A Forest for the Trees: Deforestation and Conservation Efforts in Northumberland County, Ontario 1870–1925

Abstract

While much has been written on the province's involvement in reforestation projects beginning in the late-nineteenth-century, the interface between provincial initiatives and local activities has received little attention from the academic community. The exception is Diamando Diamantakos's exploration of the impact of provincial forestry legislation on municipal tree planting programmes, for which she uses Essex County in south-western Ontario as a case study. Diamantakos offers valuable insight into the failure of provincial forestry legislation to translate into planted trees at a municipal level. Specifically, she argues that the success of afforestation programn1es was 'limited by the continuing priority attached to private property rights, doubts concerning the relation between forest loss, climate and productivity, and a long-standing antagonism towards nature and forests' .2Unfortunately, her work is restricted to two nineteenth-century forestry initiatives, The Ontario Tree Planting Act, 1883 and the creation of the Clerk of Forestry in the same year. As such, Diamantakos' work provides only a snap shot of the ways in which early provincial afforestation schemes were adopted or avoided by municipalities, making it difficult to identify what aided or inhibited the success of such initiatives.