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Lift on logging restraints would be ill-advised

Aug 7 2012/in News Coverage

As members of a hastily convened committee of the provincial legislature meet to consider a controversial government proposal to escalate logging activities in British Columbia’s already hard-hit Interior forests, questions arise about whether the commit-tee is in any position at all to make an informed decision.

Thanks to the bravery of an unnamed public servant who decided in April to leak a provincial cabinet briefing document that outlined the contentious plan, the provincial government was forced to appoint the committee, consisting of both Liberal and NDP MLAs, and to hold public hearings.

A whirlwind tour of 16 communities in less than a month followed, with the committee, wrapping up its public consultations with back-to-back meetings in Merritt and Kamloops on July 12. As a result, members of the “special committee on timber supply” are now wading through the transcripts of nearly 200 people to appear before them as well as nearly 500 written submissions, before making their recommendations, which are expected in mid-August.

A consistent theme running through many of those submissions is that it would be highly unwise for commit-tee members to side with the government’s proposal to lift limited constraints on logging remnant patches of old-growth forests among others, in an effort to buy a few more years worth of logging for an industry that simply has too much milling horse-power given what forest remains.

The reason why is simple. For more than a decade, the provincial Forest Service – guardian of the public’s forests – has been hammered with deep funding and staff cuts. That, coupled with the ravages visited upon our forests by the climate-change-fuelled mountain pine beetle attack and all of the escalated logging activities in response to it, means that no one in government can credibly claim to know what, exactly, is going on in our forests.

In Kamloops, committee members heard such from Sean Curry, a veteran forest professional. Curry noted that most of us have at least an idea of what’s in our bank accounts. Checking our forest bank account is even more critical given withdrawals in the form of logging, insect attacks and fires, and because interest rates in the form of growing trees are so highly variable. Trees may be healthy one year, dead the next.

Curry’s choice of the banking analogy was obvious. If you don’t check, you risk over-drawing. In other words, we’re relying on younger trees that were planted or that naturally re-seeded following logging to be there in future years. The trouble is we’re not checking up on them nearly enough, despite compelling evidence that that is precisely what we need to do.

The recent work of two Forest Ser-vice scientists tells us why. In 2008, Alex Woods and Wendy Bergerud reported on field studies they did in the Lakes Timber Supply Area. The team found trouble in nearly one out of every five previously declared healthy or “free-growing” plots of trees that they looked at. Significantly, their report was based on fieldwork done in 2005 – before the mountain pine beetle completely overran the region near the community of Burns Lake, where a sawmill burned to the ground at the beginning of this year and that has become a focal point for commit-tee members as they weigh the merits of lifting logging constraints.

By 2007, Woods and Bergerud noted, many of the sample plots they had looked at had subsequently been attacked by the beetle – proof, they said, of the need to do even more assessments, particularly in light of climate change.

This July, a report by Tom Ethier, assistant deputy minister in the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, noted that the problems identified by Woods and Bergerud are more widespread. Of 266 allegedly “free-growing” forest patches in five timber supply areas, “the majority” had experienced tree losses in the decade after they were declared healthy.

The good news, Curry says, is that for modest increases in Forest Service funding and a bit of patience – waiting a couple of years while the field-work is done – we could have a far better idea of what’s in our forests.

This, then, is not the time for the committee to endorse logging increases, a decision that in the absence of good data would be at best irresponsible and at worst highly dangerous.

Ben Parfitt is resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of many forestry reports, including Making the Case for a Carbon Focus and Green Jobs in B.C.’s Forest Industry.

The stump of a 14ft diameter old-growth redcedar freshly cut in 2010 found along the Gordon River near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island.

More logging won’t cure forestry trade’s ills

Aug 1 2012/in News Coverage

The B.C. Liberal government stirred up controversy recently by proposing to remove scenic forest protections in the Harrison, Chehalis and Stave Lakes regions near Vancouver. Their “quick-fix” attempt to provide more timber for logging fails to recognize that the coastal forest industry’s 20-year decline has fundamentally been driven by their own resource depletion policies.

The overcutting of the biggest and best old-growth stands in the lowlands that historically built the industry has resulted in diminishing returns as the trees get smaller, lower in value, and harder to reach. Today, more than 90 per cent of the most productive old-growth forests in the valley bottoms on B.C.’s southern coast are gone, according to satellite photos.

This practice of high-grade resource depletion and the accompanying job losses in B.C.’s forests has its parallels throughout the history of unsustainable resource extraction. As always, those responsible for the crisis deny all evidence that the resource is being over-exploited — until the very end.

Unless the B.C. government reorients the coastal forest industry toward sustainable, value-added second-growth forestry — rather than old-growth liquidation, overcutting and raw log exports — the crisis will only continue.

In a report for the B.C. Ministry of Forests (Ready for Change, 2001), Dr. Peter Pearse described this history of high-grade overcutting: “The general pattern was to take the nearest, most accessible, and most valuable timber first, gradually expand up coastal valleys and mountainsides into more remote and lower quality timber, less valuable, and costlier to harvest. Today, loggers are approaching the end of the merchantable old-growth in many areas … Caught in the vise of rising costs and declining harvest value, the primary sector of the industry no longer earns an adequate return …”

The virtual elimination of old-growth Douglas firs — 99 per cent of them — and Sitka spruce on B.C.’s southern coast has been followed by the current high-grading of cedars, previously a lower-value species. Next in line are the smaller hemlocks and Amabilis firs, sought by new Chinese markets.

However, the B.C. government’s PR spin still aims to convince all that our monumental ancient forests are not endangered. They do this by statistically lumping in vast tracts of old-growth “bonsai” trees in bogs and stunted, slow-growing “snow forests” at high elevations, together with the productive stands with moderate to fast growth rates, i.e. the areas with large trees where almost all logging takes place.

It’s like combining your Monopoly money with your real money and then claiming to be a millionaire, so why curtail spending?

As our old-growth forests are eliminated, so too are the human and natural communities that depend on them.

B.C.’s coastal forest industry, once Canada’s mightiest, is now a mere remnant of its past. Over the past decade, more than 70 B.C. mills have closed and over 30,000 forestry jobs lost. As old-growth stands are depleted and harvesting shifts to the second-growth, B.C.’s forestry jobs are being exported as raw logs to foreign mills due to a failure to retool our old-growth mills to handle the smaller second-growth logs and invest in related manufacturing facilities.

In his 2001 report, Pearse also stated: “Over the next decade, the second-growth component of timber harvest can be expected to increase sharply, to around 10 million cubic metres … To efficiently manufacture the second-growth component of the harvest, 11 to 14 large mills will be needed.” Today, more than a decade later, there is only one large and a handful of smaller second-growth mills on the coast.

Similarly, B.C.’s wildlife are being pushed to the brink by old-growth depletion. More than a thousand spotted owls once inhabited the Lower Mainland’s old-growth forests. Today, half a dozen individuals survive in B.C.’s wilds. The unique Vancouver Island wolverine — a 27-kilogram, wilderness-dependent mustelid that can fight off a bear — hasn’t been seen since 1992. Only 1,700 mountain caribou remain as logging has fragmented B.C.’s inland rainforest. Coastal rivers and streams, once overflowing with spawning salmon, are now sad remnants of their former glory, degraded by logging debris and silt.

It’s not like we haven’t had chances to learn. The pattern of resource depletion, ecosystem collapse, and ensuing unemployment has long been paralleled in our oceans where “fishing down the food chain” from larger to smaller species has caused successive stocks to collapse. Thousands of jobs have been shed along the way.

The most prominent example of this was the loss of 40,000 Canadian fishing jobs with the collapse of the North Atlantic cod stocks, once the world’s richest fishery. In B.C., giant Chinook salmon or “tyees” were once common, and smaller species like pink salmon were heavily targeted only when the preferred species declined. Since the commercial salmon industry’s peak in the 1980s, thousands of fishing jobs have been lost, and the effects of habitat destruction, climate change and fish farm parasites on wild salmon now compound the problem.

The B.C. Liberal government’s myopic response to their own resource depletion policies is to try to open up protected forest reserves. It’s like burning up parts of your house for firewood after you’ve used up all your other wood sources. It won’t last long, and in the end you’re a lot worse off.

To try to defer the consequences of unsustainable actions with more unsustainable actions is precisely what has brought this planet to the ecological brink.

The B.C. government has a responsibility to learn from — rather than to repeat — history’s mistakes. They must forge a new path based on old-growth protection, value-added second-growth forestry, and a diversified green economy.

Ken Wu is the executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance.

Opening protected areas not ideal: Bercov

Jul 31 2012/in News Coverage

Opening protected areas and parks in B.C. to logging wouldn’t be in the best interests of forestry workers, or the industry itself, according to Arnold Bercov.

Bercov is the president of Pulp and Paper Workers of Canada, Local 8, which represents workers at the Harmac pulp mill at Duke Point and Western Forest Products’ sawmill in Ladysmith. His concerns come at the same time that a special committee, struck by the government in May, is travelling across the province seeking public input into ways to add to the province’s wood inventory, particularly in areas in the Interior that have been ravaged by the ongoing mountain pine beetle infestation.

The committee, headed by Nechako Lakes MLA John Rustad, is to submit a report with recommendations to the government on Aug. 15.

To access more timber, the Clark government is floating a plan that includes logging in areas that were previously off limits for environmental or visual quality reasons and changing the boundaries of forest districts to add more timber to the supply. Bercov said that while the focus of the committee is currently on the Interior, he fears that any changes to policy that would allow more logging in protected areas would inevitably apply to the Island.

“It’s just a loser of an idea that doesn’t serve anyone well,” Bercov said. “I predict it would restart the environmental wars over forestry practices in the province and I believe that it would be a huge mistake. While there are no jobs if all the trees are protected, there will also be no jobs after everything is logged. We need to find a balance.”

The Association of B.C. Professional Foresters, environmentalists and even the University of B.C.’s dean of forestry have expressed concerns, specifically over the second look at forest lands that are set aside for ecological reasons.

“The message we want out there is: ‘We are not going to damage our environmental standards,'” said John Allan, president of the Council of Forest Industries, which intends to submit a brief to the committee. “I am struggling with how you would free up anything more than a few scraps of timber without doing environmental damage.”

Bercov suggested better planning and management practices on behalf of the forest companies and the government to ensure a future supply of wood is what’s needed, and not moving into sensitive and protected areas for logging.

“People should make it a point to have their voices heard by the government on this issue,” he said.