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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
 
 

The city of Vancouver says clearing dead wood from Stanley Park is vital for safety. Today, we look at a story about how a local group is challenging its science.
 
 

Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
 
 
 

 
 
 
  1. Mining: Near the Minnesota wilderness, a town by the Canadian border confronts what an end to the mining ban means for its future
  2. Evacuations: Flood-plagued Peguis First Nation in Manitoba prepares for possible evacuation as nearby river rises
  3. Hydropower: B.C. faces surge in electricity demand, looks to dust off big dam plans
  4. Analysis: Ontario is buying clean generation. But its long-term plans remain anything but technologically agnostic
  5. Report on Business Magazine: Governments are on a mission to standardize climate labels on investments
  6. Life: For two British mountaineers, climbing in Baffin Island is now a family tradition
 
 

 
 
 
 
An area of Vancouver’s Stanley Park that saw significant tree removals and other wildfire fuels reduction. Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
 
 

A national crown jewel
 
 

For this week’s deeper dive, a closer look at the challenge of protecting urban green spaces.
 
 

Vancouver’s Stanley Park is home to 600,000 trees, but not all are living ones. Almost a third of the public park’s trees were killed between 2020 and 2023 by a type of moth that consumed the needles of the park’s famously giant trees.
 
 

The city says removing some of the dead trees is necessary to protect people from falling trees and branches, and the area itself from wildfire as debris from dead trees could become fuel in dry conditions. Under dry, windy conditions, piles of dead brush could go up like a bonfire.
 
 
 
Workers rake up fallen branches and debris after wildfire mitigation work in Vancouver’s Stanley Park in February. Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
 
 

“If there was ever a fire in Stanley Park that, God forbid, damaged one of the steel girders on the bridge and resulted in that bridge being closed for weeks or months or longer, that would have just a shocking effect, I think, on the economy of the region,” said Joe McLeod, the city’s associate director of urban forestry.
 
 

The Globe’s Jesse Winter reported and photographed the iconic park and the people who care most about it – but not everyone agrees on what is best for the environment.

 
 

A small but vocal group of park devotees are challenging the science behind removing the trees, which they say amounts to “logging” a national crown jewel.
 
 

Michael Robert Caditz founded the Stanley Park Preservation Society in 2023 specifically to oppose the tree removals.
 
 

“This entire narrative about a looper moth killing trees and the trees are dangerous and they need to be removed, is a complete false narrative,” he said.
 
 
 
A worker cuts off the top of a dead hemlock tree during wildfire mitigation work in Vancouver’s Stanley Park in March. Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
 
 

In an affidavit filed as part of Caditz’s lawsuits to end the removals, ecologist Rhonda Millikin alleged the tree thinning would unnecessarily ventilate the forest and actually increase wildfire risk, not lower it.
 
 

Beyond arguments over which trees should be cut or saved, Jesse writes that what’s happening in one of Canada’s most iconic urban parks underscores the broader challenges of managing city green spaces in the era of climate change.