Rural Urban Forestry, Part 3 of 3:
Environmental Governance
and Canopy Cover Loss in the
Wildland-Urban Interface
Story and photos by Alexander Martin
ISA Board Certified Master Arborist, Co-Chair
of the Canadian TREE Fund, and Director of
Ironwood Urban Forestry Consulting Inc.
The past several years has seen intense scrutiny of forestry prac-
tices in North America. Recently, the protests in the Fairy Creek
Watershed on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia saw the
arrest of over 1,000 protesters by early 2022, replacing Vancouver
Island's War in the Woods protests in Clayoquot Sound (1993)
as the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.
Despite the scrutiny of forestry practices and rampant urbanization and
forest fragmentation, urban forestry governance has received less atten-
tion. In this third and final part of the Rural Urban Forestry series, I tell
stories of environmental governance, beginning first with a historical
example and the telling thereafter of two personal anecdotes related to
canopy cover loss, presenting issues of social and governance conflict.
28 CityTREES
