Forest Alert

I began my activism in 1972, after reading the Meadows Report, The Limits to Growth. It was a brutal awakening: we humans were already consuming more than the Earth could produce.

In response to this alarming realization, several governments created Ministries of the Environment — meant to act as watchdogs, regulating the exploitation of our natural capital and preventing us from exceeding the planet’s limits. The emerging citizens’ movement, filled with hope, mobilized to launch projects in conservation, recycling, and public awareness.

In the twenty years that followed, despite the politicians’ green rhetoric and the genuine accomplishments of dedicated, optimistic citizen groups, reports on the state of the planet kept showing that consumption, far from stabilizing, was still rising. By 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio, it was already clear that humanity was consuming more than the planet could regenerate each year.

Twenty years later, this fight for planetary limits took a very concrete turn here at home. In 1999, the release of the documentary L’Erreur boréale hit the public like an earthquake — magnitude eight on the Richter scale. Our leaders tried to ignore the tremor, hoping people would forget and move on. But we weren’t about to give up. Soon, Richard, I, and a few other green warriors decided to found Action boréale — to rattle the cage, mobilize the population, and force our leaders to launch an inquiry into the state of our public forests, that collective good which represents 92% of Quebec’s forested land.

Under pressure, the government created the Coulombe Commission — to reassure the public and, let’s be honest, to try to shut us up. Yet when its report came out in 2004, it proved us right: the resource was indeed being overexploited.
Around the same time, the government signed the Convention on Biological Diversity in Rio, committing to protect 12% of its territory. In Abitibi, only 0.4% of the land was protected in 2000. Action boréale got to work, and ten years later, that figure had reached 8%. Not bad for a small group that never received a single penny in subsidies from anyone.

Today, in 2025, despite the politicians’ fine words, the war for conservation rages on. Our governments, hand in hand with the extractive industry, continue to facilitate and accelerate the transformation of what little remains of our intact forest ecosystems into 2x4 lumber and paper pulp.

This year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 24. Globally, we are already consuming the equivalent of two planets’ worth of resources to satisfy our gargantuan appetite. The problem is, we only have one. And if everyone on Earth lived like we do — as Québécois, Canadians, or Americans — we would need four planets to meet our needs.

So why keep fighting? Simply because we are at war. The last one. Because if we destroy everything, there will be nothing left to defend — and no one left to defend it. As humans, it is our duty to fight for our children and their descendants.

We are the small David facing the giant Goliath. And if I remember the story correctly, after the third stone was thrown — it was Goliath who fell.


 

Henri Jacob
Ecologist and co-founder of Action boréale