Nature Conservancy Magazine: Summer 2007 - The Last Stand

The boreal forest is North America’s premier bird nursery. The plan to protect more than half its 1.4 billion acres in Canada is one of the largest conservation initiatives in history.

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The Boreal Forest in Canada
Stretching across 1.6 billion acres, the North American boreal forest is one of the few largely unspoiled ecosystems remaining on Earth.

The Conservancy's Global Forest Partnership
This partnership works to advance responsible forest management practices, high-impact conservation transactions and public policies that protect, restore and manage the world’s forests.

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Climb into forest life with the Conservancy.

The Canol Road

The Mackenzie Gas Pipeline project has been a long time coming. First proposed in 1967, it faced almost unanimous opposition from Indian tribes along its route, and after an exhaustive investigation into its effects on aboriginal communities and the environment, British Columbia Superior Court justice Thomas Berger recommended in 1977 that the project be put off for at least 10 years, until land claims could be settled.

Instead, it was shelved for almost three decades. Today, however, with energy demand soaring, the newly elected conservative federal government in Ottawa is pushing hard for the project, as is the Northwest Territorial government and that of neighboring Alberta, where the gas is needed to fuel the massive oil-sand boom gobbling up the boreal landscape there.

In Norman Wells, one town along the course of the proposed pipeline, you can see the history of past efforts to tap Canada’s oil. Unlike most communities in northern Canada that started as fur-trading posts, Norman Wells got its start as a petroleum town, with prospectors lured here in the early 1900s to tap the natural oil seeps.

This remote post is accessible only by air or barge and, in winter, by a treacherous ice road up the river valley — a highway that literally melts away in summer. The wells for which the town is named rose to prominence during World War II, in a frantic attempt to ensure a supply of oil for the American military. To get the crude to the refinery and on to Alaska, thousands of GIs fought summer heat, bugs and frigid winter cold to build a pipeline known as the Canol Road almost 600 miles west over the rugged mountains to the Yukon.

Leaky and inefficient, the Canol wasn’t completed until nearly the end of the war, when the Japanese threat to Alaskan supplies had already faded. It was shut down and dismantled in 1947. Some of the weathered old trucks and heavy equipment left from those days sit outside the community museum. Far more is rusting away in the mountains, where the Canol is now a hiking trail for the adventuresome, a scar slowly being reabsorbed by the wilderness.

Another small oil pipeline was completed along the Mackenzie in 1985. Today, all that shows of it is a grassy strip 30 yards wide, which is popular with caribou and wolves. Parts of the new pipeline will be elevated, bordered by year-round gravel roads, punctuated with compressor stations, and haunted by trucks, helicopters and heavy machinery. No one doubts that the new pipeline will be far more permanent and vastly more intrusive.

Given the size and distance the pipe will run, the scale of the construction will be massive. But the pipeline’s footprint is just the tip of the iceberg: To keep the pipeline running at full throttle over its lifetime, the development will open up new gas fields in the Beaufort Sea and throughout the Mackenzie Valley.

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