Our World

Human Impact on the Environment

Some of you may be familiar with the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. It’s a wilderness in northern Minnesota and a haven where campers, fishermen, kayakers, and canoeists can get away from the rest of the world. Humans have always affected their environment so much; it’s extremely rare to find a place devoid of that influence. The BWCA is now protected by federal law, but it wasn’t always. Commercial logging, over 100 years ago, once cleared the area, and the effects are still seen a century afterwards. It’s most evident along the Border Trail, in lakes like Crooked and Basswood, international waters, where the Minnesota-Ontario boundary is drawn down the middle of the lake. The Ontario shore is part of the Quetico Provincial Park, a sort of Canadian equivalent to the Boundary Waters. The Quetico was logged as well, but not nearly to the extent of the U.S., and in some places it wasn’t at all. Look to the Canadian side in those areas and it’s a deep, rich shade of green, an old-growth pine forest never touched by the loggers. This is what the U.S. once looked like, but there’s hardly anyone left who can remember when it did. Now this shore is dominated by bright, slender birch and aspen, the kinds of trees that take only a century to establish themselves, as opposed to the Quetico’s several-hundred year old pines. It’s only that obvious when you know what to look for, but it changes the ecosystem and the effects are evident centuries later.

posted by Anonymous @ 9/23/2006 06:44:00 PM