
[wind gusts]
[squeaking]
The trees are just laughing their heads off right now.
♪
In the 35 years, we've had five previous mast years and,
this is the first time we've seen this happen.
♪
So, here's this incredible amount of energy
lying on the ground in the form of these individual seeds,
but they just can't take advantage of it.
[squeaking]
♪
[squeaking]
Now they're going to go into the winter
with their food store empty.
♪
[Nadir] We have a problem right now.
What to expect? That is the biggest problem
we have right now.
Some areas used to be climatically unsuitable for
mountain pine beetle, for example.
Right now, they've become suitable because it's warmer.
[insects buzzing]
[Roger] The droughts benefit the mountain pine beetle
because the trees can't get enough moisture and
just lowers the defences of the tree.
[Sandy] Some of the cells in the xylem-phloem system,
it just kind of collapses in on itself.
[cracking & creaking]
And it causes that pop on that cellulose wall.
[cracking & creaking]
That tree is less able to defend itself,
plus it's signaling that it's having problems.
So, the insects, once they get close up,
they can actually hear that.
♪
[Roger] When you dig into a tree that has been mass attacked,
a lot of the time directly under the bark,
it's as dry as a bone and dusty.
And there'll be sawdust in there from the beetles
boring and doing what they do.
♪
You have little tiny pitch outs.
Not a lot of resin flow.
So, the tree was weakened enough when
the mountain pine beetle attacked the tree in mass.
It didn't have enough vigour to produce a lot of resin
to pitch them out.
The needles are still green, they're still trying to
produce photosynthesis and they're still trying to
operate as business as usual,
except they're drying out the tree even more because
there's no uptake from the roots.
The tree is dead.
It just takes a while for the tree to understand
that it's dead.
♪
It usually takes about a year for the red needles to show up.
[howling wind]
When you look at an entire hillside that is just red
with Lodgepole Pine, which is a flammable species anyway,
because that's how it propagates itself,
I can't help but think, "That's not a good sign".
[thunderclap]
[Kajar] Now when the new fire is hitting the area,
we actually don't know how this will affect
the permafrost, how deep it will melt.
♪
[Mike] It can burn deeper and longer
if we get drier conditions.
This is legacy carbon slowly building up over
thousands of years, and then, in the course of one fire,
it can be injected into the atmosphere.
♪
[David P.] As things progressively get worse,
we will start losing all of these species, actually.
The Spruces will go first because they're the ones
that are most intolerant of drought.
Then I think we'll see the Pine disappear from the uplands.
♪
[Ted] It's really hard to predict what's gonna happen.
You might see a patchwork of stunted Aspen groves with
grassland in some of these areas that are now Boreal Forest.
That's what I would see.
♪
[David S.] Forests were best when we left them alone.
Over a period of about 50 years.
We've seen declines in so many things...
like butterflies, Boreal birds, amphibians...
Lake Trout, caribou.
♪
[Mike] Because of things like fire and mountain pine beetle,
our forests, our Canadian forests,
are now carbon sources and not carbon sinks.
♪
[Diana] We can't live without forests.
To maintain life on this planet,
we have to have a green cover.
We won't be able to breathe.
[Isabelle] I feel upset that this is what the
generations before me are leaving me with.
But I just think that instead of looking at it as,
"Oh, we've made mistakes, and we're bad,
and we're this plague on the Earth..."
No, we're extremely creative.
♪ [ethereal]
Sometimes I think, "I hope you live."
Sometimes I think, "This is not the best place for you.
Even though this is not efficient,
I'm gonna pull you out because if I take
another step to the right, it's going to be
a much better soil habitation for you."
♪
Sometimes I think about what they're going to look like
in 10 years from now.
Sometimes I wonder if they're gonna survive.
We have the ability to make whatever it is that we imagine,
so let's just start imagining a new path.
Let's start imagining a new way.
♪
We're so inherently tied to this experience,
and what happens to that forest is gonna be
a reflection of what happens to us.
♪
[Edmund] We are here to make sure that the world,
that the species, that humanity continues.
The trees are support, guidance,
encouragement and faith,
that things are just the way they're supposed to be.
That support from something that's inanimate,
it looks like, but you're getting it because
it's connected to the ground and it's aiming for the sky.
It's a conduit between the earth and the sun.
♪
To see the tree as a living light...
When you see that light, you've gotten a gift.
You're going to be very humbled.
♪ [ethereal choir singing]
[birds chirping continues]