The Shift: From Forester to Forest Protector

Mark Balogh has enjoyed spending time in the woods for as long as he can remember. Growing up just outside of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., Balogh found solace in the outdoors. “I was a bit of a loner and I spent a lot of time wandering the forest by myself,” he says. “I found some mystery there.” After stints as a bicycle messenger and tree planter, Balogh pursued forestry as “a job where I could have a professional designation and still have a large component of my time in the field,” he says. He graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and went to work in B.C. forests that had been devastated by mountain pine beetles. “I enjoyed the forest environment, whether it was pristine and intact or had been cut,” he recalls. “We were working in a salvage scenario. Our job was to harvest this timber while we still could and prevent catastrophic wildfires.”

Balogh remembers his early experiences in the forest industry as generally positive, but the focus on maximizing economic returns didn’t quite jive with his outlook as a “conservation-minded forester,” he says. “The big challenge for me was the scale of the operations. Although everything on public land is very well regulated and everyone does their best to follow the rules, silviculture doesn’t do a good enough job of mimicking a natural forest environment.” As much as modern forestry attempts to use selective harvests and clearcuts to replicate natural events like wind storms and small wildfires, logging operations utilize heavy machinery that requires massive roads for cutting and hauling timber. These corridors can take decades to recover. 

“Even the best practices were too much plantation for me,” Balogh says, with stands of similar-aged trees and less species diversity than in a natural forest in order to optimize the economics of future harvests. “There are no rewards to go above and beyond the minimum regulations, even with special features like a stand of old-growth trees or critical wildlife habitat,” he adds. “I would push for larger protected areas around key features than the rules mandated and the response would be, ‘why would we walk away from harvesting that timber?’ That was a real struggle for me.”

Plus, Balogh missed the leafy maples, majestic oaks, and windswept white pine of Ontario. He returned to Sault Ste. Marie in 2016 to manage tracts of privately-owned forests, which were being managed and logged as investment vehicles for landowners, including wealthy individuals and corporations. Most of northern Ontario is public land and forestry is regulated by provincial legislation. Private lands like the ones Balogh managed, however, have far fewer regulations — which allows them to be harvested irresponsibly, without regard for sustaining critical habitat and the renewal of the forest. That concerned Balogh, but he was somewhat relieved that even the biggest investors were “shifting towards a more sustainable mentality,” including using selective cuts to ensure the forest ecosystem is maintained over time, he says. Paradoxically, the lack of regulations afforded Balogh more freedom to “make decisions on the land” by protecting special features. The landowners he represented often had little practical knowledge of the forest, except for its rate of economic return. “The activist in me would omit certain areas [from planned harvests] that were sensitive and not suitable for just making a quick dollar,” he says. “But at the end of the day, I was reporting to people who were most interested in the internal rate of return on the investment.”

With changing economics, including fewer markets to sell pulpwood, private landowners have recently started exploring new ways of generating income from forest management. For example, logging was largely suspended on a parcel just north of Sault Ste. Marie to develop one of Canada’s largest maple syrup operations. For his part, Balogh was intrigued at the notion of opting to protect forests rather than log them to generate carbon credits. 

It’s well known that forests regulate the planet’s climate by sequestering and storing carbon dioxide. The climate benefits of choosing to protect rather than log a forest can be measured and sold on global markets to corporations and individuals looking to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions. The global carbon market, with a trading hub in Toronto, was valued at $2 billion in 2021. A certified credit for one tonne of carbon dioxide (or the equivalent amount of other greenhouse gases), the standard currency in the market, fetches up to $30. 

Voluntary carbon markets have been around for a few decades, and they’ve weathered plenty of controversy. Environmentalists — Balogh included — struggle with the notion of monetizing nature, and some carbon projects have been exposed as hoaxes. A 2022 investigation by The Guardian revealed that over 90 percent of carbon offsets generated in South America’s rainforest — certified to international standards and purchased by corporations like Shell and Gucci and the band Pearl Jam — were “largely worthless” due to accounting errors. Furthermore, in the absence of global, legally binding regulations to reduce greenhouse gases, climate scientists have warned that voluntary offsetting of carbon emissions will have little effect on the climate crisis. Offsets can be used to delay or avoid actual reductions in emissions.

Balogh was skeptical when, in July 2022, a 150,000-acre (60,000-hectare) property north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., he had been managing for hardwood logging was sold to Kincardine, Ont.-based Perimeter Forest. The new owners bought it with a promise to permanently suspend forestry operations that had occurred continuously here for at least a century. They retained Balogh to orchestrate the conversion to carbon credits under the Verified Carbon Standard (Verra).

Balogh leapt at the challenge, mostly because he was enamoured with the forest he was now tasked to protect. Suddenly, chainsaws would be kept out of the pristine areas where Balogh had mapped out future roads and harvests for his previous employer. Some of these areas “exhibit pre-colonial and old-growth forest characteristics,” including ancient white pine and yellow birch, Balogh notes. “The forest is rich in tree species, age classes, and structural diversity, which contributes to biodiversity and ecological resilience, including resiliency to wildfire.”   

What’s more, a project by Ontario adventurers and photojournalists Gary and Joanie McGuffin revealed this same property as the inspiration for dozens of Group of Seven paintings — and many of the same scenes are still intact today. Balogh’s carbon calculus involved quantifying the amount of greenhouse gases the forest would remove from the atmosphere under a 100-year protection plan for the “Painted Forest,” compared to that of the “business-as-usual,” logging model. 

A complex, standardized method, with permanent sample plots to allow for recalibration in the future, suggested the change in management will avoid the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to about 3,000 Canadian homes each year. The project is currently under validation with Verra and once certified, private corporations and individuals can negate their own carbon emissions by investing in the Painted Forest.

Further north, Perimeter Forest also purchased 200,000 acres (80,000 hectares) of boreal forest previously owned by the logging giant GreenFirst, near the community of Kapuskasing. The property includes large areas of old-growth spruce and potential habitat for boreal caribou, a sensitive species that’s listed as threatened under federal and provincial legislation. “There were road and harvest plans, and volume expectations for the mill,” Balogh says. “It would’ve changed the area completely. That’s all halted now — for the sake of biodiversity and intactness of the forest ecosystem.”

The Kapuskasing project is registered and being developed to sell credits in Canada’s emerging Greenhouse Gas Offset Credit System, which will force large industrial emitters to invest in offset credits. Though Balogh still wonders about the true climate benefits of carbon offsets, whether they’re purchased voluntarily or required by law, he says the system is providing revenue to support the protection of ecosystems. He’s thrilled that his career has shifted from harvesting timber to safeguarding remnants of Canada’s original forests. 

“Go on Google Earth and fly across northern Ontario,” he says. “What you’ll see is ‘good’ forest management. It’s regulated and may be sustainable, but it’s clearly not the natural state. It is amazing to be a part of these conservation efforts, as something tells me that intact forest ecosystems and the protection of biodiversity are going to be an important piece of the climate change mitigation puzzle.

“Hopefully it gets people thinking about what an intact forest means versus a heavily managed plantation,” Balogh continues. “Carbon revenue could be one of the first steps in having private forests permanently protected.”

Read about a Canadian company using drones to reforest hard-to-access areas.