The Past Speaks

Laurentian University history professor Mark Kuhlberg has recently published One Hundred Rings and Counting:  Forestry Education and Forestry in Toronto and Canada, 1907-2007 (University of Toronto Press).

Commissioned by the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Forestry, the book examines the history of the Faculty, which was the first in Canada and one of the country’s most influential institutions, from its founding in 1907 to its 100th year anniversary in 2007.

While the Faculty of Forestry’s beginning was marked by opposition from both the university’s uncertainty of the field’s importance and the provincial government’s concern about how such an institution would affect control over forests, the faculty has produced a disproportionate number of leaders in the world of forestry and beyond.

Demonstrating the Faculty of Forestry’s longstanding commitment to conservation and environmental stewardship, Kuhlberg depicts its struggles with governments and the public to implement sustainable natural resource practices. Using unexamined archival materials, while contextualising the Faculty within the major educational, social, and political changes of the last hundred years, One Hundred Rings and Counting is a solid institutional history that also traces the development of conservationism in Canada.

Born and raised in Toronto, Kuhlberg earned his undergraduate history degree from UofT and Master’s and PhD (both history) from York University.  His doctoral dissertation analyzed the Ontario government’s approach to the province’s pulp and paper industry between 1894 and 1932; he is currently revising it for publication with UofT Press.

Kuhlberg’s field of expertise is forest history.  He has published numerous articles that address topics ranging from industry’s forestry initiatives during the 1920s to the mismanagement of First Nations timber in the first half of the twentieth century. Over the last decade he has been retained by several First Nations to substantiate their timber and flooding claims. Kuhlberg is also a board member of the Forest History Society, based at Duke University in North Carolina, and is a founding member of the Forest History Society of Ontario.

He now serves as a volunteer member of Sudbury’s Re-greening Committee (VETAC) and the Local Citizens’ Committee for the Sudbury Forest.

Although he beams when he speaks of the 20 seasons he spent working in the treeplanting industry in northern Ontario and Alberta (1984-2003), his proudest achievement is his family.  It is composed of wife Cindy, two “energetic” kids, Nolan (3) and Carling (5), and their wonderdog, Fernie.