March 09 2026

By Gary Schneider

I often feel as though I learn more from the students that I teach at UPEI and Acadia than I share with them. One of the key components of the ecological forestry courses is a writing project. About five years ago, one of the Acadia students put in a quote from Fritjof Capra, the highly regarded author of The Tao of Physics and The Web of Life. I found the quote so enlightening that I now use it in my presentations.

In one of his essays, entitled “Speaking Nature’s Language,” Capra wrote:

A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

We’ve seen this play out for years, with both insects and diseases affecting the growth of many of our plantations. One example that I have watched for years is Scots pine plantation on the North Shore Highway in front of the Campbell’s Cove Campground. It is part of my regular bird-watching route.

When I first encountered this plantation, it looked awful – unhealthy, unattractive, and with little to no future economic value that I could see. Turns out that I wasn’t wrong about any of that. Most of the trees have died over the more than three decades that I’ve been watching them. It seems almost a miracle to me that this forest is slowly turning into an early successional Wabanaki Forest, full of white birch, grey birch, trembling aspen and red maple.

This is what the stand would have looked like – for a lot less cost and with much older trees – if we hadn’t interfered in the first place. It is a forest begging for red oak acorns, yellow birch seeds, and hemlock and white pine cones. It is not without hope, but it has taken an extremely circuitous route to have any amount of diversity.

Intuitively, I’ve always known that putting in plantations of one or two species of conifers didn’t make sense. It seemed to contradict all the sage advice that parents gave children about “not putting all your eggs in one basket.” I truly believe that it is the ultimate in hubris when we think we can plant rows of one species of tree and that nothing will go wrong with them over a lifespan of 60-100 years. We don’t even do that with potatoes or tomatoes in our gardens, and they are both short and short-lived.

And the concerns over insects and diseases paled before Post-Tropical Storm Fiona. If nothing else, that should have taught use a serious lesson about planting shallow-rooted conifers.

Left to its own devices, the Wabanaki Forest is rich and resilient, with its diverse mix of plant life. Twenty-six species of trees, over 60 species of shrubs, more than 30 ferns

and hundreds of wildflowers. That’s without mentioning mosses, club mosses, lichens, fungi, and more – it really is an impressive list.

We need to take the sound, scientific advice of Fritjof Capra, and others including Nova Scotia’s own Bob Bancroft and Donna Crossland. Diversity is not just a numbers game – it is the basis for a healthy forest in this region. We can no longer ignore that wisdom.