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BC Timber Sales (BCTS) has decided to drop the cutblock known as the Roberts Creek headwaters ancient forest from its future harvesting plans, BCTS planning forester Norm Kempe has confirmed.

The 15-hectare cutblock, designated as DK045, had been removed from the current timber sale for Mount Elphinstone after a team of scientists identified “unique ecological/cultural attributes.”

“We did that in late August, and as a result of that and concerns we heard from the public, we decided to let this one go,” Kempe said Wednesday in an interview.

After Elphinstone Logging Focus (ELF) “managed to elevate the issue in the public’s eye,” Kempe said his office was contacted by “a number of individuals” requesting the cutblock be permanently set aside.

“And we said OK. It’s part of the consultation process,” he said, noting the status of the cutblock had been “a running issue” for more than two years.

ELF hailed the decision in an Oct. 30 press release.

“For three years we held back logging plans, and so it’s very rewarding now to know that this magnificent stand will remain for its own sake and for future generations to appreciate,” Ross Muirhead said.

Containing culturally modified trees, more than 340 rare Pacific yews, and yellow cedar and hemlock that are up to 1,800 years old, DK045 is “a very special forest,” Muirhead added.

“We’d like to thank all those who supported the campaign, including BCTS staff who considered new information we brought forward about this block,” he said.

While DK045 was removed from the current sale, about 53 hectares of old growth forest in Dakota Bowl is still included in the BCTS harvesting plan for Mount Elphinstone.

This Monday, Nov. 4, Kempe said he would be accompanying a carnivore specialist from the Ministry of Environment into Dakota Bowl to evaluate the area for bear dens. ELF has called for BCTS to designate two of the remaining four cutblocks as a wildlife habitat area, due to the high number of black bear dens.

“That’s something we manage anyway,” Kempe said. “If we encounter a den that’s active, then we’re stopping. We’re not cutting right through.”

Kempe said BCTS’s logging plans for Dakota Bowl address concerns about slope stability and impacts on the Dakota Creek community watershed.

“We think at this stage we have a pretty good plan,” he said.

He also noted that BCTS, in its 10 years of existence, has not logged any old growth on Mount Elphinstone, although about 150 hectares had been identified for logging.

Of the 150 hectares, he said, about half has been dropped from future harvesting plans, largely due to concerns from the public and the Sunshine Coast Regional District.

“We are not just managing for timber values on Mount Elphinstone. We get it, that there are other issues,” he said.

Read more:  https://www.coastreporter.net/article/20131102/SECHELT0101/311029999/-1/sechelt/bcts-drops-headwaters-block-from-future-plans

With the recent announcement that two sawmills in the communities of Quesnel and Houston will close with the loss of more than 430 jobs, the time has come to face an unpleasant but necessary truth.

Our forests are so depleted as a result of the unprecedented Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak and more than a decade-long logging frenzy in response to it, that we cannot possibly sustain the sawmilling industry that we currently have.

The provincial government has known for years that this would happen, yet did nothing of consequence to prepare for it.

Worse, it now appears to be using the unfolding crisis to set the stage for the virtual privatization of British Columbia’s public forests, a move that it knows full well most members of the public oppose.

To achieve that goal, Premier Christy Clark and her forests minister, Steve Thomson, are deliberately perverting the work, report and recommendations of a bipartisan committee of the provincial legislature on which both Liberal and NDP MLAs served.

The government is misconstruing the work of that committee to suggest that after touring the province and canvasing public opinion, committee members recommended a course of action that would result in the door being thrown wide open to a handful of forest companies gaining de facto control over most of our public forestlands.

Nothing of the kind happened.

Yet, in June of this year, Clark instructed Thomson in a formal letter to proceed with enabling legislation that would allow the granting of private tenures on Crown land known as Tree Farm Licences (TFLs).

The biggest winners in such a move would be just five companies, two of which, Canfor and West Fraser, are behind the recent sawmill closure announcements.

Clark’s instructions are a complete reversal of her government’s pre-election decision in March to pull such a plan from the order papers where it was within a hair’s breadth of becoming law.

Since then, the B.C. Liberals have promised that there would be full public consultation of draft legislation to enable the conversion of public forest tenures.

The details on what that promised consultation will look like, however, are as yet anyone’s guess. Yet the promised consultation process could begin later this fall.

In the meantime, Liberal MLAs and forests ministry officials have allegedly been meeting secretly with municipal mayors and selected First Nations’ groups to convince them that the establishment of private forest tenure monopolies is in their best interests.

Meanwhile, 434 mill workers at Canfor and West Fraser sawmills are contemplating the pending demise of their jobs and rumours abound that up to 10 more sawmills are vulnerable to closure at a further loss of thousands of jobs due to a growing lack of timber.

In the face of known, unprecedented uncertainty for numerous Interior communities and First Nations dependent upon forestry for their livelihood, this is most decidedly not the time to be making fundamental changes to who controls what by way of our publicly owned forestlands.

Instead, government needs to show long absent leadership.

That leadership begins with a solid commitment to reassess available timber supplies everywhere in the province, to plant trees and to lower approved logging rates to levels in keeping with what trees remain available to log.

Anything less will result in even deeper pain for workers and communities in the months ahead.

In tandem with that, the government should also put a halt to the flagrant jockeying for position now in evidence by Canfor and West Fraser. Both companies not only simultaneously announced that they would be closing sawmills — in and of itself a highly unusual event — but both of them also concurrently announced that they intended to swap logging rights one with the other.

It looks very much like those swaps are intended to give Canfor uncontested, monopolistic control over the forests in the Houston area and to give West Fraser a virtual lock on forests in the Quesnel region.

Further mill closures would almost certainly lead to more horse-trading, all in anticipation of the government then handing the companies the keys to the treasure chest by allowing them to convert their newly amalgamated holdings into TFLs.

Our forests are, indeed, a public treasure.

But the treasure chest has been looted badly. And now is not the time to let what remains be signed away forever under lucrative TFL agreements that reward a handful of companies at the expense of the many.

Now is the time for government to do what it is supposed to do and lead the way to a healthier, more sustainable future for our forests and rural communities.

Read more: https://blogs.theprovince.com/2013/11/03/anthony-britneff-the-liberals-forest-plans-are-not-sustainable/