Oil Industry Looks to Forestry Folk for Advice on How to Deal w/ Enviros

John Spears


Business Reporter

Oil industry players have been sniffing around the landmark Boreal Forest Agreement between industry and environmental groups, says one of the agreement’s architects.

Avrim Lazar, who head the Forest Products Association of Canada, says he’s fielded inquiries from senior civil servants, executives and oil industry associations about how the forest industry got together with its one-time adversaries.

“They’re saying: What were you thinking? How did you do it? What’s working, what’s not working? What would your advice be?” Lazar said in an interview Thursday.

"It seems like very honest, good faith curiosity.”

The forest agreement was signed in May between the forest companies and a coalition of environmental groups who had fought the industry bitterly for decades, and boycotted their products.

Under the pact, the 21 member forest companies agreed to suspend new logging on 29 million hectares of forest. Environmental groups agreed to end their boycotts.

The signatories set themselves a three-year target to set up detailed, working agreements in areas such as developing more sustainable harvesting practices and protecting wildlife and water systems.

Oil and gas officials, while expressing interest, are skeptical that a similar process could work in their sector, says Lazar. “Who wouldn’t be? I was skeptical when I started.”

“All that being said, there are pieces of the model which are very importable,” Lazar said.
“A precondition of having a constructive conversation is acknowledging the legitimacy of each other’s public interest.”

That means environmentalists would have to stop calling oil sands extraction “an abomination that has to be stopped,” and acknowledge that the oil industry is going to operate in the sands.

“We’re not debating that. We’re debating how, and at what pace and under what conditions.”
The oil industry, for its part, must say: “We recognize that over time this degree of greenhouse gas intensity, this degree of effluent in the water, this disturbance of biodiversity, is not going to be acceptable. We know we have to be quite a bit better. It’s a question of how, and how fast.”

“Once you have those two, then you have something to talk about. You can go to problem-solving mode…It doesn’t become easy, but it becomes possible.”

Lazar says progress is continuing toward fleshing out the boreal forest agreement.

A panel on acceptable forest practices has been established, for example: Each of the three members was agreed to by both. The panel’s recommendations must be accepted in whole by both sides, unless there’s a fundamental disagreement.

A working group is pursuing protocols for protecting caribou habitat and migration routes.

But hurdles remain. The agreement was negotiated at a national level, but many areas lie within provincial jurisdiction. First nations groups were not part of the pact; their participation is now needed.

And vast cultural changes must take place. Forest industry managers, for example, were always rewarded for extracting every last scrap of fibre from a given area. That must change.

“It’s complicated,” says Lazar. “But over-all, we’re moving forward