In Far North, Peril and Promise

Brian Amiro, head of the department of soil science at the University of Manitoba, is part of a research team involved in a project called Fluxnet. The researchers have erected more than 400 towers throughout the world, outfitted with instruments to measure the exchange of carbon between earth and air. The boreal forest, sometimes called "the lungs of the world," breathes in more carbon in years when the forests grow, and loses more carbon in years of bad forest fires, drought or insect infestation.

Lately, there has been a string of bad years. The number of forest fires in Canada doubled in the 1980s and '90s from the previous two decades, and some scientific models indicate they will double again this century, Amiro said. Logging, mining and oil exploration have carved roads deeper into the forests. Temperatures have risen faster toward the north -- by as much as five degrees since the 1950s -- than in more temperate zones.

"The environmental triggers are going to become much more significant," said Faisal Moola, director of science at the David Suzuki Foundation, a Vancouver-based environmental organization.

There are mixed views about whether the process can be stopped. The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- the highest in at least 420,000 years -- mean average temperatures will continue to rise, accelerating the thawing.

But humanity's footprint could be changed. Development, mining and logging account for 25 percent of the carbon loss in forests, Elgie said. Logging releases almost twice as much carbon dioxide each year as all the passenger vehicles in Canada, he said.

Credits for Preservation

Here in Pine Falls, a town of 1,400 about 80 miles northeast of Winnipeg, the giant Tembec pulp mill billows steam and smoke into the crystalline sky. The 1920s-era mill makes newsprint from spruce and pine trees, and Vince Keenan, a forester for the company, said Tembec has responded to calls for change. It has set aside 12 percent of its 2 million-acre logging forest here, and up to one-fourth of its product is now made from recycled paper. Changes in mill practices have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50 percent since 1990, he said.

But a broader step would be to set aside vast areas of the forest now designated for mining or logging and preserve them. This could be done by setting up a system of "carbon credits," in which, for example, an industrial plant would offset its pollution by paying money to preserve land in the forest that could store an equal amount of carbon.

"Right now, the only way to make money in the boreal forest is to cut trees down," Elgie said. "If you had carbon credits, you would be able to make money by keeping the trees up and storing carbon."

That system appeals to some native Indian groups, now torn between the desire to keep their traditional lands and the need for income from logging or mining.

"Preserving the land is important to us," said Carl Smith, an elder of the Brokenhead Ojibway First Nation on the Winnipeg River near Pine Falls. "Once the land is gone, you're gone."

Smith also is president of the Manitoba Model Forest, a group set up 15 years ago to balance the competing views of how the forest here should be used. One of its goals is teaching schoolchildren about the forest, a job that falls to Bob Austman, the woodsman, whose family has lived in and on the boreal forests of Manitoba for three generations.

He sees nothing but beauty here. As he and Brian Kotak, an environmental scientist, tramped in minus-10-degree cold through a stand of birch near the Winnipeg River recently, it seemed hard to see the Earth as a potential danger.