Welcoming the world to hidden treasure. Volunteers are building boardwalks to Avatar Grove the old growth forest near Port Renfrew. We hear how popular the site is becoming.
Listen here: www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Local+Shows/British+Columbia/All+Points+West/ID/2388712559/
Simon Fraser University is about to give its highest honour to a man who eats mosquitoes to turn his breath into bug repellent.
It's unclear whether the university will award botanist Andy MacKinnon an honorary doctorate this month because of his taste in bugs, or in spite of it.
Each spring, MacKinnon kills and consumes a mosquito in a belief its colleagues will find his breath so foul they'll avoid him for the next seven months. He bagged this year's victim in March on the banks of the Yakoun River in Haida Gwaii.
The unfortunate insect commended itself as a sacrifice by alighting on the left cheek of MacKinnon's face.
“They have a nice little tart tang to them,” MacKinnon says. “A bit like mayflies, but smaller. I Kinnon says. “A bit like mayflies, but smaller. I would encourage you to give it a try yourself.”
MacKinnon – who should perhaps be renamed Dances With Bugs – has eaten a lot of mosquitoes over his 56 years and believes this works. But admits the ritual has no basis in fact.
This is probably a sensible admission coming from a forest service research ecologist revered across B.C. as a guru of botany.
The reverence may have something to do with the six best-selling books on Western North American plants MacKinnon has co-authored over the last 21 years.
It may have something to do with his role in B.C. governments' evolving understanding of the ecology of coastal old-growth.
It may have something to do with the part MacKinnon's sense of humour and guitar skills played in keeping B.C.'s forest sector from splintering into hopelessly embittered factions in the early 1990s.
Anybody that commands the respect of eco-warriors, industry and academia can't be all bad, even with self-induced bug breath.
Ken Wu, executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance, calls MacKinnon the rock star of B.C. botanists and the most knowledgeable person in the province on old-growth forest ecology.
Plants of Coastal British Columbia, MacKinnon's most popular book, is “a bible of botany” on North America's west coast, Wu says. Battered copies hold sway in the book shelves and backpacks of B.C. naturalists and tree huggers, he says.
“In the '80s and '90s and even in some circles today, there was a view that old-growth forests were decadent, disease-ridden ecosystems that had to be replaced by tree plantations,” Wu says. “His work has shown that's just wrong.”
Vancouver-raised MacKinnon managed to thwart nature and nurture by dodging the glowering destiny of a career in law. His father was a judge, both grandfathers and three uncles were judges, his brother and sister are lawyers.
He even married a lawyer, as if to remind himself in the middle of the night of his professional rebellion. But he stumbled into biology, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in botany from the University of B.C. and becoming an expert on seaweed and mushrooms.
“A master's degree in the ecology of micro-fungus is about as unemployable as a person can get,” he says.
Somehow, he managed to get a job with the forests ministry in northern B.C. as he graduated. It was less sombre work than the funeral director job he worked to help put himself through university.
MacKinnon has stayed with the forest service, off and on, for 30 years. Today, he's a research ecologist with the West Coast region.
He could have retired on pension last summer but has no plans to abandon ship.
“I'm just hitting my stride,” he says. This claim is plausible. MacKinnon serves as an adjunct professor at SFU, mentoring dozens of master's students in the university's school of resource and environmental management. Every other summer he teaches a six-week field course in Bamfield on rainforest ecology at University of Victoria.
Each summer he does a one-to-two-week stint as a naturalist on the tall ship Maple Leaf, which cruises the coast from Victoria to Alaska.
“It's a high-end operation so I'm fed really well,” he offers.
A resident of Metchosin on Vancouver Island, MacKinnon's also a sought-after speaker, adviser and field-trip leader. He's also a star guest at mushroom festivals.
“If I was going to be stuck in a rainstorm on a small island on the north coast for a week, he's the person I'd want to be with,” says Ken Lertz-man, a friend of MacKinnon and a professor in SFU's school of resource and environmental management.
BOTANIST ANDY MACKINNON's flair for blending scientific detail with humour has helped his six co-written books collectively sell more than 500,000 copies.
Plants of Coastal British Columbia alone has sold more than 250,000 copies – an astounding number for a book about green shoots in a country where selling 5,000 copies qualifies a book as a bestseller.
But MacKinnon's initial bid to sow his seeds as an author fell on stony soil. His first book on the plants of northern B.C. was rejected by 11 publishers.
“I still have a letter from one of B.C.'s top publishers telling me the idea was stupid,” MacKinnon says.
Edmonton-based Lone Pine Publishing loved the book, and agreed to publish it.
But Lone Pine didn't love one of the book's descriptions and insisted it be removed.
MacKinnon had been cheeky enough to include the common name for dwarf scour-
ing rush. The common name is “swimmer's dink.”
MacKinnon says it was a deliberately juvenile inclusion. But he says the books' sense of fun – all of them include sasquatch tales – have helped them to become popular.
Lone Pine, which has published all of MacKinnon's books, has implicitly acknowledged its error. Swimmer's dink appears in his latest book, Alpine Plants of British Columbia, Alberta and Northwest North America, published in April.
The plant is so named because “the stems are shrivelled like a brash man's penis in a tarn,” the book says.
Five volunteers with the Ancient Forest Alliance at the first viewing platform they built by Canada’s Gnarliest Tree in the Upper Grove of Avatar Grover in Port Renfrew. There is still more work to be done there but they’re off to a good start.
[Sooke News article no longer available]
New maps of the remaining old-growth forests on Vancouver Island and the southwest mainland highlight the large-scale ecological crisis underway in B.C.’s woods.
In the 1990s, conservationists fought for whole valleys. Those are now gone, except in Clayoquot Sound. Today, almost all of our ancient forests are tattered and fragmented.
At least 74 per cent of the original, productive old-growth forests on our southern coast have been logged, underscoring the need for a science-based provincial plan to protect our remaining old-growth forests and for a sustainable, value-added, second-growth forest industry.
Most significantly, at least 91 per cent of the biggest, best “high productivity” old-growth forests in the valley bottoms have been logged. These are the classic monumental stands rich in biodiversity that most people visit and picture in their minds, places like Cathedral Grove, the Carmanah, Walbran, Goldstream and Avatar Grove.
A century of unsustainable high-grade logging has depleted these lowland ancient forests, resulting in diminishing returns as the trees get smaller, lesser in value and more expensive to reach.
The ecological footprint from logging millions of hectares of B.C.’s grandest ancient forests — an area bigger than many European nations — is at least on par with any pipeline or fossil-fuel megaproject.
Scientific studies show that our coastal old-growth forests store two times or more carbon per hectare than the ensuing second-growth tree plantations. Only a tiny fraction of the carbon gets stored in long-lasting wood products. The vast majority ends up decomposing as wood waste in clearcuts, landfills and sewage. It would take 200 years or more for the second-growth to re-sequester all of the released carbon, which won’t happen with our 70-year rotations.
A recent B.C. Sierra Club report showed that just one year’s worth of old-growth logging in southwest B.C. in 2011 released more carbon than the province’s entire “official” greenhouse-gas reductions over three years, from 2007 to 2010.
The dramatic decline of old-growth species reveals our collapsing ecosystems. An estimated 1,000 breeding adult spotted owls once inhabited B.C.’s wilds. Today, fewer than a dozen individuals survive. Marbled murrelets have declined substantially over much of the coast, while in B.C.’s interior, mountain caribou have declined by 40 per cent since 1995.
Across B.C., thousands of salmon- and trout-bearing streams have been decimated by siltation and logging debris.
B.C.’s diverse First Nations cultures are being impoverished, not only by the destruction of salmon streams, but by the disappearance of monumental cedars that many once carved into canoes and totem poles.
The massive export of raw logs has been driven by a combination of the government’s deregulation agenda and by the unsustainable depletion of the prime old-growth red cedar, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce stands in the lowlands that coastal sawmills were originally built to process.
At a critical juncture in 2003, the B.C. government removed the local milling requirement for companies with logging rights so that they didn’t have to retool their mills to process the changing forest profile — the smaller old-growth hemlocks and Amabilis firs higher up, and the maturing second-growth trees in the previously cut lowlands.
Without any government regulations or incentives to retool or add value to second-growth logs, this resulted in three million logging-truck loads of raw logs going to foreign mills in China, the U.S. and elsewhere over the last decade. More than 70 B.C. mills closed and 30,000 forestry jobs were lost. B.C.’s coastal forest industry, once Canada’s mightiest, is now a remnant of its past.
Most of our remaining old-growth forests are “low-productivity” marginal stands of smaller trees with little to no timber value, growing at high elevations, on steep, rocky mountainsides and in bogs. The B.C. government has been spinning a tale that “old-growth forests are not disappearing” with their statistics that fail to mention how much productive old-growth forests once stood, and that include vast tracts of stunted, low-productivity forests to overinflate how much remains. It’s like combining your Monopoly money with your real money and then claiming to be a millionaire, so why curtail spending?
The history of unsustainable resource extraction around the world is filled with examples where the biggest and best stocks have been depleted, one after another, causing the collapse of ecosystems and the loss of thousands of jobs along the way. B.C.’s politicians must not allow this familiar pattern to continue in B.C.’s forests under their watch — or through their active support.
A major change in the status quo of unsustainable forestry is vital. Politicians who fail to understand this fundamental concept don’t deserve power. Those who do will finally bring an end to B.C.’s War in the Woods.
Ken Wu is the executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance.
New maps of B.C.’s forests put together by conservation groups using provincial government data show 74 per cent of productive old-growth forests has been logged and much of the remaining old growth is made up of small, stunted trees.
On the valley bottoms, where the largest old-growth trees grow, 91 per cent has been logged, leaving only nine per cent of the classic old forest with iconic trees, the maps show.
Victoria conservationist Vicky Husband said it’s an ecological crisis due to a century of overcutting the biggest and best trees.
“[It] has resulted in the increasing collapse of ecosystems and rural communities,” Husband said.
Even 20 years ago, there were intact watersheds and whole valleys to save, but now they are all gone, except in Clayoquot Sound, Husband said.
With ancient forests mostly tattered and fragmented, she said, B.C. needs a government that would “have the wisdom” to implement a science-based old-growth protection plan immediately to save what remains. They also need to ensure a sustainable value-added second-growth forest industry, she added.
The maps are based on last year’s inventory data from the Forests Ministry.
The analysis is based on conservative calculations, said Ken Wu of the Ancient Forest Alliance. “The actual amount of logging is probably much higher,” he said.
The depletion of larger trees has left the industry in a financial crunch as the trees get smaller, since they’re worth less but more expensive to reach, Wu said.
The government counters that large swaths of old-growth are protected in park and old-growth management areas.
On Vancouver Island, 46 per cent of the forest on Crown land is old-growth, says a ministry statement: “Of the 862,125 hectares of old-growth forest, it is estimated that over 520,000 hectares will never be harvested.”
But Wu said those figures do not present the real picture. “The B.C. government, for the past decade, has been spinning a tale that all is well in the woods and that old-growth forests are not disappearing, by their promotion of totally misleading statistics,” Wu said.
Much of the old-growth included in the government’s estimates are “bonsai” forests in bogs or at high altitudes, where the stunted trees have little commercial value, he said.
“It’s like combining your Monopoly money with your real money and then claiming to be a millionaire, so why curtail spending?”
Whatever happens in the election this week, it is clear the newly elected premier, whether it is Adrian Dix or Christy Clark, will have to put the environment high on the agenda for early action.
Pipelines and liquefied natural gas development emerged as key, perhaps even defining, issues during the campaign, but there are more problems out there.
Here are 10 things the premier has to act on if he, or she, wants credibility on the green file.
No. 1: Withdraw from the Environmental Assessment Equivalency Agreement that the province signed with the federal government. There is an exit clause in the deal, which essentially gives the National Energy Board the power to do environmental assessments for B.C. By opting out, the province will have a lot more say over pipeline proposals, natural gas processing plants and off-shore oil or gas facilities. The NDP has said it will get out within 30 days. A Liberal government should do the same.
No. 2: Scrap Site C. The province shouldn’t drown valuable farm land that can produce food for thousands of years to provide power to LNG plants that will be relatively short-lived.
No. 3: Bring the rapidly expanding number of independent power projects under tighter environmental scrutiny. Under the Liberals, 55 private hydro projects have been built and another 35 are proposed. But the government has done a poor job of monitoring them, allowing fish kills and other damaging impacts.
No. 4: Bring in legislation to make it illegal to cut any more giant, old-growth trees. The Ancient Forest Alliance alerted the public to plans to log the Avatar Grove, near Port Renfrew, saving it just in time. But the group is now warning the last of B.C.’s ancient trees will soon be lost unless something is done.
Vicky Husband, one of B.C.’s leading conservationists, says the group’s new maps “clearly show the ecological crisis in B.C.’s forests due to a century of overcutting.”
No. 5: Modernize the 150-year-old Mineral Tenure Act, which was drafted during the gold-rush and has given mining companies “free entry” for far too long. The law allows miners to stake claims virtually anywhere they want to in B.C., without consulting the government or First Nations. Should mining companies really be allowed to stake claims over places such as the Gulf Islands? They are now, under an antiquated law that should have been revised when miners stopped using mules.
No. 6: Don’t allow coal mining to expand in the Elk Valley until the companies working there have demonstrated they can stop polluting streams with selenium. The water in some areas is already so toxic it can deform fish eggs and kill aquatic insects. Do we really need to see a two-headed trout before bringing this issue under control?
No. 7: Strike an all-party committee to come up with a plan to take over the duties of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO has been so badly managed that our salmon stocks are in peril. It’s time to stop managing B.C.’s fish from Ottawa.
No. 8: Take meaningful steps to protect endangered species. B.C.’s spotted owl population has fallen from 1,000 breeding pairs to less than a dozen birds. Marbled murrelets are in decline and so are mountain caribou. Extinction should not be acceptable to any government, anywhere.
No. 9: Form an elders council to provide the government with advice on how to best manage the environment. This approach has worked for First Nations for about 10,000 years.
N0. 10: Listen to the Greens. Whether or not the party gets any seats, it has a lot of smart things to say about the environment.
Link to Globe & Mail online article: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/whoever-wins-election-needs-to-take-early-action-on-environment/article11881474/
Environment
“In many ecosystems of B.C., old-growth forest is incredibly scarce — 91 per cent of valley bottom ancient forest growth on the southern coast has been logged of the classic monumental trees. Are you willing to commit to fully ending old-growth logging in any regions or ecosystems of B.C.?”
Ken Wu , Executive Director, Ancient Forest Alliance
Jane Sterk, Green: Yes. It is a policy of BC Greens that we stop all old-growth logging in B.C.
Carole James, NDP: The BC NDP is committed to protecting our province’s environment and coasts and will take measures to protect significant ecological areas including wetlands, estuaries and valuable old-growth forests.
Karen Bill, Liberal: Old-growth forests are not disappearing. There are more than 25 million hectares of old-growth forests in B.C. About 4.5 million hectares are fully protected, representing an area larger than Vancouver Island. Conserving old growth is an important part of long-term resource management. By law, forests that reflect the working definition of old growth must be retained in ecological units to meet biodiversity needs.
John Shaw, BC Communist Party: Yes, all regions of the province containing old-growth forests should be protected and maintained. The provincial government must ban raw log exports, and legislate the processing of timber locally for export as lumber or value-added products under public ownership and control.
The volume of raw logs exported from B.C. more than tripled between 2002 and 2012, prompting forestry workers to join with the Ancient Forest Alliance to push for more stringent log-export restrictions.
During the last decade, 30,000 forest workers lost their jobs and more than 70 mills shut down, said Arnold Bercov, Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada forestry officer.
“The B.C. Liberals have decimated the province’s forestry workforce through massive raw-log exports, industry deregulation and unsustainable jobs,” he said. “We lost both our forests and our jobs. It’s nuts.”
However, Forests Minister Steve Thomson said it was necessary to increase raw-log exports to protect jobs during an economic downturn.
“The increased value available from the export of logs helped keep harvest rates up and that kept people employed and kept coastal communities going,” Thomson said.
“I think we would all agree that we would rather add value here and have those logs manufactured here, but we recognize that, in the economics of the coastal industry, we need exports to keep the level of harvest up. That services mills and keeps additional jobs going.”
Overall exports for the province are about 10 per cent of the total harvest, which makes it important in the economics of the coastal industry, Thomson said.
The union and the Ancient Forest Alliance, a conservation group, want policy changes to protect remaining stands of old growth and to push the industry into retooling coastal mills to process second growth.
Over the last decade, more than 47 million cubic metres of raw logs were exported from Crown and private lands.
The province issues permits for exports from Crown land when logs are declared surplus to the needs of local mills, but the federal government is responsible for export permits from private land.
The figures show that the equivalent of almost three million loaded logging trucks of raw logs were exported from B.C. between 2002 and 2012, said Ken Wu, executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance.
In 2002, according to provincial government figures, 1.5 million cubic metres of logs were exported from Crown lands and 2.3 million cubic metres from private lands.
Last year, four million cubic metres were exported from Crown lands and 2.4 million from private lands.
The lowest years for exports from Crown lands were 2007, with 900,000 cubic metres, and 2008, with one million cubic metres going to China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S.
Wu also blames the province for much of the increase in exports from private lands, since, in 2004 and 2007, Island Timberlands and Western Forest Products were allowed to remove huge swaths of land from tree farm licences.
If that hadn’t happened, jurisdiction would have remained with the province.
Modern mills in the interior of the province are designed to handle smaller trees, but on the coast, most mills have not retooled to process second growth.
That can largely be explained by the government removing local milling requirements in 2003, Wu said. Prior to the change, companies were required to mill logs at specified local mills, but after 2003, many simply shipped them to Vancouver or overseas.
“That allowed tenured logging companies to shut down their mills instead of being forced to retool them to handle the changing forest profile,” he said.
Thomson said that if the Liberals are re-elected, they will work to make the industry as competitive as possible through low tax rates and regulatory costs.
“We have put in over $900 million in investment in the industry, despite the downturn. I would expect, as the market improves, to see investment in the mills,” he said.
Changes in January to the log-export system saw government fees reduced for companies cutting low and mid-grade logs in an effort to increase harvesting while curtailing exports.
The NDP has pledged to limit log exports and reinstate a jobs-protection commissioner.
Environmental groups are suing the provincial government in hopes of saving the last remaining pockets of coastal Douglas fir forests on Vancouver Island.
The Wilderness Committee, ForestEthics Solutions and Ecojustice filed a lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court on Thursday seeking a court order preventing the province from allowing logging on Crown land in the coastal Douglas fir biogeoclimatic zone.
The groups are claiming that the province is violating its own laws, which are supposed to protect ecosystems from destruction.
“This is a greenwash test case,” said Valerie Langer, ForestEthics Solutions forest conservation director.
“The province brags that it has world-leading environmental laws. Clearly this is misleading and it’s about time that the province put some teeth into environmental protection.”
Coastal Douglas fir forests were recognized by the province as endangered ecosystems in 2006. But, since then, it has been logging as usual, said Torrance Coste, Wilderness Committee Vancouver Island campaigner.
“This forest type is listed under B.C.’s forest laws as being at risk, but instead of being protected, the entire forest is being wiped out,” he said.
The issue came to a head with the province giving the go-ahead in 2011 for the logging of DL 33, a patch of coastal Douglas fir near Nanoose Bay, Coste said.
A fraction of the remaining ecosystem is on provincial Crown land, and only a few hectares of that is prime old-growth, which should make it vital for the province to enforce full protection, Coste said.
A Forests Ministry statement said it would be inappropriate to comment on the lawsuit.
There are 256,800 hectares of coastal Douglas fir remaining on southern Vancouver Island and parts of the Fraser Valley and Sunshine Coast, but only 23,500 hectares are on provincial Crown land. Of that, 39 per cent is fully protected, including 1,600 hectares protected under the Land Act in July 2010, the ministry statement said.
About 80 per cent, or 205,800 hectares, is privately owned. The remaining 11 per cent, or 27,400 hectares, is on federal and municipal land.
“The major threat to coastal Douglas fir ecosystems is continued urbanization, not logging,” a ministry spokeswoman said.
Last year, the province formed a partnership with local governments and conservation groups to further protect ecosystems and educate private landowners, she said.
Coste said the record of private owners, mainly large logging companies, is “appalling” and he has little hope the patches of endangered forest will be protected.
The aim of the court case, expected to be heard this year, is to protect what is left of coastal Douglas fir on Crown land, said Devon Page, executive director of Ecojustice, whose lawyers are leading the case.
“Do our laws say ‘protect the environment’ in one clause, but, in the next, provide a loophole to legally destroy it, or is the province legally required to protect these endangered forests and species,” Page said.
“If the government is breaking its own law, then we want the courts to make the province take action to protect the last of these endangered forests.”
When provincial NDP leader Adrian Dix announced his party’s green policy last Monday, Ken Wu of the Ancient Forest Alliance was less than impressed: “The NDP’s environment platform is like a blurry moving sasquatch video in regards to potential old-growth forest protections and park creations. You can’t discern if it’s real and significant, or if it’s just Dix in a fake gorilla costume.”
That’s scarcely a ringing endorsement from a group Dix must be hoping to recruit. If the NDP are to win next month’s election, they’ll need support from environmentalists.
Remember what happened last time. In the 2009 election, the NDP lost the popular vote by a fairly narrow margin, trailing the Liberals 42.2 per cent to 45.8.
Yet the Green party garnered eight per cent of the ballots that year. If the NDP had done better among this group of voters, they might have won. The same was true of the 2005 election. Vote-splitting on the left has cost dearly in the past.
But there’s a problem. Dix can’t match the Greens promise for promise. That would take him too far from the political centre where most of the votes lie.
The environmental platform he laid out testifies to that reality. It’s more remarkable for what it doesn’t contain than for what it does.
The only significant new commitment is a plan to dissolve the Pacific Carbon Trust. More on that in a moment.
Dix reiterated his party’s opposition to a proposed pipeline that would move crude oil from Alberta to Kitimat. He also promised a ban on cosmetic pesticides, and money for park infrastructure.
These are either measures the party must adopt to retain its core vote (opposing the pipeline), or they’re minimalist gestures (the ban on pesticides) calculated to appeal outside the green community. Rather than a streaking sasquatch, the picture they bring to mind is Dix tiptoeing through a minefield.
No mention was made about B.C. Hydro’s proposal to build the Site C hydroelectric dam on the Peace River. Likewise, nothing about old-growth logging, or iron-dumping at sea to improve salmon habitat.
Fish farming or genetically modified crops weren’t mentioned. There was no discussion of grizzly bear hunting, although grizzlies are already “blue-listed,” meaning the species is vulnerable to further predation.
Of course, it’s possible the NDP is keeping quiet about such controversial topics until after the election. Parties often campaign in the centre, then govern closer to their base.
But Dix, like his mentor, former premier Glen Clark, comes from the blue-collar side of the party. Environmental restrictions that put jobs at risk in forestry or the fishery might be a bridge too far for him.
There is, however, a huge area of uncertainty. As noted, the New Democrats are planning to dissolve the Pacific Carbon Trust, a Crown corporation that helps public- and private-sector agencies reduce their carbon “footprint” by selling them “offsets” that reduce greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.
Last month, provincial auditor general John Doyle published a scathing review. Doyle found that some of the alleged offsets were far less effective than claimed. Dix used this report as justification for killing the trust.
There are indeed very real problems with carbon trading. The same difficulties have cropped up in other countries. But does that mean cap-and-trade is now dead in B.C.?
Who knows? Dix said only that some of the trust’s functions would be assumed by the Climate Action Secretariat. That is hardy a full or convincing answer.
It appears, on this central issue, that the NDP are unwilling to take a clear stance for now.
Perhaps the blurry sasquatch isn’t such a bad metaphor after all.
Read More: https://www.timescolonist.com/editorial-ndp-unclear-on-environment-1.140177
