Check out the news report by Shaw TV on the endangered Central Walbran Valley! TJ Watt and Ken Wu from the Ancient Forest Alliance talk about their goal of legislation to protect all of BC's endangered old-growth forests and to ensure a sustainable second-growth forest industry, and Dan Hager of the Port Renfrew Chamber of Commerce talks about the local business community's interest in seeing the Central Walbran protected for tourism.
FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. – Members of a small but defiant group are pledging to keep protesting the Site C hydroelectric project in northeastern British Columbia, despite being ordered off the land.
They set up a camp on Dec. 31, when BC Hydro and Power Authority issued an eviction notice while pressing ahead with land clearing for the controversial $9-billion dam.
The Crown corporation gave protesters 24 hours to leave the area known as Rocky Mountain Fort, on the south bank of the Peace River, just a few kilometres south of Fort St. John.
It warned that BC Hydro personnel will remove all contents of the camp and deliver it to RCMP but such action had not been taken by Monday afternoon.
Verena Hofmann, a Peace River Valley resident who was at the encampment over the weekend, said contractors appear ready to begin logging a three-kilometre region that is First Nations territory.
“We've just heard that equipment has started up. It looks like they are intending to keep on cutting,” she said on the phone from Fort St. John. “Treaty 8 First Nation people are holding their ground and are not moving from the site, so things are intensifying and changing quickly.”
Hofmann said demonstrators believe BC Hydro has no right to force them off the land in the midst of ongoing legal challenges involving Site C.
Several court cases raise major concerns about the potential impact of flooding from the creation of a new lake on the Peace River and the surrounding valley during construction of the dam.
She said upward of about five people at a time are occupying the west side of the mouth of the Moberly River in rotating shifts. First Nations people and other landowners are staying in a small cabin that was flown to the bank, as well as a hunting tent, she said.
It takes about 30 minutes to walk or less by snow machine to reach an area where contractors are set up, she said.
“There is no physical structure blockading BC Hydro's construction, it's individual people approaching them and reasonably and respectfully pleading with them to cease construction.”
Local people are trying to protect the land – significant because it contains swaths of old-growth boreal forest – until court proceedings run their full course, Hofmann said.
She said the group has asked that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reassess the environmental approval granted for the project by the former Conservative government, in conjunction with the B.C. government.
A spokesman for Site C project said the utility will continue to monitor the situation and is evaluating “all options.”
“BC Hydro respects the right of all individuals to peacefully protest and express their opinions about Site C in a safe and lawful manner,” Craig Fitzsimmons, the manager of communications and issues management, said in an email.
“We are hopeful this can be resolved. We are in discussions with the protesters and local authorities to allow us to resume construction activities.”
The Rocky Mountain Fort was established in 1794 by the North West Company as a fur trading post and is the site of the earliest settler post in mainland B.C.
The dam will be the third on the Peace River, creating an 83-kilometre-long reservoir that's slated to power up to 450,000 homes a year.
BC Hydro announced in mid-December that a consortium of three companies will be paid about $1.75 billion to build the largest components of the Site C development over the next eight years.
Read more: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/bc-hydro-orders-protesters-off-land-near-site-c-dam-1.2723597
Logging company Teal Cedar Products has been granted an extension of an injunction that will keep environmental activists at bay as the company continues to log in the Walbran Valley.
In a decision delivered Monday, the B.C. Supreme Court ordered that until the end of March, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee and other environmental activists must allow the company to carry on its work unimpeded and maintain a 50-metre safety zone from any motor vehicle engaged in active logging.
Teal Cedar Products is part of Surrey-based Teal-Jones Group.
The ruling came as a major blow to the Wilderness Committee, with organizer Torrance Coste saying the result could be permanent damage to the ecosystem.
“If people are discouraged from getting out to Walbran … if no one knows what’s going on, Teal-Jones will run rampant,” he said.
“That’s what we’ve seen in the rest of the [tree farm licence areas] where Teal-Jones is active. Public access to Walbran is critical to keep these last stands of old-growth standing.”
The court’s decision came after a long day of procedural hearings, punctured by muffled shouts from a sometimes vocal and passionate gallery of as many as 65 environmental advocates.
Madam Justice Jennifer Power acknowledged the gallery Monday, noting it drove home the point that Walbran is an area of significant public concern.
However, Power said she was satisfied that Teal-Jones had the right to log the area, and that protesters will now have to keep their distance.
Power also dismissed an application by activist Marlene Simmons for an adjournment of the proceedings.
Power said while she sympathized with Simmons, who represented herself, she was not persuaded to grant the adjournment.
However, Power did include in the order a clause that would allow Simmons or any other activist to have the order set aside with 24 hours’ notice in order to bring the matter back to the courts when they have counsel or additional evidence.
The Wilderness Committee and other activists want to see a ban on cutting of old-growth trees in the Walbran Valley.
Teal-Jones Group gained a permit in September from the province to harvest timber in cutblock No. 4424, a 3.2-hectare area of Crown land in the contentious Central Walbran, for pulp, paper and solid-wood products.
Coste said the cutblock contains 1,000 year-old trees and a densely packed group of old-growth western red cedars dubbed Castle Grove. “It’s a forest unlike any other on the planet,” he said.
According to Teal-Jones’ submissions, the extension of the injunction, which would have expired Monday at midnight, follows three blockades, the last of which saw a man lock himself to a log placed across the road to prevent anyone from going to work.
The injunction will allow legal protests and activities, but stops protesters from interfering with the company’s harvesting operations. Anyone found violating the injunction could be considered in contempt of court.
Activists began blocking Teal Cedar Products Ltd. from road-building work in November.
While the Wilderness Committee and Coste were named by the company in its court application, the activist group says it did not organize the blockades or civil disobedience, but is championing the rights of individuals to stand up for and advocate for the environment.
Teal-Jones’ counsel said it has the legal right to log the area and that the activists’ fight is with the province. And while the company respects the right of activists to protest, it says those blockades have become a safety issue.
Coste maintains the logging company is trying to block access to the Walbran for the law-abiding public. “In a democracy like B.C., we have a right to get out and witness what’s happening in our forests, to witness ecological destruction and to report back on that,” Coste said during a morning protest outside the court. “Teal-Jones is trying to bar that and we’re here to stand up and say the public is deeply concerned about what is happening in the Walbran.”
A lawyer for the Wilderness Committee argued that the 50-metre zone keeping protesters away from the logging equipment is too large and the injunction period is too long. Initially Teal-Jones had asked that it be extended until September.
Coste told a cheering crowd outside the court that the group is standing up for the rights of individuals to protest and defending the province’s forests.
“We are here in court standing up against Teal-Jones today, but a ban on old-growth logging, a legislated solution to this, [has] to come from the province of B.C.,” Coste said. “We need to put pressure on them.”
Teal-Jones may legally be permitted to log the area, but ethically and environmentally it’s wrong, Coste said.
“We don’t have the cathedrals, the castles that other parts of the world have. These are our links back in time and they should be protected as such, as historical monuments,” he told the crowd, arguing the province should ban the logging of old-growth forests this year. “There are no replacements for these forests. A 1,000-year-old forest takes 1,000 years to grow.”
The B.C. government has given away so much power to timber companies that district forest managers no longer have the authority to stop suspect harvesting practices in the public good, a Forest Practices Board report reveals.
The independent provincial watchdog says that in recent years it has seen “situations arise where forestry development was putting local environmental and community values at risk, yet district managers could do little to affect the development and protect the public interest.”
The board adds that “conflicts between resource users could have been avoided if district managers had the authority to intervene to ensure operations would meet local management objectives and respect tenured interests.”
As the provincial officials “closest to the ground,” district managers should receive conditional discretion over the issuance of cutting permits and road permits in “specific and limited circumstances,” the board recommends.
“It would strengthen the district manager’s role in safeguarding the public interest when dealing with matters such as logging on steep slopes, cumulative effects management, visual quality, conservation of species at risk, or conflicts between tenure holders.”
The Forest and Range Practices Act is designed to give forest licensees flexibility to manage harvesting, within a framework of government objectives.
The report says “these objectives place restrictions on logging in certain locations, but licensees are free to operate elsewhere, as long as they comply” with the act and Forest Planning and Practices Regulation.
“It is licensees and their professionals who make the final decisions about how to balance resource values and minimize risks. If a problem occurs, government officials are restricted to dealing with it after the fact …”
Susan Yurkovich, president and CEO of the Council of Forest Industries, said in response that industry is “operating at a very high level of compliance” under the Forest and Range Practices Act and has a set of requirements and expectations against which companies are expected to perform.
She noted as an example that companies are required to maintain a minimum of 1,800 hectares of caribou habitat in the timber harvesting land base but are maintaining 10 times that amount and “expect to maintain that level for the foreseeable future.”
In another report last August, the board concluded that most forest stewardship plans governing forest activities on Crown land do not meet the public’s needs, are not enforceable by government and provide little in the way of innovative forest management.
Vivian Thomas, spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations, said that in response to that report the ministry will be focusing on communicating clear government expectations, improved language for plan objectives, and improvements to measurement and verification of results and strategies. The board’s recommendation for greater power for district managers will be considered as a part of that process.
The board’s findings drew immediate support from the environmental community and those individuals who have fought against the province’s inability to stop controversial logging practices.
“Logging companies have free rein over everything,” said Dan Gerak, owner of Pitt River Lodge, who is fighting to stop the Teal Jones Group from logging his tourist viewscapes and the rainforest habitat of some of the last few grizzlies in southwest B.C.
“Somebody has to get control of these logging companies. They have way too much power.”
Teal Jones is also under fire for logging of old-growth forests in the Walbran Valley on Vancouver Island.
“District managers must be given back the right to say no,” said Joe Foy, national campaign director for the Wilderness Committee, noting government has stripped that right in the name of cutting red tape.
“People attend public meetings thinking that their pleadings to save endangered species habitat or a viewscape or favourite camping area will be heard and acted on by the district manager, but the people might as well be talking to a blank wall.”
Randy Saugstad, a rancher in the Chilcotin, was the subject of two Forest Practices Board reports into the impact of logging practices on the hydrology of his property and earlier this year reached an undisclosed out-of-court settlement with Tolko Industries.
“It should go back to where there’s government oversight,” he said at the time. “There’s no compliance and enforcement anymore. It’s just a free-for-all.”
Informed of the board report, he said: “This couldn’t come at a better time as BC Timber Sales has now — in spite of Tolko’s settling with me — gone up Twinflower Creek and laid out a 300-hectare block to be put up for auction. I have a lawyer involved again but am not looking forward to another six-year fight, especially with the government.” Saugstad’s 160-hectare ranch is bisected by Twinflower Creek.
Here’s a new article by the AFA’s Ken Wu in Focus Magazine about the impacts of old-growth logging on climate change. In particular, it debunks the false notion that logging old-growth forests and replacing them with younger second-growth tree plantations benefits the climate. Scientific research shows that BC’s coastal old-growth forests store two times more carbon per hectare than the ensuing second-growth tree plantations that they’re being replaced with – and that the second-growth plantations are simply trying to re-sequester or re-absorb the carbon that is lost into the atmosphere after logging the original old-growth forests. However, it’ll take 200 years to resequester the released old-growth carbon, which will never happen under the 30 to 80 year rotation ages in coastal BC when our second-growth stands are slated to be relogged. Thus, there is a major net release of carbon – about 50% – when converting old-growth forests into second-growth stands.
