News Coverage

“The time to act is now” was the message delivered by outgoing Shawnigan Lake director Bruce Fraser on protecting the Alberni Valley’s watershed.

Bruce delivered that message to a packed Search and Rescue Hall that included local residents, Island Timberlands representatives and city officials during a watershed forum organized by the Watershed-Forest Alliance and Alberni-Pacific Rim MLA Scott Fraser.

Bruce Fraser said that the concerns he’s heard voiced in the Alberni Valley about watershed protection are similar to the worries people are having all around the province, as well as the issues he dealt with in Shawnigan Lake.

“Shawnigan is feeling that human footprint, everything from climate change to gravel beds,” said Bruce, comparing the situation there to the Alberni Valley’s, both in terms of industry encroaching on the watershed and the provincial government’s seeming lack of initiative in terms of dealing with any problems that may arise.

“Our senior governments have basically retreated from the fields in so many cases, leaving us with a damaged environment and too little control to do anything about it,” said Bruce, adding that public support was key to getting a say in watershed planning.

However, Bruce said that Port Alberni is in a better place to take action with its watershed than was Shawnigan Lake, which is an unincorporated electoral area with no municipal council.

“We had to create local civic infrastructure [in Shawnigan Lake] to try to gain some authority to be involved in watershed planning,” he said. “Here you already have a council and you are a municipality, you don’t have to reinvent that.”

Having the civic authority in place means that “city council will have to step up to continue to put pressure on the various interests” in the area, said Bruce.

The recently passed Water Sustainability Act will be key to gaining control of the watershed.

“It has a clause in it that enables local governments to become involved in some of the responsibilities for watershed planning.”

While the details aren’t yet hammered out and regulations won’t be written until 2015, Bruce said that this is the ideal time for Port Alberni to position itself to be a part of the dialogue.

“City council should be having a dialogue with government about their role under the Water Sustainability Act and they should do so as soon as possible.”

That’s the sort of action Scott Fraser is hoping for from Port Alberni’s new city council, some of whom were in attendance at the forum.

Scott said he was frustrated by the lack of action he’s seen from the province. He cited correspondence between Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Steve Thomson and environmental experts that stated that areas currently being logged in the China Creek watershed by Island Timberlands should not be logged as something that should have spurred the province into action, rather than being ignored.

“I need support from local government, from the regional district, from the city of Port Alberni,” Scott said, adding that on his own, he doesn’t have enough clout.

“We still have a chance to have some control over what happens in our region. The local government has that responsibility and I think we’re going to see this local government take that seriously.”

Until local governments pressure the provincial government into taking action, there’s not much that can be done.

“Private land is private land, you can do pretty much what you want with it,” said Scott.

Earlier this week, B.C.'s oldest forest conservationist, 104-year-old Dr. Al Carder — who is older than most of B.C.'s second-growth trees — received the 2015 Forest Sustainability Award from the Ancient Forest Alliance. The award honours his decades of service to document, research, and promote the conservation of B.C.'s old-growth trees. (As Dr. Carder is currently ill with pneumonia, his children, Judith, Mary-Clare, and Andrew, received the award on his behalf.)

Al Carder was researching and raising awareness about B.C.'s biggest trees years before old-growth forests became an issue of popular concern. Along with his books, Carder is perhaps best known for his work to protect the Red Creek Fir, the world's largest known Douglas-fir tree found in 1976 by loggers near Port Renfrew. It was measured and highlighted by Carder. Today the Red Creek Fir is within a Forest Service Recreation Area, and is also listed in B.C.'s Big Tree Registry.

I first heard of Carder when I was a teenager in the early 1990s through the late, great conservationist Randy Stoltmann, who spoke highly about Carder's work and who worked with him to document the province's largest trees. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure to meet Carder in person for the first time. Carder is hard of hearing and plagued with various ailments as you'd expect after living for over a century, so I was impressed with his continued enthusiasm for big trees.

With help from his daughter Judith, he spoke about how he remembered taking a train through the Fraser Valley near Cloverdale and Langley back in 1917. Today those suburbs of Vancouver are known for their box stores, residential neighbourhoods, and farmland. But back then the railway went through a forest “like Cathedral Grove,” lined with towering ancient Douglas-fir trees, including a felled specimen that Carder and his father measured to be over 340 feet (100 metres) tall!

It's amazing to think about what B.C.'s southern coast would have been like a century ago when Carder was born in 1910. Ancient forests, vital for sustaining endangered species, climate stability, clean water, wild salmon, tourism, and First Nations culture, would have dominated the forested landscapes, carpeting the valley bottoms up to the mountaintops and over to the adjacent valleys, unbroken for millions of hectares. This would have included vast stands of old-growth coastal Douglas-fir trees, which today have been reduced to just one per cent of their former extent.

Grizzlies would have roamed the Lower Mainland around Vancouver in those days, while more than 1,000 breeding adult spotted owls were estimated to have inhabited the region's ancient forests. Today, less than a dozen spotted owls survive in B.C.'s wilds.

The unique Vancouver Island wolverine — a 27-kilogram, wilderness-dependent mustelid that can fight off a bear and that once feasted on the Vancouver Island marmot — hasn't been seen since 1992. Many thousands of mountain caribou would have once roamed the inland rainforest of B.C.; today, only 1,500 remain. Coastal rivers and streams, once overflowing with spawning salmon, are now sad remnants of their former glory, degraded by logging debris and silt.

Not only have native ecosystems been collapsing as a result of the resource depletion policies of successive governments, but so have forestry-dependent communities. The overcutting of the biggest and best old-growth stands in the lowlands that historically built B.C.'s forest industry has resulted in diminishing returns as the trees get smaller, lower in value, and harder to reach high up on steep mountainsides.
Today, 75 per cent of the original, productive old-growth forests have been logged on B.C.'s southern coast, including over 90 per cent of the most productive old-growth forests in the valley bottoms. The ensuing second-growth tree plantations, harvested every 30 to 80 years on the coast, fail to support the old-growth dependent species, the tourism industry, the climate, and traditional First Nations cultures in the same way that our original centuries-old forests do.

In a report for the B.C. Ministry of Forests (Ready for Change, 2001), Dr. Peter Pearse described the 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 …”

B.C.'s coastal forest industry, once Canada's mightiest, is now a mere remnant of its past. Over the past decade, about 80 B.C. mills have closed and over 30,000 forestry jobs lost.

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, and very little value-added wood manufacturing.

The B.C. Liberal government's myopic response to their own resource depletion policies has been to open up some protected forest reserves and to relax environmental standards in parts of the province. 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.

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

It's in the memories of our elders like Dr. Al Carder — a conservationist with a deep connection to the natural world from his earliest days — where we can recall our histories and learn the wisdom to make a better world.

Read more: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ken-wu/bcs-oldest-forest-conservationist_b_6239054.html

It might surprise you to learn that there is a place just a few hours from Victoria, B.C. that is home to Canada's version of the American redwoods. It's a place where you can walk amongst groves of centuries-old trees, some with trunks as wide as your living room; where you can swim in pools of emerald-green water by the base of cascading waterfalls; where bears, cougars, and wolves still roam the wild, rugged, temperate rainforest as they have for millennia. And it may come as more of surprise to learn that its days could now be numbered unless something is done to finally protect it.

The place I'm referring to is the Upper Walbran Valley. It doesn't have the catchiest name (it sounds like a type of muffin), but it is a most magnificent place. It is located on Crown (public) land west of Lake Cowichan in the unceded territory of the Pacheedaht Nuu-Cha-Nulth people. The Walbran is home to Canada's most incredible remaining stand of unprotected old-growth redcedar trees, the Castle Grove, as well as the at-risk Central Walbran Ancient Forest, a largely intact, valley-bottom-to-mountain-top forest filled with giant old-growth cedars, delicate limestone creeks, and abundant wildlife. Thanks to the ideal growing conditions in the region, it is here that Canada's temperate rainforests reach their most magnificent proportions.

And it was here in 2004 that I first experienced their true grandeur and witnessed what really constitutes a BIG tree in B.C. — a giant redcedar that is 16 feet (five metres) wide. It was also here where I first learned that not all is well in the woods; that old-growth logging continues relentlessly in many regions of this province, including on Vancouver Island.

That first visit inspired a decade-long passion for exploring wilderness and the backroads of Vancouver Island, hunting for the last pockets of lowland ancient forests and the mammoth trees that lurk within them. One quickly discovers, however, that these seemingly indomitable forests have now sadly been reduced to a tiny fraction of their former extent. Outside of parks on southern Vancouver Island, a century of industrial logging has left us mostly with tattered patches of lowland old-growth forests, poking up above the monotonous tree plantations like tufts of grass missed when mowing the lawn.

In the early '90s, when the nearby Carmanah/Walbran Provincial Park was established, the Upper Walbran Valley and its finest stands of ancient redcedars was left out like a bite from the side of the park, and the best bite at that. The timber industry, with its voracious appetite for giant trees, continued for the next two decades to fragment a large portion of the upper valley, moving ever closer each year to the unprotected central core.

Thankfully, the Central Walbran has, until now, remained mostly intact; when compared to the surrounding area, it truly is the region's largest tract of unprotected, lowland old-growth forest left. On southern Vancouver Island the landscapes are largely clearcuts, big stumps, or tree plantations; where unprotected old-growth forests do remain, they're typically at the high elevations or in scrubby bogs along the outer coast.

You can see, then, why local conservationists became concerned upon the recent discovery of survey tape marked “Falling Boundary” and “Road Location” in the Central Walbran Ancient Forest. I recently visited the valley with AFA activist Jackie Korn to document the survey tape and the surrounding endangered forest with photos and video for the public to see.

In an email from the Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations to my old-growth tree protection organization Ancient Forest Alliance, the B.C. government stated that the Teal Jones Group, the logging licencee with tenure in this area of the Walbran Valley, has not applied for any cutting or road building permits there yet. However, the flagging tape clearly denotes the company's interest in potentially logging the ancient forest. In response, conservationists have renewed their call for the company halt any logging plans and for the B.C. government to protect the Upper Walbran through a new provincial conservancy designation.

Ecological surveys done in the Upper Walbran have revealed the presence of species at risk including marbled murrelets, Queen Charlotte goshawks, red-legged frogs, Vaux's swifts, and Keen's long-eared myotis, as well as cougars, wolves, black bears, elk, black-tailed deer, steelhead, and coho salmon. ­

The old-growth forests of B.C. are vital to sustaining endangered species, climate stability, tourism, clean water, wild salmon, and the cultures of many First Nations who use the old-growth redcedars to build canoes, long houses, masks, and to meet numerous other needs. Yet on the province's southern coast, satellite photos show that at least 75 per cent of the original, productive old-growth forests have been logged, including over 90 per cent of the valley bottoms where the largest trees grow (see recent maps and stats here).

The Ancient Forest Alliance is therefore calling on the B.C. government to implement a comprehensive science-based plan to protect the province's endangered old-growth forests, and to also ensure a sustainable, value-added second-growth forest industry.

Allowing B.C.'s finest ancient forests to be logged is akin to the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria. The rich ecological and cultural histories stored over millennia in our old-growth forests provide records and are part of B.C.'s identity and support endangered species, clean water, wild salmon, tourism, recreation, and an exceptional quality of life for future generations.

Do we need wood products? Yes. But do we need to cut down one of nature's last cathedrals for more two-by-fours and pulp? No. There is a viable second-growth forest alternative that dominates most of the landscapes of southern B.C. now, and if used sustainably, it can allow for a prosperous forest industry. If we've learned anything from the widespread loss of this planet's grandest ancient ecosystems, it's that when they're gone, they're gone. You have but one chance to protect them.

Now is that chance to protect the Central Walbran Ancient Forest, the Castle Grove, and the Upper Walbran Valley — before it's too late.

Read more and view images at: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/tj-watt/not-all-is-well-bc-woods_b_6201668.html