In June 2020, a massive wildfire devastated the boreal forest to the north of Lac Saint-Jean in Quebec. I followed the gravel roads leading to the burnt area, a largely unorganised territory within the Zec des Passes. Logging operations and access roads have deeply fragmented the landscape of this controlled-exploitation zone. The soil has been compacted by tracked feller-bunchers, leaving countless scars behind them. The fire reduced the remaining forests, which had already been altered, to ashes; the ground is now utterly desolate. I stood and contemplated these deserts of ash and lunar landscapes.

Fire is a violent yet regenerative force and an integral part of the natural cycle of the boreal forest. The taiga is perfectly adapted to fire, and part of its ecosystem even depends on it. Certain species, such as black spruce and jack pine, produce serotinous cones that remain closed for years and only release their seeds at very high temperatures. Without fire, these species eventually decline. Trembling aspen and paper birch, on the other hand, regenerate rapidly through root suckering when the canopy is destroyed by fire but the root systems remain intact. However, when fire strikes stands that are too young, before they have reached the maturity needed for natural regeneration, it can take centuries for the original plant diversity to be restored. Plantations produce young trees that disperse few seeds and contain only a handful of species selected by the timber industry. Ecologically, they are extremely poor. Moreover, forestry companies mostly replant with conifers, which are highly flammable, and this uniformity encourages the spread of fire. Artificial reforestation can never truly replace what nature took centuries to build, but the real problem lies in the repeated combination of cutting too frequently and large wildfires. Logging itself is not the main culprit, but rather it is the permanent fragmentation of the territory and the very low average age of public forests that pose a problem. Quebec’s boreal forest evolved with disturbances far more violent than those caused by our mechanical saws. We cut too often, on patches that are too small and widely scattered, never allowing old-growth forests to develop. The present-day forest landscape of Quebec has been shaped at the expense of animal and plant species that require continuity, old trees and minimal human disturbance.

Today, forests cover no more than one-third of the planet’s land surface, a proportion that continues to shrink. Since the advent of agriculture, humanity has destroyed over half of the world’s primeval forests. Every year, millions of hectares still vanish. Yet intact primary forests are essential for sustaining biological processes and ecological balance because they harbour an astonishing array of life forms.