Certainly. Thank you for the question. I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts.
Silviculture as a tool is a tool available to help us guide the development of forests to produce certain values. Those values can be economic—we can produce products or goods and services that people demand or desire from the forest—and they can be non-market values as well.
In these systems where forests are small, in smaller countries with small forest land bases, with forests they did not inherit from nature beforehand, they've been developed for a long period of time. There can be a significant amount of demand, and I think generally that silviculture is responsive to the market. If we have a market for small-diameter logs, if the supply is low and the demand is high, then we know, through forest science and silviculture and the science of forest growth and yield, that we can produce those values to meet the market.
Why are our systems different?
A professor of mine on silviculture—I'm fortunate to be a graduate of the University of British Columbia as well—said that our forests are inexpensive because we didn't have to pay a lot to make them. We just inherited them when North America was settled and developed by Europeans. It's very easy for us to acquire forest resources at low cost. If you wanted to develop a mine, you would have to dig a hole in the ground and build it out. We have the tools to do these things. It's just a question of whether there's a market value for doing so.
There are also a lot of mechanisms that incentivize different kinds of silviculture. I've argued for many years that silviculture, again, is just a tool that we use to produce certain values. If the value that is attached to a forest is, say, a particular spiritual and structural old-growth value, we can use silviculture and forestry to produce that value. If the value we want is more low-carbon building products and more bioenergy, we can do that as well.
I think the difference between Canada and Europe reflects the incredible supply that we have had of very low-cost forests. We just go out and get them, and there's a relative lack of that in Europe, again, matched with demand.