The recent release of the BC Timber Sales review drew disappointment from several stakeholders.
Instead of asking why forestry collapsed in the first place, the B.C. government limited the review to finding ways to create growth and competition, provide predicable and reliable market access to fibre, and increase jobs and investment opportunities.
In the absence of acknowledging our dangerously diminished forests and the government policies and forestry practices that have decimated them, the review recommendations are unachievable.
Dozens of sawmills, pulp mills, pellet plants and bioenergy plants have permanently shut down across the province, many more are on curtailments on a month-by-month basis. Thousands of workers are displaced. Industry leaders and economists point toward government policies, first nations consultations, environmental activism, and market conditions as reasons for this collapse.
None of these reasons hold true.
Since British Columbia commenced clearcut logging practices 60 years ago, the supply of primary forests industry has traditionally relied upon are now depleted. The timber harvest land base of 22 million hectares is pretty much clearcut. Companies turned their attention to vulnerable high elevation and low volume forests that had been previously netted out of the timber harvest land base, but these areas too, are now depleted.
Recently, industry has pivoted towards taking advantage of B.C.’s wildfire crisis. With the help of communications experts, the sector has launched a nationwide campaign to convince the public the forestry sector is the only solution to lower the risks of wildfires by reducing fuel load and logging all forests in British Columbia, including parks and protected areas.
Provincial wildfire patterns and international research have shown that most wildfires occur in previously logged areas. Wildfire risk is high because of clearcutting and replanting dense monocrops of conifer trees, then using glyphosate to kill off deciduous trees and broadleaf plants that provide natural wildfire mitigation.
In 2003, the provincial chief forester had suggested a sustainable level of harvest would be 60 million cubic metres or 1.5 million logging truck loads, every year. But he also revealed that industry was putting pressure on government to increase the annual allowable cut to 90 million cubic meters or more.
That chief forester was re-assigned to another ministry, and under the guise of mountain pine beetle salvage logging, industry achieved their goal.
Industry commenced clearcutting extremely large areas. They called it sanitizing the forests. There was no science to support this term, but it resonated with the public. Companies claimed their forestry practices were mimicking natural disturbances.
The problem was that pine beetles didn’t kill every tree on the landscape – but clearcutting did. Some clearcuts in the northern interior are larger than many lower mainland cities.
The sanitization eliminated 84 species of B.C.’s wildlife that den or nest in tree cavities, and it led to the starvation of moose and other ungulates. B.C. government’s own records show that moose populations in the central interior dropped by 70 per cent between 2005 and 2015, the period of mountain pine beetle sanitization.
Forest practices turned natural disturbances into man-made disasters.
As part of industry’s strategy to increase the annual allowable cut, companies convinced the B.C. government the monoculture conifer plantations that had been planted in the 80s and 90s were growing much faster than previously expected – 30 to 40 per cent faster. Yet, 20 years later, forest experts in growth and yield modeling determined that those projections were overstated by up to 40 per cent.
This significant error contributed to erroneously high annual allowable cut determinations. The current allowable cut level is 60 million cubic metres, but the forest sector only managed to cut 35 million.
Industry claims since the chief forester set the level at 60 million, it must be government policy that limits access to the remaining allowable cut. The council of forest industries [COFI] has now suggested an arbitrary allowable cut of 45 million.
The sad reality is that B.C.’s primary forests have been reduced to the point where it is incapable of providing any reliable level of annual cut.
In 2002, in preparation for the new era of industry-led forestry practices, the forest minister sequestered a group of industry executives and lawyers in Victoria to provide input into the proposed Forest and Range Practices Act. The 2002 legislative transcripts covering the debates on the new Forest and Range Practices Act, described this legislation as market-driven and results-based.
The rewriting of this act eliminated any statutory authority for the provincial chief forester and the regional district managers. Despite numerous attempts to impose restrictions on the amount of green timber harvested during the mountain pine beetle period, the chief forester’s requests were, for the most part, ignored.
District managers, frustrated at over-harvesting practices, provided memorandums requesting industry modify their logging, but they too were ignored. By the time this legislation was introduced, B.C. had been clearcut logging for over 40 years and up until the mid 1990s, no consideration had ever been given to the environmental effects of clearcutting in assessing annual allowable cuts.
Over the past 20 years, University of BC forest hydrology researchers determined that clearcutting is causing increased frequency, magnitude, and duration of flood events in B.C. The practice is also leading to increased landslides, terrain instability, drought, and an escalating risk of wildfires.
Lives have been lost from flood events, landslides, and wildfires. Billions of dollars in damage occurred to provincial infrastructure, people’s homes and businesses, ranches and farms, along with billions more in economic losses. Yet government continues to put British Columbians at risk by approving clearcut harvesting.
UBC forest research also determined it takes conifer trees 80 to 100 years to grow tall enough to restore the hydrological integrity of the watershed. The alarming reality is that province-wide, not one clearcut has recovered enough to restore the hydrological integrity of our watersheds.
British Columbians deserve to hear the truth.
It’s time for the Premier to call a commission of public inquiry into forestry.