When the publisher of Forest Book asked if I'd be interested in writing the story you're reading, I turned him down.

It wasn't that I didn't feel qualified to do a comparison of forestry and wood processing in the US and Canada. It was that I'm an American and it's widely believed that Americans don't know anything about what happens in Canada.

Besides, we're the enemy. We're the guys that insist that Canada's sawmills and panel manufacturers compete with us on a level playing field. That's what the ongoing softwood duty dispute is all about - and that's why the family-owned sawmills in the western US have so many good lawyers on staff: to keep Canadians honest. Just kidding; the truth is that you can't get out of bed in America without the services of a good lawyer. If you try, there's a good chance some malcontent will take you to court.

So let's put subsidized stumpage and the softwood lumber dispute on the back burner for a few minutes so we can honestly plumb the depths of our differences. Who knows, we might even veer close to the real reason why so many US sawmills watch our shared international border like hawks.

I'm a big fan of most everything Canadian. I lament the fact that I cannot speak French because I just love Quebec City. My wife and I enjoy travelling in Canada, and it doesn't much matter if we're in our car or on a train. It's a beautiful place with a relaxed atmosphere and friendly faces that are increasingly difficult to find in the United States. We're wound too tight down here. It's hard for us to relax.

But Canadians have figured it out - and I admire them for it.

My first full immersion in Canada's forest products industry came in the spring of 2004. I got a call from Claude Leger, an administrative assistant who was then working for the Canadian Forest Service. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in devoting an entire issue of Evergreen Magazine to forests and forestry in Canada. He explained that the funding would come from Canada's provincial forestry agencies and that he'd help me arrange an appropriate travel schedule. I could hardly believe my ears. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. Who in their right mind would turn down a free trip to Canada?

And what a trip it was. The research alone, took more than six months. I also had to hire several Canadian writers to help me with the project. Canada is simply too big for one writer to tackle - especially if that writer is an American who is sweating bullets about getting the story right in all of its exquisite detail.

The 64-page issue, which we titled "Canada: Reaching for Forestry's Holy Grail," turned out to be one of the best publications we've done in the 22 years we've been in the forestry education business. In fact, I count myself lucky to still have four copies in my possession. The rest were snapped up in a proverbial heartbeat.

The comparisons I'll draw in this essay are largely the result of my having spent a good deal of the summer and fall of 2004 tramping around Canada. I'm sorry to say that time and budget made it impossible for me to venture east of Quebec City, but I saw much of what there was to see from there west to Vancouver Island. The level of professionalism I encountered everywhere I went was the most impressive of many Canadian traits I came to admire. Canadians remain deeply committed to both forestry and the forest products industry. I wish I could say the same about the US.

I can sum up the major difference between forestry and forest products manufacturing in our two countries in just two sentences: Canada's governments - federal and provincial - are doing everything in their power to improve their forest practices and to build up their forest products industry because they know it is a vital component in their country's economy and they are very proud of it. Our own federal government no longer practises forestry on lands it controls, hates our industry - despite the fact that it employs more than one million workers - and is doing everything in its power to run it out of the country. It's working.

Increasingly, major manufacturers in the US are investing capital in the southern hemisphere, where it is welcomed with open arms, where commercial timber grows to maturity much faster than it does in the northern hemisphere, and where land, labour, and regulatory costs are a fraction of what they are in the US - competitive advantages that make it possible to build state-of-the-art wood processing facilities in the middle of nowhere and make them pay. Doomsday rhetoric to the contrary, these plants are employing the most advanced pollution control technologies known to humankind.

I fully expect this trend will continue because the political and regulatory climates in the US have become so toxic over the last 20 years. Under the guise of protecting the environment, our federal government has made it virtually impossible for companies to amortize, much less recover, their long-term capital investments in forestry and wood processing technologies.

Ours is a very litigious society, and nowhere is our "sue the bastards" mentality in finer form than in our industrial sectors, including forest products manufacturing. Federal air and quality regulations - which are mirrored at the state level - have become little more than "gotcha" games. There was a time when companies had to put up with this costly nonsense, but not anymore. Now, thanks to globalization, capital is fleeting. It can move from a hostile climate to more friendly environs at the speed of light. And it is.

One of the most interesting people I met while researching our Canadian issue was a man named Jean Cinq-Mars. He was (and perhaps still is) the president of Wildlife Habitat Canada, a non-profit foundation created by Canada's federal government in partnership with several Canadian conservation groups. The organization promotes stewardship and applied science in resource management - which separates it from most environmental groups in the United States. Resource management isn't even on American environmentalists' radar screens. Nor is applied science. Science, they insist, is too risky. Preservation - not management - is for them the only answer.

I asked Mr. Cinq-Mars why it was that his organization did not include litigation in its conservation strategy. His answer left me momentarily speechless: "We get money from the federal government, so it would not be acceptable for us to lobby. And litigation designed to stop activity or lock up land is unknown in Canada. Mainly, we try to raise awareness of problems and propose structural and lasting solutions."

By contrast, US environmental litigators lobby constantly, and ring the federal cash register on a regular basis. They can do this because our crazy environmental laws allow them to collect money from our government whenever they win a case - and they frequently win, not because they are right, or because any environmental harm has been done, but because our laws and regulations are about process, not problem solving. Solving problems is the last thing most members of US environmental groups have on their minds because if problems are solved, they're out of work. No wonder environmental lobbying and litigation have become billion-dollar-a-year industries in our country.

Mr. Cinq-Mars also confirmed something else I have long suspected. Very simply, Canada is not a litigious society. In many small lumber towns in Canada, suing and causing someone to lose their job could get you lynched in the nearest public square.

It's a long way between towns in Canada, and most Canadians seem to understand that jobs, especially good paying jobs, are precious. There is an all-for-one and one-for-all commitment that simply does not exist in the United States. The cultural divide that distances America's consumers from their rural resource producers grows wider by the day. It is heartbreaking to watch, but the fact is that we've become such a rich and self-possessed country that most of us don't give a damn whether our neighbours live or die.

It helps immensely that most forest land in Canada is owned by the provinces. Decision making occurs much closer to the ground, and there is significant involvement on the part of communities and organizations that have everything to gain - and much to lose, both economically and environmentally - if forests aren't properly managed. Rural America has been disenfranchised from the public forest planning process. We can only stand in envy of Canada's much more democratic approach. (Oh, that most of our federally owned forests were owned by the states in which those lands are located!) State forests in our country are far better managed than federal forests. So are private lands, for that matter. In fact, private lands provide far more wildlife habitat than do federal lands.

But our timberland ownership pattern also defeats us. East of the Mississippi River, about 70 percent of all timber land is privately owned and 30 percent is publicly owned. But west of the Mississippi, where our softwood lumber industry is concentrated, the percentages are reversed - and our major western landowner is a federal government that no longer manages the public's timber resources. The prevailing view seems to be that it's better to let it all burn to the ground than manage it in a way that would produce jobs and wood products. Such thinking is routinely ridiculed.

This is why our pulp, paper, and panel industries are so heavily concentrated on private timberlands in the US southeast, far from most of the federal silliness. In my opinion, the only reason our dimension lumber industry is still very much a western industry is because Douglas fir and western larch - the two finest structural building materials on earth - grow here. But the harvest is limited to state, tribal, and private timberlands. Our federal timber sale program collapsed after the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species in 1990.

Last I knew, Canada did not have a federal endangered species act, but it did have species-at-risk regulations designed to give forest managers the opportunity to use the best available science as a beginning point in the protection, creation, or expansion of species habitats. What a great idea. But you won't see it here. Nineteen years have come and gone since our government listed the northern spotted owl as a threatened species, and they still haven't come up with a plan for protecting or expanding owl habitats.

Why? Because protecting owls was never the issue. The issue was finding a way to shut down the federal timber sale program in Douglas fir forests that owls occupy. It worked. Our federal timber sale program, which once provided about 14 percent of America's softwood lumber, is gone. But owl numbers continue to decline, despite an end to timber harvesting that was supposed to have been the problem. And why is this? Because wildfires are destroying the very habitat in which owls nest and reproduce. We could reduce this risk by thinning overstocked stands that provide habitat for many species, including owls, but special interest groups and their friends in Congress have taken both applied science and adaptive management off the table, so owls continue to disappear, making a mockery of well-intended federal legislation that has been twisted seven ways from Sunday by environmental litigators.

My Canadian friends tell me that several US environmental groups have established beachheads in Canada since we completed our Canadian issue. That's very unfortunate, but it leads me to a good stopping point in my story. Were I a Canadian sawmill owner, I'd worry a lot less about trying to find ways to circumvent the softwood lumber agreement and I'd worry a lot more about modernizing my mill, keeping radical environmentalists at bay, keeping good science in the game, and telling my story to Canadian provincial voters day in and day out, year in and year out.