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RM Rob Mullen Wilderness artist and author who has spent decades canoeing and painting in the boreal forest, and founded the Wilderness River Expedition Art Fellowship to bri...

“So the boreal forest doesn't have a lot of people. None of those far northern regions do. And they're huge. So they just fell off the map for money.”

A Climate Change with Matt Matern · Climate & Energy · September 2026

“So the boreal forest doesn't have a lot of people. None of those far northern regions do. And they're huge. So they just fell off the map for money.” — Rob Mullen, A Climate Change with Matt Matern

Context

Mullen is describing why the world's largest forest was overlooked by conservation funding, which organized itself around biodiversity hotspots: small areas with endemic species at immediate risk. The boreal is the opposite of that on every axis. He adds that when northern latitudes finally did get attention for climate change, the publicity went to polar bears and skipped the forest entirely.

Transcript

A Climate Change with Matt Matern Around 36:07 into the episode
Rob Mullen

were. And my wife was going, Aren't you furious? And I'm like, I got a lot of great canoe trips out of it, and we'll pull something out of this. So just pick up and keep going.

Matt Matern

Yeah, well, that's the way to go. So tell us a little bit about the book and what are the highlights of it as far as you're concerned. And what are your hopes for what it will do out in the community?

Rob Mullen

…like a small area. And that's exactly what the boreal forest is not. So when you were all the funding, this became a funding model for, you know, world, for all the big boys. And all the money for conservation went into these basically these hotspots, which are all stretched, of course, where you're going to have endemic species disappearing is where there are a lot of people destroying habitat. So the boreal forest doesn't have a lot of people. None of those far northern regions do. And they're huge. So they just fell off the map for money. And even when climate change became a big issue and the north was focused on because of the disproportionate effect of climate change on northern latitudes, the publicity machine went right to polar bears in the Arctic and totally skipped over the boreal forest. Polar bears are fantastic and they're at risk. I'm not putting down polar bears, but it was just unfortunate that we totally ignored…

Matt Matern

No, no, I had never heard that. 59% of the forest cutting up in Canada is for paper towels and toilet paper. Toilet

Rob Mullen

paper. Yeah. As NRDC says, we're literally, well, they put it a little indelicately. We're literally wiping our butts with a boreal forest and flushing it down the drain. Well, I guess

Matt Matern

everybody buys one of those toilet seats that has the water thing, you know, you can get rid of the toile need for toilet paper.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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