In Abitibi-Témiscamingue as in the rest of the province of Quebec, forest governance remains a deeply centralized domain of public administration. The forestry industry has the widest imprint on the province’s shared commons and among the strongest voices at the negotiating table, yet it keeps expressing its dissatisfaction with regard to the current regime and repetitively clashes with other stakeholders in its promotion of its own mercantile logic. The numerous and often contradictory laws regulating forestry ignore for the most part the First Nations’ recognized rights and the forests’ place within their culture and economy. Hunters, campers, tourists and other advocates of nature currently benefit from a rather inconsistent access to forests, and these rights might eventually be called into question; already, their activities appear to necessitate a stronger monitoring and reglementation framework if we are to ensure the health and sustainable use of forests. Scientists, ecologists and activists strive to give a voice to science for the benefit of all the concerned stakeholders, but they often prove silenced by other, "heavier" interests. Meanwhile, the animal and vegetal kingdoms, construed as both users and products of these milieus, clearly enough must have some kind of an opinion with regard to all this? But their voices, spoken in such a foreign idiom, have traditionally been ignored, invisiblized.

The present proposition aims to create a space, an architecture, where differing voices asserting their respective rights to the forest as a common good would share a forum to debate in a constructive fashion the way to defend the health, sustainability and longevity of forests, all the while accounting for current issues of climate change and world-wide deforestation. Information technologies are to be leveraged in a way to access and amplify the voices of both human and non-human actors, facilitate their debates within this new parliament of the forest and promote new forms of "nature politics" in a region of Quebec still yet defined by resources extraction.

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