I’ll admit it. When I was first invited to craft stories for a forestry company, I pictured clear-cuts and churned-up mud. In a story about trees, somebody has to play the bad guy, right?
Then I met Rose.
For more than four decades, she and her spouse have cared for 75 acres of rural Ontario. Part of it was a pine plantation, planted in tight rows and never thinned. A logger had taken the valuable timber and left the forest floor buried in slash, promising it would all be gone in two years.
More than five years later, Rose’s verdict was short and certain: “That’s nonsense. No.” Some of the most powerful lines in an interview are the shortest ones.
When Kyle Hokkanen first walked the property, his assessment was just as plain: “They kind of left you in a pickle here.” As the owner of Green Acres Forestry and Landscaping, Kyle gets invited in to resolve bad forestry decisions all the time. In this case, it was a tangle of unnavigable forest made worse by bad management practices.
And what I was learning from my forest walk with Kyle’s client is that there’s a better approach if you know who to ask.
When Kyle’s team set about on the remediation plan, the transformation of the land was clear.
Morel mushrooms appeared along the newly opened lanes. “It used to be just sand,” Rose said of the soil. The right forestry guy – in this case, Kyle – wasn’t the villain of her story. He was the reason her land came back to life.
The forest renews. Access is enjoyed. The wins are everywhere.
Rose’s story is incorporated with others to paint a portrait of landscapes transformed for the better. Watch the film below.
