The Canadian Institute of Forestry recently launched a tree planting drive with their program Forests without Borders that is looking to change the face of the earth. Partnering with several other groups such as World Clean Air Forest Initiative, CIF is offering tree planting kits with an extra little something: for every tree that is planted in Canada and registered online, an international partner will plant a sister tree in a country such as Ghana or Zambia. John Clement, a CIF member and professor at Sault College’s environment and outdoor studies department thinks the kit program is “tree-mendous…The goal is to grow clean air.”
Hopefully, not only will this initiative save the world, but also generate some interest in forestry programs at Canadian universities!
This reminds me of a time when forestry wasn’t news, a time when there were no forestry programs in Canada…. I don’t actually remember this time, because it was before 1907. Interesting fact: the University of Toronto started Canada’s first forestry program over 100 years ago. You can read about the history of forestry in UTP’s new book, One Hundred Rings and Counting: Forestry Education and Forestry in Toronto and Canada, 1907-2007.
We’re offering the chance to read a bit of this book for free, online!
Click this link to read an excerpt!
Examining Canada’s first Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto from its founding in 1907 to its hundredth year anniversary, One Hundred Rings and Counting is a detailed account one of the country’s most successful and influential institutions. While its start was marked by opposition from both the university’s uncertainty of the field’s importance and from the provincial government’s concern about how such an institution would affect the government’s control over forests, the faculty has produced a disproportionate number of leaders in world of forestry and beyond.
Demonstrating the Faculty of Forestry’s longstanding commitment to conservation and environmental stewardship, Mark Kuhlberg depicts its struggles with governments and the public to implement sustainable natural resource practices. Using unexamined archival materials, while contextualising the Faculty within the major educational, social, and political changes of the last hundred years, One Hundred Rings and Counting is a solid institutional history that also traces the development of conservationism in Canada.
