Long before conservation became a formal program, Irving Woodlands foresters were quietly keeping track of places that should not be cut. Four decades later, their private lists have become a 2,419-site conservation system—making them this year’s ECOlogical award winner in the Land-Based category.

The special spots

Sometimes, that might be a stand of old trees. Sometimes, a rare plant. Or a waterfall, a salmon pool, or 30 great blue heron nests clustered in the tops of white birch, red maple and trembling aspen. Whatever the feature, the reaction was the same: this place was different. Leave it alone.

In the early 1980s, foresters working for Irving Woodlands—a division of J.D. Irving Limited based in Saint John, New Brunswick—who found these places, kept track of them in notebooks, in paper files or simply in their heads. Long before conservation became an industry catchword, it existed here as a private map, held in the minds of people whose living depended on harvesting trees, showing where their own machines should not go.

Andrew McCartney, science director for Irving Woodlands, says the impulse grew naturally in its army of woodsmen and women. “We always say the Maritimes are home,” he notes, emphasizing the last word. “That’s where we’re located. That’s where the family’s from. That’s where we live. That’s where we work and that’s where we play.”

Today, what began as an informal collection born of personal missions has become Irving Woodlands’ Conservation Areas Program—a permanent, internally-funded system embedded in the daily work of managing, harvesting and renewing forests. Formalized in 1996, it turns an observation in the woods into an enforceable boundary: a feature is identified, assessed, mapped in the company’s geographic information system and excluded from harvesting and other operations.

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