So let me give an example from my own family. So I come from a family of horse loggers... selective loggers. And by the 1960s basically had lost all of our permissions to to do that, we lost our livelihoods... as the corporatisation of forestry took its grip. It was no longer people living on the land with the forest and ensuring that their livelihoods were supported by the forest. It became more about people distant from the forest, you know, shareholders who expected dividends... And so it just changed from us doing it to something else, doing it. And, and we see the consequences now on our landscapes. We've seen extensive clearcutting. We've seen forests that are not nearly as productive as and healthy as the old forests that they that they've replaced... We've been on this mission since, for the last century to liquidate the old growth forests... The primary forests. And when Europeans came to Canada and set up the forestry industry, they said, we're going to convert these old forests to what they called normal forests. These European forests like tree farms, so that they're all like the same species, same size, more efficient for, you know, growing and then harvesting in the future, got to get rid of the old forest and so on.

There's a term I learned from this book... we have to recognize we've created a killer forest... eucalyptus is a species that's been planted worldwide because it's one of the fastest growing species... But the reason it's a killer forest is because for one, it requires a lot of water... it draws down the hydrologic system, dries out the ecosystem. And then the, the, the tree itself is full of oils that are very flammable and it sheds bark... they're kind of like Molotov cocktails in a way... In Canada... we've at least where I'm from in British Columbia, we planted a lot of lodgepole pine and a lot of Douglas fir and a lot of spruce conifers. We've been focussed on conifers. Why? It's because... the conifers that brought such great market value... focus so much on these coniferous trees and then spraying herbicides and weeding out these other plants that really increase the flammability of the forest... we banned indigenous burning in the late 1880s with the Indian Act that's created havoc across the ecosystems... You wrote in the book that Canada's forest practices are detonating a carbon bomb. Yeah... In 2001, Canada's forests shifted from being a carbon sink overall to a carbon source... our experiments show that we're losing 61% of the forest floor carbon due to these practices. And it took a long time to get that forest floor... we estimate 10,000 years.

Let's talk about the Mother Tree project... it's a climate gradient experiment. It's 1000km long... we're trying different ways of leaving mother trees behind in different densities and configurations to protect, hopefully to protect the carbon pools and the biodiversity of the forests, and to increase the regenerative capacity of the forest... we need to leave these old trees behind... how much you leave behind depends on the climatic conditions of the forest... the more stressed a forest is under... especially benefit from a higher cover of these old trees... Can we get back to being a carbon sink? What does that roadmap look like? Yes we can... we really need to be tending our forests, you know, by, by reducing the fuel loads and encouraging these less flammable plants to come back, we need to reintroduce indigenous burning... preventing wildfire is really important... We also have to deal with climate change, right? That's the big elephant in the room. And we need to be getting off of fossil fuels.