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 ForestNorth America’s Forests: Page 18 Further inland, the Wood Buffalo National Park, bordering Alberta and the Northwest Territories, is the sole breeding ground of the endangered Whooping Crane (Grus canadensis). This enormous park, designated a United Nations World Heritage site, was logged in large clearcuts from the end of World War II until 1992, a tragic loss of old-growth boreal forest (Devall 1993). The logging was stopped by a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund) in conjunction with the Canadian Parks and The Wilderness Society. The suit was based on the Canadian National Parks Act, which states, "The National Parks shall be maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations" (Devall 1993). The Peace River, flowing through Wood Buffalo, is so contaminated by dioxin from the Daihowa pulp mill upstream that natives no longer eat the fish, their major food staple, from the river (Devall 1993).
By the end of 1988, one-third of the land surface of Alberta, Canada-- 221,000 square kilometers--had been logged. Much of Saskatchewan's former forested land--more than one million hectares--has been clearcut and not replanted, nor has it regenerated naturally (Devall 1993). Manitoba, south of Hudson Bay, protects less than 2 percent of its territory from development and logging. In 1989, the Manitoba government opened up an area the size of Ohio, 108,000 square kilometers, to logging (Devall 1993). Logging in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta fueled $10 billion in new pulp mills, major water and air pollution sources (Devall 1993).
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