David Broadland

The exploitation forest economy brings dwindling forest-related employment. IN THE YEAR 2000, there were 101,000 direct jobs in BC’s forest industry: 35,500 in forestry, logging and support services; 47,800 in wood product manufacturing; and 17,700 in pulp/paper manufacturing. By 2019, only 16,100 jobs were left in forestry, logging and support services; 21,000 in wood product manufacturing; and 9,000 in pulp/paper manufacturing. Half of all jobs in the forest industry disappeared in just 20 years. To understand where BC needs to look to increase forest-related employment, we really need to understand why that large decrease in forest-related jobs occurred, and in which direction the level of employment is likely to go if the business-as-usual course is continued by BC’s government. By “business as usual,” I mean the continued destruction of primary forests by large corporations like Canfor, West Fraser and Western Forest Products. When we mash all three sectors of the industry together, its record of direct employment looks like this: To begin with, we know that half of all the jobs didn’t disappear as a result of cutting half as much forest. The chart below shows how the actual harvest has changed since 2000. In the first 5 years of that period, the harvest averaged 76 million cubic metres per year. In the last 5 years it averaged 65 million cubic metres. That’s a drop of about 14 percent in the average volume cut per year, yet half of the jobs disappeared. The logging industry’s view on job loss was captured in a 2017 editorial in a BC Truck Logger’s Association newsletter. It attributed the job loss to three sources: Manufacturing productivity gains accounted for 38 percent; logging productivity gains 27 percent; less manufactured wood products 22 percent; reduced harvest 10 percent; and log exports 4 percent. Those “productivity gains” were all a result of technological change. For example, many individual fallers with chainsaws were replaced by feller-bunchers. Sawmills became bigger and more automated. Since that direction is likely to continue as artificial intelligence and industrial robots seep into the industry, employment derived from industrial forestry is likely to decline even further as a result of future “productivity gains.” This machine allows more forest to be cut by less people The Truck Logger’s Association account of “less manufactured wood products” pointed to the decline in the use of paper. Younger generations use the internet for information and services that their grandparents found in telephone books and newspapers. That change will accelerate as younger people increasingly make choices informed by the need to respond to climate change. A clear sign that this trend is continuing is the recently announced permanent closure of the paper mill at Powell River, which began operations in 1912. Another change that will continue to have a profound impact on the number of jobs in logging is the shrinking availability of primary forest. Chris Harvey, a forester and spokesperson for the Teal Jones Group, noted in 2016 that “old growth is an absolutely essential part for us to harvest. We can’t be economically viable if we log 100 percent second growth. And this is true for other companies as well.” While some companies don’t want to let go of cutting primary forest, others are even more primitive in their outlook about what’s possible. In 2020, a spokesperson for Mosaic, the joint management company for both Island Timberlands and TimberWest, stated that without being able to export raws logs, its operations would not be economically viable. If we take these companies at their word, logging is only viable if it can continue to accelerate climate change, destroy ancient forested ecosystems, and damage our economy. These harms will become increasingly indefensible as the planet gets hotter and forest employment dwindles further. The movement to protect the remaining primary forest in BC is getting stronger, not weaker, and has a solid scientific underpinning that links loss of primary forest to biodiversity collapse and climate change. Why would the tiny number of jobs remaining in the primary-forest-dependent logging industry outweigh the urgent need to protect our life support systems? By 2019, jobs related to this destruction amounted to only 1.8 percent of BC’s total workforce. Whether an industry with nothing to harvest but second-growth trees would be economically viable is unknown, but significantly smaller trees will mean a higher degree of mechanical harvesting will be possible, likely reducing employment further. The lumber from younger, smaller-diameter trees with a higher percentage of sapwood will be less valuable as a construction material, thus lowering demand for BC wood products. Moreover, it is now clear that the growth and yield of second-growth plantations has not measured up to the predictions of BC’s timber supply analysts. All over BC, timber supply is falling. Predictions made in 2004 now appear to have been far too optimistic. A wildly optimistic timber supply forecast made in the 2004 State of the Forests report. Using faulty growth and yield models, the ministry of forests predicted timber supply in 2020 would be about 50 percent higher than it has turned out to be. In 2004, the ministry was expecting the Mountain Pine Beetle to have a greater impact on timber supply than it actually has had, so the beetle was not the cause of the optimism bias. All of these factors point toward continued falling employment in the logging-milling industry. The fall-down in pulp and paper production in BC means the largest market for the most voluminous product of BC logging—wood chips and sawdust—is collapsing. The only alternative, so far, for getting rid of all that low value waste is to compress it into pellets and send it overseas where it is burned for heat, a process that creates more carbon emissions per unit of thermal energy produced than coal does. The shear backwardness of BC’s forest industry is unlikely to attract young people looking for long, meaningful careers. Pellet-making is more likely to be seen as a dirtier job than mining coal than greenwashed “bioenergy.” Indeed, the forest industry, for all its attempted greenwashing, is having difficulty filling available jobs. In Ontario, one forestry company has begun experimenting with remote-controlled logging trucks due to the shortage of drivers. It seems likely, then, that the halving of employment over the past 20 years will continue through the next 20 years. Given the industry’s already small contribution to overall employment in BC, what political leverage will 25,000 workers have? Industry employment has already reached such a diminished state that, given the huge public subsidization of the industry, it would be less costly for BC taxpayers to provide employment supports as a way of transitioning current forestry workers into less subsidized employment. The Province, through its Bridge to Retirement program, has already headed in that direction. A far more appropriate kind of forest-related job will emerge, one far more suited to getting through the climate emergency and reversing the biodiversity collapse. What will be needed in the future is expertise and a workforce for protecting forests from fire, disease and insect infestations. Forests are already more valuable standing than as lumber, sawdust and forest fire fuel. Our hired bean-counters just aren’t thinking clearly. While engineers elsewhere try to design and build expensive equipment for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, BC already has the “equipment” to do that: Its remaining primary and mature second-growth forests. Those irreplaceable assets just need to better protected. Restoring and regenerating BC’s forests will also restore their hydrological function of cleaning and cooling water and controlling its flow over the land. In the future, how much will it be worth to former logging-dependent communities to feel safe again from the flooding and forest fires they once experienced that were attributable to over-exploitation of nearby forests? BC will always need some forest products, and there will be employment generated by that need. But as reconciliation with First Nations advances and final treaties are completed, the control of forests should go back to Indigenous people. The courts have already decided that. British Columbians would be in a better place—ethically, economically and ecologically—if Indigenous leaders made the decisions about how many jobs the forests could provide and who gets to fill them. Read more about the Pacific Sideband Snail.pdf

Logs being loaded onto a ship in Northumberland Channel near the Harmac pulp and paper mill, Vancouver Island IT HAS LONG BEEN ARGUED IN BC that the export of raw logs should be reduced—or even banned—because the practice amounts to exporting forest-product manufacturing jobs out of BC. In this view, the value of such jobs is seldom questioned and is never measured against the full costs of the required logging. That conventional economic argument is countered with an opposing conventional economic argument that log exports actually raise the value of logs taken from public land, thus conferring some benefit on the public. This view, too, never considers the full costs of the required logging. By “full costs” I mean both economic and environmental costs. It’s a mystery why these arguments have gone unchallenged for so long. How can we understand whether log exports are better than a ban on log exports, or vice versa, if we don’t consider the full costs of the logging that’s done in order to meet the demand for log exports. Below, we’ll consider those costs. First, however, let’s review the conventional economic arguments as understood by one of BC’s most distinguished resource economists. In a 2019 op-ed in the Vancouver Sun, Peter Pearse argued that restrictions on BC log exports “don’t make a lot of sense.” Pearse outlined the two conflicting economic arguments, starting with the argument for jobs: “The often confusing debate usually centres on jobs. Opponents of exports argue foreign buyers of logs reduce the raw material available to our domestic sawmills and pulp mills, and thereby diminish local employment opportunities (as summarized in the slogan “Export logs = Export jobs” on road signs along the Malahat Highway). This view is widely held, especially by those engaged in manufacturing forest products.” Pearse then contrasted that with the argument that log exports support jobs and a greater public interest: “Proponents of free trade in logs, however, point out access to foreign markets hikes the demand and value of logs, which increases employment in forestry and timber production. In addition, logs are exported only when they bring prices higher than domestic sales, so exports advance the public interest in the economic return on our forest resources.” Which side does Pearse come down on? He wrote: “Restrictions on exports obviously constrain the demand for our logs, depress their domestic market price and hence also the quantity produced. So the direct beneficiaries are the local buyers, mainly sawmills and pulp mills and their employees and shareholders. But, for the same reason, those involved in producing logs suffer from the reduced production and value of their product. In effect, the loss suffered by log producers serves as a subsidy to manufacturers.” Since a large proportion of BC’s “log producers” are the same companies that manufacture wood products like lumber, pulp and paper, we might ask ourselves why this is a problem. Pearse gives us an answer. He says that the real losers created by restrictions on log exports are BC taxpayers: “However, there is another, often forgotten, player in this industry, namely the owners of the timber. In BC, where most of the timber is harvested on public land, the government sells timber to logging companies for a ‘stumpage price,’ calculated as the difference between the market value of the logs and the cost of harvesting them. Export restrictions depress the value of logs, so stumpage revenues are reduced accordingly, shifting the ultimate burden of log export restrictions onto us, the hapless taxpayers.” Pearse comes down on the side of unrestricted log exports because, he believes, with restrictions logs would have a lower price and so BC taxpayers would get a lower return from the liquidation and sale of publicly-owned forests. The existence of such a linkage between the level of exports and the stumpage the Province would collect is crucial to the pro-no-restrictions position. This is easy to test by comparing the average stumpage collected in a year that had a high rate of log export to one that had a lower rate of export. In 2014, 10.1 percent of the volume cut in BC was exported as raw logs. That year the public received an average of $7.62 per cubic metre. The very next year, exported logs dropped to 8.3 percent of the total volume. By Pearce’s reasoning, the average stumpage collected by the public should have been reduced. But it wasn’t. It increased to $8.03 per cubic metre. Evidently, there isn’t a smoothly working linkage between the level of log exports and the public interest, at least not in the direction Pearce asserts. You might think, “You are just cherry picking one case that happened to not support Pearse’s reasoning.” Okay, let’s look at the two years before the year Pearse wrote his op-ed. In 2017, 9.0 percent of the total volume cut in the province was exported as raw logs, almost all of it from the coast. The average stumpage collected by the Province was $12.34 per cubic metre. In 2018, exported logs fell to 8.0 percent of the cut. Did this reduction in log exports result in a decrease in stumpage? No, stumpage jumped up to $18.78. Why? Mainly because the ministry of forests raised stumpage rates in BC. What does that show? It demonstrates that BC taxpayers don’t really need log exports to get a higher return on its forests; it just needs government to set higher stumpage rates. In my view, those who argue for restrictions based on the need for more jobs—and those who argue for no restrictions based on getting a higher return for the public resource—are both overlooking most of the real costs associated with exporting raw logs. Yet it’s only by rigorously examining the full economic and environmental costs of logging in BC that we’ll be able to have a clear sense of the impacts of log exports—or the export of any wood product from BC. This includes the net loss to taxpayers arising from the fact that stumpage and other forest-related revenue don’t even cover the cost of the ministry of forests’ management of the resource. It must also include indirect subsides the industry receives, like a reduced rate for consumption of electrical energy. Much worse than those economic omissions is the failure to examine the environmental harms created by logging, milling and exporting raw logs, lumber, pulp and paper. None of these costs are included in considerations of whether the over-exploitation of BC forests—which is the sole driver of log exports—is good for the broad public interest. All that economists like Pearse consider in looking at log exports and other forest product exports are the numbers associated directly with the logging industry and its downstream partners. This is actually only a minuscule slice of the real costs. Consider, for example, one cost that is never considered when the economic benefits of exporting logs is reckoned: the carbon emissions associated with a year’s worth of logging for raw log exports. We are in the midst of a growing climate emergency and ignoring this cost would be foolish—just look at what happened in BC starting on November 12, 2021. This cost applies equally to all forest products, but let’s confine our consideration to the export of raw logs. In 2019, the year in which Pearse penned the above analysis, 8.5 percent of the volume of forest cut in BC was exported as logs, mainly to China. That amounted to 4.7 million cubic metres of logs. But those logs represent only about one-half of the forest biomass that was killed by the logging required to obtain those logs. By international convention, the carbon emissions associated with the decomposition of that forest biomass are attributed to the year in which the cut took place. When we convert the total forest biomass that was killed to equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, we find that logging for the export log market produced 7.7 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2019 that could have been avoided. To put that number in context, not cutting those forests for log exports would have been the equivalent of taking 80 percent of all light trucks and passenger cars in BC off the road for a year. Can we put an economic value on the emissions that would have been avoided? We can. In 2019, the BC Carbon Tax put a cost of $40 per tonne on carbon emissions. The atmosphere can’t tell the difference between a carbon dioxide molecule that comes from burning fossil fuels or one that comes from decomposing or burning wood. They both have the same effect on global heating. All forest carbon will, over time, return to the atmosphere. But by accelerating that return by several decades, or even centuries, we are having the same effect on climate change as we would by burning fossil fuels with the equivalent carbon content. So, if we’re being realistic, 2019’s 7.7 million tonnes—priced at $40 per tonne—should have cost the log producers $308 million. How much of that was actually collected and added to the public purse? Not a single penny. Over the years 2008 to 2019, the uncollected tax on 96 million tonnes of carbon emissions associated with producing logs for export amounted to $2.97 billion. That’s not the only real cost associated with log exports that isn’t being counted by either Pearce or the job seekers. For example, the loss of forest carbon sequestration capacity—the ability of mature forests to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, isn’t included in any reckoning of the cost of exporting raw logs. Logging also dramatically raises forest fire hazard in the area logged for 30-40 years. Forest fires can destroy communities and local economies, yet the resource economists never include those costs when they perform their analyses. Fires fill the air with particulates that can cause serious health problems, and those problems come with both high social and economic costs. Nor are the carbon emissions from those fires included. Likewise, logging can affect the timing and peak flows of BC rivers and cause catastrophic flooding in BC communities. Look at what happened to Merritt, Princeton and the Fraser Valley in mid-November 2021. Increased sedimentation and warming of water caused by clearcut logging degrades salmon habitat, lowering the salmonid productivity of BC streams and rivers. Yet such impacts never appear in the economic analyses that argue whether the 10 percent of BC logging that occurs for log exports is good for the public interest or not. Nor does the impact clearcut logging has on the huge potential BC has for forest-based research and tourism. The problems with both Pearse’s economic analysis supporting log exports and the argument against log exports based on the lost opportunity for more jobs in BC, are the same. They both ignore many of the economic costs associated with this industry and they both ignore all of the environmental costs of the industry.

The ministry of forests has its collective head in the sand about the increase in fire hazard caused by clearcut logging. Meanwhile, the logging industry is feeding on the huge public expenditure of money used to fight the fires. The Doctor Creek fire, the largest in the province in 2020. This BC Wildfire Service photo shows all three fuels BC’s forest fires are burning: Mature forest, plantations and clearcuts. WHY ARE THERE SO MANY LARGE, OUT-OF-CONTROL FIRES burning in BC’s Interior this summer? It’s partly the result of extreme hot weather made worse by climate change, but testimony provided to an Oregon court in 2019 revealed that clearcut logging, followed by replanting, creates fuel conditions that make fires easier to ignite and harder to control. These effects persist for decades. Since the area being logged each year in the Interior has more than doubled since the 1970s, southern BC has become a Molotov cocktail of clearcuts and young plantations ready to explode into flames with the first lightning strikes of summer. The Oregon testimony arose because a land conservation organization, Oregon Wild, sued the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for failing to disclose the extent to which logging on public land near an Oregon community would raise forest fire hazard. The Oregon case included written testimony from a BLM fuels specialist, provided under oath, that stated that logging and plantations increase forest fire hazard. Those two fuel conditions make a fire easier to ignite and harder to control. Here’s the relevant testimony by the BLM fuels specialist (we quote from the court judgment record): “The change from a ‘mature’ to an ‘early successional’ stand structural stage would change the associated stand-level hazard from low to moderate/high. The stands would go from a timber model to a slash fuel model with higher predicted flame length, fire duration, and intensity and decreased ability to control a fire, with the greatest risk of a fire start during the first 5 years following harvest. Over the next 10 to 40 years, stands would transition through stages associated with high stand-level fire hazard rating and go from a slash fuel to a brush fuel type, which are more volatile and susceptible to high fire-caused mortality rates. These potential fires would have high flame lengths, rates of spread, and intensity and would be difficult to initially attack and control. Overall fire hazard would increase for 5 to 20 years following planting, then drop from high to moderate after the next treatment.” Logging slash in an Interior clearcut (Photo by Sean O’Rourke/Conservation North) Fire hazard, as referred to in the testimony, isn’t quite what I thought it was, so I should outline the meaning of that term for you. A “fire hazard rating” is an assessment of the fuel comprised of living and dead vegetation in an area—a mature forest or a clearcut or a plantation, for example. The assessment estimates the ease with which a fire can be ignited, and, once ignited, the fire’s resistance to human control. If a fire ignites in a high hazard area, or encounters such an area, it can spread more easily than in mature forest. Fire hazard is independent of weather-related factors like moisture content, humidity, temperature or wind speed—all of which are influenced by climate change. Instead, hazard is all about fuels: the volume, type, condition, arrangement, and location that determines the degree of ease of ignition and the resistance to control. The distinction between climate effects and fuel effects is necessary to make for one important reason. Although the forests ministry can’t directly control climate change, it does have full control of how much of BC’s publicly owned forests are converted from a low fire hazard rating to a medium/high hazard rating each year. Since the early 1970s the ministry has ramped up the production of clearcuts and plantations—and, as a consequence, the fire hazard. The growing prevalence of clearcuts and plantations The ministry of forests’ record of the extent of logging on publicly owned land shows there has been a large increase over the last 50 years. In the first five years of the 1970s, an average of 105,000 hectares of Crown land was being cut each year. In the 5-year period ending with 2018, that had risen to 240,000 hectares each year, a 230 percent increase. Data crunching by David Leversee, based on the ministry of forests’ RESULTS Openings and Consolidated Cutblocks. Over the past 40 years, about 8.5 million hectares of BC’s publicly owned forest have been logged. Based on the BLM fuel specialist’s testimony that the fire hazard associated with a plantation would be higher than the mature forest it replaced for up to 40 years, we can project that as much as 8.5 million hectares of BC now have an elevated level of fire hazard as a consequence of logging and replanting. That means 8.5 million hectares where fires will ignite more easily than mature forest, and 8.5 million hectares where fire will be harder to control. That number doesn’t include logging on private land. It’s that growing prevalence of clearcuts and plantations that’s worrisome. Lightning strikes in those areas will be more likely to ignite and the resultant fires will be more difficult to control than in mature forest. Lightning is the most common cause of forest fires in BC. Obviously, then, if there’s more land where fires are easier to ignite, more fires will occur. If fires are initially more difficult to control, they are more likely to grow. And once a fire grows large enough to start encountering multiple areas of higher-hazard fuels—like clearcuts and plantations—the fire becomes more and more difficult to control. If the area of the province that’s subject to this higher fire hazard is growing—and it is—then larger fires will become more numerous. That’s exactly what we are seeing this summer. One method of judging the prevalence of clearcuts and plantations is to view satellite imagery of Crown land. I highly recommend this to anyone skeptical about the extent to which publicly owned forests have been converted to higher fire hazard clearcuts and plantations across BC. Below is a satellite image of part of the area involved in the Flat Lake Fire: Satellite images show a lot of deceptively green areas. Unless you have been trained to interpret aerial imagery, it can be difficult to know what you are looking at. Many of the green areas in the image above are high-hazard plantations, many of which have now been burned. A better picture of the prevalence of clearcuts and plantations involved in the fires can be obtained by superimposing the ministry of forests’ fire perimeters onto the ministry’s record of logging in these areas. We’ve done that in the images below of four perimeters of 2021’s largest fires, shown as black lines. Past logging is indicated by the red-shaded areas. Each fire’s point of ignition is indicated by a bright red dot. The white areas are remaining primary forest or rangeland. Protected areas, like provincial parks, are shaded green. In each case you will notice that the area of past logging overwhelms the landscape. The August 6 perimeter of the 60,000-hectare Flat Lake Fire (black line) superimposed on top of the BC ministry of forests’ RESULTS Openings record of logging (red-shaded area). The green-shaded area is Flat Lake Provincial Park. August 8 perimeter of the Sparks Lake Fire. On its west side, the fire burned to the edge of the massive 2017 Elephant Hill Fire, which burned through the logging indicated on the left side of the image above. August 8 perimeter of the Tremont Creek Fire southeast of Cache Creek. The August 8 perimeter of the White Rock Fire. The ministry of forests’ record of logging in the RESULTS Openings database misses some of the logging that has occurred. The area within the fire perimeter near Okanagan Lake (right side) has actually been heavily logged. The ministry’s records show that several of BC’s largest fires this summer were ignited in a clearcut or plantation and then quickly grew out of control. The White Rock Lake Fire ignited in an area of logging that was replanted in 2007. The Flat Lake Fire started when lighting struck a clearcut that was logged in 2015. The Sparks Lake Fire began beside a large area logged in the mid-1980s. The Octopus Creek Fire was ignited by lightning in an area logged in 2005 and planted in 2006. The Young Lake Fire was started by lightning in a clearcut logged in 2006 and replanted twice, in 2012 and 2015. And so on. Every one of the big fires in the southern Interior, no matter how they started, consumed thousands of hectares of clearcuts and plantations. The widespread conversion of BC forests from areas of low fire hazard to medium-high hazard by the logging industry is clearly playing a decisive role in the size of forest fires. Patrick Byrne, district manager of the 100-Mile-House Natural Resource District, declined to answer questions about the role clearcuts and plantations are playing in the Flat Lake Fire, but Byrne did note that “the fires burn quite nicely through plantations.” The aggressive behaviour of fires fuelled by clearcut logging slash and plantations puts firefighters in greater danger. BC Wildfire Service fire incident reports filed from the field often note extreme fire behaviour related to the fuel loading in clearcuts. A report from a fire in 2018 warned: “The slash blocks have more fuel loading than the standard slash fuel type, expect higher intensity. This higher intensity can cause fire whirls to develop, this would cause rapid fire growth and increased spotting potential.” Spotting refers to embers travelling downwind and starting new fires. Many incident reports from different fires make similar observations about the impact of the fuel in clearcuts on fire behaviour. A fire whirl in a clearcut fire (Photo by BC Wildfire Service) The impact of clearcut logging on fires will last a very long time Fire hazard rating is, by definition, independent of the moisture content in fuel. Yet the dryness of a clearcut, plantation or area of mature forest has a large influence on the speed with which fire can spread. Clearcutting exposes the land to the full strength of the sun, evaporating ground moisture and lowering humidity, important factors driving increased fire size and severity. Clearcuts also allow drying winds and higher temperatures to more easily penetrate the edges of adjacent forest. BC forester Herb Hammond contends that “clearcuts are clear culprits for heating up and drying out not only the immediate area where they occur, but also the surrounding landscape. They change local and regional weather patterns, and turn former heterogeneous, ecologically resilient stands and landscapes into homogeneous, ecologically vulnerable stands and landscapes. Their vulnerability is well documented in both the rise of insect epidemics, which clearcuts are allegedly meant to suppress, along with wildfire risk.” BC Forester Herb Hammond The drier conditions caused by the widespread use of clearcut logging in BC will persist far longer than the BLM fuel specialist’s predicted “10 to 40 years” of higher fire hazard, as Hammond explains: “Forests, particularly as they grow older, conserve water in large part due to complex, multi-layer canopies, and overall composition and structure that are all geared to slowing the movement of water through the forest, while filtering and storing water at the same time. Clearcuts, on the other hand, expose the land to rapid water loss. After a clearcut in montane Interior forests, 150 to 200 years of natural stand development are necessary to get back to something close to the level of water conservation provided by intact, natural old forests. If one takes into account the development of decayed fallen trees that are needed to store and filter water, that could be doubled to 300 to 400 years. Most of these vital fallen tree structures get destroyed in high-production, mechanized clearcutting.” The dryness of clearcuts and young plantations is evident to anyone who has walked through one on a hot summer day and then stepped into the shade of adjacent mature forest. The difference in temperature and humidity is startling. That difference can even be measured by satellite imaging using microwaves. The top image below shows clearcuts near the Brenda Creek Fire in the Peachland area on July 16. The image below that shows the relative moisture content on the ground that same day. The dark blue areas contain the most moisture and the red areas are the driest. Yes, those red-yellow-orange areas are all clearcuts. (Graphics courtesy of David Leversee) There are several other aspects of how clearcut logging is practiced in BC that have had an impact on fire size. For example, in the Interior, the practice of “managed” forests has evolved to mean managed coniferous forests. Deciduous stands are eradicated, often using glyphosate sprayed from helicopters, so that more commercially valuable coniferous stands can be planted instead. This, too, has made Interior forests more vulnerable to large fires. James Steidle, forest activist, has campaigned against this practice in the Prince George forest district. Steidle observes: “The conifer-dominated forest type we are actively encouraging is highly flammable, while the broadleaf aspen forest type we are actively eliminating is incredibly fire resistant. With a few caveats, the conclusion is undeniable. According to a 2001 study by Steve Cummings et al, pine forests are 8.4 times more likely to burn compared to aspen forests, based on historical data.” With fewer stands of fire-resistant deciduous trees to slow down or stop fires, larger fires are inevitable. Another dubious ministry policy has been “salvage logging” of healthy non-pine forest stands alongside lodgepole pine killed by the Mountain Pine Beetle. Several of the largest fires in the Interior during the last six years have included thousands of hectares of salvage logging. The ministry of forests allowed companies that were awarded salvage logging licences to take not only dead pine, but healthy living trees as well. The ministry’s own records show that only 15 percent of the logging that occurred in BC since 2010 has been dead pine. Hammond is scathing about the salvage program and its consequences: “For a stand to be eligible for salvage stumpage rates, all that was needed was for the stand to have a lodgepole pine component of 3 percent or more. This led to a massive windfall for logging companies, which clearcut thousands of hectares of diverse, mixed species natural forests, many of them old growth, under the guise of ‘pine beetle salvage.’ These were the precise stands on which ecological recovery would have been centred through natural succession. Instead, the bulk of these areas have been converted to young lodgepole pine forests, as that species was the easiest to naturally regenerate and meet ‘reforestation’ requirements by the timber companies. So, the forest industrial complex have simply set up the forest landscape for both more frequent severe fire, and an even larger beetle outbreak—if the trees escape climate disruption.” Hammond predicts the relentless removal of primary forest in the Interior will eliminate essential ecological functions of old forest, and that will lead to more pine beetle epidemics, more “salvage logging,” more giant clearcuts and—inevitably—to more large fires: “Mixed species old-growth forests were once randomly scattered throughout the forest landscapes of much of the Interior. These forests were the home to carnivorous beetles who eat herbivorous beetles—like the Mountain Pine Beetle—and also the home for many cavity nesting birds that prey on herbivorous beetles. So, as long as these forests were found throughout the landscape, they served as important agents to keep bark beetle populations in balance. Along with all of the other benefits of old-growth forests and diverse natural landscapes, these benefits have been eradicated by timber-biased ‘forestry’ that increasingly has no place in BC or anywhere in the world.” Hammond believes the industry and their ministry partners have created a bleak future for BC forests: “The omnipresent danger of fire and ongoing drought, coupled with inhospitable soil and atmospheric moisture and temperature, call into question whether trees in clearcuts will ever grow to merchantable size in many clearcut areas. Indeed, we are already seeing plantation die off, including death by fire. Particularly in the Interior, we may soon begin to see ecosystem shifts, where former forests become degraded shrub ecosystems.” The growth in fire size is having broad impacts, including physical damage to communities and infrastructure, long periods of pervasive, health-damaging smoke, disruption to local economies, loss of large areas of wildlife habitat and loss of protected areas. The fires, partly a symptom of climate change, will worsen it: burned forests and plantations can’t continue to sequester carbon and the fires are releasing immense quantities of carbon to the atmosphere. Those emissions have doubled every 9 years since 1990, an exponential increase. Carbon emissions from forest fires are on track to double every 9 years since 1990. The current 9-year period runs until 2026, but 2021’s fires will likely be all that’s needed. The ministry has its head in the sand With the forest fire problem growing in size at an alarming rate, you would think the BC ministry of forests would have put significant resources and effort into understanding how the higher fire hazard of clearcuts and plantations is fuelling the growth in fire size. But the ministry appears to be avoiding the issue. FOCUS filed an FOI for any technical or scientific reports produced for the ministry between 2010 and 2020 that considered the relationship between logging and forest fire frequency, size, behaviour or intensity. Throughout that period, it was clear that the area being burned in BC during long, hot summers was growing rapidly. Had the ministry investigated? Our FOI request produced a single study (see link at end of story) conducted by the ministry during that period that examined how fire behaviour was affected by man-made changes to forests. The records released show that in 2019, the ministry started the “Fuel Treatment Efficacy Project” to examine how different fuel-reduction treatments, like thinning or broadcast burning, had impacted subsequent forest fire behaviour and fire suppression tactics. The $50,000 internal study considered 17 forest fires, only one of which was in an area that had been “100 percent logged.” The researchers gave that fire “low priority” for further study. The main finding of study, as indicated in the 7-page report, was that there was “a paucity of examples” where forest fire had interacted with fuel treatments. Given the high stakes, it’s difficult to understand why the ministry of forests hasn’t examined the impact of logging and plantations on worsening fire behaviour in BC. Fighting those fires is increasingly costly, as I will describe below. Yet, judging by its response to our FOI, the ministry hasn’t lifted a twig to understand what’s happening. This failure is worrisome, and may stem from the transition of the ministry over the past 30 years from functioning as a regulator of the logging industry to being its primary enabler. It is perhaps unreasonable to expect that an organization that works every day to maximize logging would, at the same time, spend money and effort on digging up evidence that clearcuts and plantations are feeding large forest fires. Besides, the ministry knows that logging slash raises fire hazard. That’s why it requires logging companies to burn hundreds of thousands of slash piles every year in an attempt to lower the fire hazard that fuel poses. BC forester John Waters knows, too. In a 5000-word treatise advising his fellow Woodlot Licence tenure holders what they needed to do to reduce fire hazard after their logging, Waters summed it all up: “Decades of wildfire research and examination of large wildfires shows that wildfire spreads most rapidly in areas where there is an abundance of dry, fine fuel or old unburnt piled slash accumulations.” The ministry is very careful to never explicitly admit the obvious. If lack of fire hazard abatement results in injury, death or property loss, the Province and its industry partners could be held legally responsible for damages. The closest the ministry comes to acknowledging the higher fire hazard caused by logging is contained in its Guide to Fuel Hazard Assessment and Abatement in British Columbia, last updated in 2012. The Guide states: “In some timber harvesting circumstances, it will be impracticable to reduce fuel loads sufficiently so that potential fire behaviour is not increased relative to pre-harvest conditions.” Given the growing size of forest fires and the huge associated economic and environmental costs, we might ask why it would ever be “impracticable” to reduce fuel loads. Surely it should now be clear to the ministry that if reducing fire hazard would be “impracticable,” then logging should never occur in the first place. The Guide, of course, has nothing at all to say about reducing the fire hazard posed by plantations, which have, according to the BLM fuels specialist, the highest fire hazard. No worries. The ministry is already solving that problem. According to the ministry’s own records of the area logged and area replanted between 2000 and 2017, 1.2 million more hectares were logged than were planted. Just how bad this problem actually is depends on which ministry record of how much logging has occurred is used: the one made publicly available (below in black), or the one based on the ministry’s best data (red). Just to be clear, I am not advocating for leaving clearcuts unplanted. I am pointing out that our forests are not in good hands. They are being ransacked, and so is the public purse. The money whirl: Who benefits economically from forest fires? The ministry seems to have in place all of the policies needed to make fires worse and few that would mitigate the risk. One result is that fighting forest fires is costing BC taxpayers a lot more. In the 5 years starting with 2010, fire management cost BC $1.02 billion. In the following five years it more than doubled to $2.12 billion. Indeed, fighting forest fires has become a big business in BC, and much of the economic rewards from that business flow back to the logging industry itself. Of the $2.1 billion spent on fire management by the ministry of forests between 2015 and 2019, just under 70 percent was paid to private companies for services provided in the increasingly difficult battle to contain forest fires. Through an FOI request for records, FOCUS obtained details of payments totalling $1,471,832,630 (see link at end of story for complete list). Fires in 2017 and 2018 accounted for over 70 percent of that cost. Who benefitted? On the ground, fighting big forest fires requires constructing fire breaks and other measures that involve logging company personnel and equipment. So, paradoxically, a company that logged an area that was later involved in a fire could end up being contracted by the ministry to help fight the fire. Tolko Industries, which has created what are among BC’s largest clearcuts, was paid $4.6 million for work it did during the 2017 and 2018 fire seasons. During the five years covered by the records, there were 150 small companies with the word “Logging” in their company name that received, on average, $200,000 each for fire fighting operations during fire season. Seventy-two company names on the list included “Trucking” and 35 contained “Excavating.” Eighty-two companies provided helicopter services and the top 10 helicopter companies alone were paid $148 million. The private business at the very top of the money whirl was Conair, a BC-based company that provides fixed-wing air services for fighting forest fires. Over a five-year period Conair was paid $96,466,895.60. Next on the list were Perimeter Solutions Canada Ltd ($54,703,223.38) and Air Spray (1967) Ltd ($43,670,860.94). Perimeter and Air Spray supply fire retardant and retardant delivery to fires by aircraft. The $100 million spent on those services points to another level of damage that may be occurring as a result of the over-exploitation of BC’s forests. Fire retardants are known to be harmful to aquatic life, especially to stream-type chinook salmon smolts. Many chinook salmon populations in BC are now considered threatened. The growing use of fire retardants to fight BC’s forest fires is just one more threat to the species’ survival. Even transferring money to the over 8600 entities on the fire-fighting money list was expensive for BC taxpayers. For example, use of a Bank of Montreal Mastercard account cost hapless taxpayers $20,607,365.60. Since many of the companies that are receiving payments for fighting fires are the same companies that create the higher fire hazard of clearcuts and plantations in the first place, there is, to say the least, an appearance of a conflict of interest. An air tanker drops a load of fire retardant on a clearcut fire in 2017 (Photo by BC Wildfire Service) Forget Brazil. BC's per capita rate of forest removal is worse than Bolivia's. The response to the growing size and cost of fires from those with an economic stake in continuing logging as usual in BC forests all have one thing in common: No one ever suggests reducing the ongoing production of clearcuts and plantations, the inevitable consequences of logging. Quite the opposite, in fact. Industry and government both know that as time goes on and less and less primary forest is available to be cut, to keep volumes up at mills will require even greater areas of clearcuts and plantations to be created. That’s the ministry’s plan, and that promises an even more catastrophic future for BC. If you’ve come this far in my story, you must be looking for a solution to the mess the mindustry has created. If so, ask yourself these questions: Could the rate at which primary forest is converted to clearcuts and plantations be reduced? Or is the current rate of forest exploitation needed just to meet BC’s own basic need for products derived from forests? Ministry of forests’ data shows that 80 percent of the value of BC forest products comes from exports, and most of those go to China, the USA and Japan. So BC is cutting far beyond meeting its own needs for wood products. The extreme nature of that over-cut becomes apparent when BC’s rate of forest-cover loss is compared with other states that are, like BC, heavily forested. Consider Bolivia. It’s the 8th most heavily forested country in the world. It has an area of 1.099 million square kilometres, just slightly larger than BC’s 944,735. When you do the arithmetic, Bolivia’s forest-cover loss from all causes between 2001 and 2019 amounted to .545 hectares per capita. BC lost 1.66 hectares per capita, more than three times Bolivia’s loss. Yet when we compare per capita income between BC and Bolivia, there’s no question about which country has the greater need to exploit its forests. In 2010, the mid-point of the 20-year period we’re considering, Bolivia’s per capita income was around $1900 per person. BC’s was $41,327. So Bolivia had a vastly greater economic need to exploit its forest resource than BC did. Yet BC’s per capita rate of forest loss was three times as high as Bolivia’s. Keep in mind, too, that BC’s high per capita GDP had little to do with the forest industry, which in 2010 accounted for only 2.5 percent of BC’s GDP, according to the BC government. By 2019, that had fallen to 1.8 percent. By the way, if you take the forest-cover loss attributable to the beetle epidemic and forest fires out of BC’s total and compare that to loss from all causes in other countries, BC still has the worst record, as shown below: Back in the late 1980s, we used to say “BC is the Brazil of the north,” to express our disapproval for what the government and logging industry were doing to BC forests. That’s no longer even remotely appropriate. Now the global forest destruction putdown ought to be, “Bolivia is the British Columbia of the south.” And Brazil? On a per capita basis, Brazilians are forest angels by comparison. It’s evident that the extreme rate of forest removal in BC that’s fuelling large forest fires has, in turn, been fuelled by the high level of exports. That has been supported by a forests ministry that long ago stopped regulating the industry and now whole-heartedly facilitates extreme logging. Successive BC governments have chosen to go along with this, thinking that somehow this must all be good for the economy, and if it’s good for the economy, that’s all that matters to most politicians. Now that choice is having severe consequences. Unless BC breaks away from converting low-hazard primary forests into higher-hazard clearcuts and plantations to service export markets, our province seems fated to burn increasingly out of control. David Broadland writes about BC forests.

Slash piles left after clearcut logging in the Klanawa Valley on Vancouver Island. (Photo by TJ Watt) IN THE FACE OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS, BC’s ministry of forests and the forest industry have been working hand-in-hand on a public relations campaign to make clearcut logging seem climate friendly. They know its an uphill slog to sell the biggest emitter of carbon in BC as “climate friendly,” but employees of the ministry depend on continued forest destruction for their jobs, and industry depends on high-volume forest destruction for its profits. For them, the move to conserve forests to mitigate carbon emissions is an existential threat. Thus we increasingly hear in BC of new (publicly subsidized) initiatives that are going to make forest destruction even more “climate friendly.” These initiatives take two forms: First, creating “bioenergy” from logging “residue.” And second, developing “mass building” technology that will lock forest carbon into long-lasting buildings. This greenwashing of the forest industry is happening around the globe. In the US, forest and climate scientists are speaking out about the forest industry’s attempts to climate-wash itself. Two-hundred forest and climate scientists recently wrote the following letter to the US congress: “AS FOREST AND CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTISTS AND EXPERTS, we are writing to urge you to oppose legislative proposals that would promote logging and wood consumption, ostensibly as a natural climate change solution, based on claims that these represent an effective carbon storage approach, or claims that biomass logging, and incinerating trees for energy, represents renewable, carbon-neutral energy. We find no scientific evidence to support increased logging to store more carbon in wood products, such as dimensional lumber or cross-laminated timber (CLT) for tall buildings, as a natural climate solution. The growing consensus of scientific findings is that, to effectively mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, we must not only move beyond fossil fuel consumption but must also substantially increase protection of our native forests in order to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere and store more, not less, carbon in our forests (Depro et al. 2008, Harris et al. 2016, Woodwell 2016, Erb et al. 2018, IPCC 2018, Law et al. 2018, Harmon 2019, Moomaw et al. 2019). Furthermore, the scientific evidence does not support the burning of wood in place of fossil fuels as a climate solution. Current science finds that burning trees for energy produces even more CO2 than burning coal, for equal electricity produced (Sterman et al. 2018), and the considerable accumulated carbon debt from the delay in growing a replacement forest is not made up by planting trees or wood substitution (noted below). We need to increase growing forests to more rapidly close the gap between emissions and removal of CO2 by forests, while we simultaneously lower emissions from our energy, industrial and agricultural sectors. In your deliberations on this serious climate change issue, we encourage you to consider the following: The logging and wood products industries suggest that most of the carbon in trees that are logged and removed from forests will simply be stored in CLT and other wood products for buildings instead of being stored in forest ecosystems. However, this is clearly incorrect. Up to 40 percent of the harvested material does not become forest products and is burned or decomposes quickly, and a majority of manufacturing waste is burned for heat. One study found that 65 percent of the carbon from Oregon forests logged over the past 115 years remains in the atmosphere, and just 19 percent is stored in long-lived products. The remainder is in landfills (Hudiburg et al. 2019). Logging in U.S. forests emits 617 million tons of CO2 annually (Harris et al. 2016). Further, logging involves transportation of trucks and machinery across long distances between the forest and the mill. For every ton of carbon emitted from logging, an additional 17.2 percent (106 million tons of CO2) is emitted from fossil fuel consumption to support transportation, extraction, and processing of wood (Ingerson 2007). In fact, the annual CO2 emissions from logging in U.S. forests are comparable to yearly U.S. emissions from the residential and commercial sectors combined. The cumulative climate change impact of logging in the U.S. is even higher, since logging causes substantial reductions in carbon sequestration and storage potential in forests due to soil compaction and nutrient removal, and these combined impacts can often reduce forest carbon storage potential by 30 percent or more (e.g., Elliott et al. 1996, Walmsley et al. 2009). The wood products industry claims that substituting wood for concrete and steel reduces the overall carbon footprint of buildings. However, this claim has been refuted by more recent analyses that reveal forest industries have been using unrealistic and erroneous assumptions in their models, overestimating the long-term mitigation benefits of substitution by 2- to 100-fold (Law et al. 2018, Harmon 2019). The climate impact of wood is even worse if the reduced forest carbon sequestration and storage caused by nutrient loss and soil compaction from logging is included, as discussed above. In countless public communications, and at numerous Congressional hearings, industry representatives have advocated for increased logging in the context of reducing wildland fire and related emissions. While small-tree thinning can reduce fire intensity when coupled with burning of slash debris (e.g., Perry et al. 2004, Strom and Fulé 2007) under very limited conditions, recent evidence shows intensive forest management characterized by young trees and homogenized fuels burn at higher severity (Zald & Dunn 2018). Further, the extremely low probability (less than 1 percent, Schoennagel et al. 2017) of thinned sites encountering a fire where thinning has occurred limits the effectiveness of such activities to forested areas near homes. Troublingly, to make thinning operations economically attractive to logging companies, commercial logging of larger, more fire-resistant trees often occurs across large areas. Importantly, mechanical thinning results in a substantial net loss of forest carbon storage, and a net increase in carbon emissions that can substantially exceed those of wildfire emissions (Hudiburg et al. 2013, Campbell et al. 2012). Reduced forest protections and increased logging tend to make wildland fires burn more intensely (Bradley et al. 2016). This can also occur with commercial thinning, where mature trees are removed (Cruz et al. 2008, Cruz et al. 2014). As an example, logging in U.S. forests emits 10 times more carbon than fire and native insects combined (Harris et al. 2016). And, unlike logging, fire cycles nutrients and helps increase new forest growth.” COUNTERING GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY MISINFORMATION about these issues is critical. Both bodies have immense resources at their disposal to develop and perpetuate these myths. A properly informed public is an essential need that must be met in order to fight climate change and use forest conservation as the best form of natural mitigation. Through the resources page (see link below), we intend to provide the latest insights from BC and around the globe to develop public knowledge on this critical issue. You can help increase the level of public knowledge by adding links in the forum to resources that you found helpful in understanding these issues.

Climate change helped transport the water from there to here, but the extent of the damage done is mainly the responsibility of BC’s out-of-control logging industry. A short-wave infrared image of this summer’s 20,000-hectare July Mountain Fire (reddish brown area). The Coldwater River snakes along the fire’s lower edge on the left and then punches through the centre of the burn as it heads toward Merritt. LET’S SURVEY SOME OF THE DAMAGE and the circumstances that led to the Lower Mainland being cut off from the rest of Canada and the flooding of Merritt and Princeton in mid November. The Tank Hill Underpass, just east of Lytton, was built in 1957 to allow the newly widened Trans Canada Highway to pass underneath the CPR Railway. In all the years since, there’s no record of the culvert below the highway not having enough capacity to safely transport water under the structure. In February of 1963, for example, the structure survived a 24-hour rainfall of 69.9 millimetres (2.8 inches) that washed out both the highway and railway at a point closer to Lytton. In the “Great Coastal Storm” of 2007 that hit BC, Washington and Oregon in early December, Lytton recorded a 24-hour rainfall of 106.9 millimetres and the underpass was unscathed. But on November 14, the structure washed out after the fall of 61.9 millimetres of rain in the previous 24-hour period. What had changed? The washed out Tank Hill Underpass (Photo: BC Ministry of Transportation) The 807-hectare watershed above the underpass was severely burned during last summer’s 84,000-hectare Lytton Creek Fire. The ministry of forests’ historical record of forest fires shows that watershed had no previous record of fire. This summer’s fire, rather than the quantity of rain that fell, may have determined the underpass’s fate. The hydrological impact of forest fires is well understood. A 2011 study, conducted by US Forest Service scientists, noted: “Basins with high-burn severity, especially those with steep, previously forested terrain, have flashier hydrographs and can produce peak-flows orders of magnitude greater than pre-fire conditions.” (See report attached at end of story.) Note the scientists’ use of the expression “orders of magnitude greater.” As you know, one order of magnitude means 10 times greater. Two orders of magnitude means 100 times greater. And so on. Why would a forest fire have such a large impact on the hydrological function of a forest? Here’s the short answer from those scientists: “This is due to fundamental changes in the hydrology of burnt watersheds, especially in the short term (1-3 years). Consumption of the canopy and forest-floor organic horizon that formerly intercepted precipitation, moderated infiltration, and protected mineral soil, results in decreased evapotranspiration and infiltration, and increased runoff. Further, newly exposed soil surfaces are subject to rain-drop erosion, which may be exacerbated by fire induced soil-water repellency. Though the hydrologic impacts of high-severity wildfire have been well documented in the scientific literature, the socio-political ramifications of a latent, continuous, and highly unpredictable disturbance regime (i.e. post-fire flooding and sedimentation) has not been addressed.” At about the same time as the Tank Hill Underpass was washing out, more serious trouble was brewing 50 kilometres to the east. The Coldwater River began to surge over its banks where it joins the Nicola River at Merritt. The west end of the town was flooded above the level that hydrologists had determined would likely be the worst case scenario—the 200-year flood plain—for future floods from melting snowpack. No one foresaw Merritt being flooded by a mid-fall rainstorm. As many as 7000 residents were forced to evacuate. Yet Merritt itself recorded only 31.4 millimetres of rain (1.2 inches) in the critical 48-hour period on November 14 and 15. By way of comparison, a total of 28 millimetres fell in a 48-hour period on November 24 and 25, 1962 and no flooding was reported. Similarly, 36 millimetres fell on Merritt in a 48-hour period during 2007’s Great Coastal Storm, yet no flooding occurred. The Merritt flood was obviously the result of rainfall, but where did that rain fall? The town is near the junction of the Coldwater and Nicola rivers and just downstream from where Clapperton Creek—which drains the Nicola Plateau—joins the Nicola. Flooding in Merritt, looking southeast across the west end of town. The Coldwater River cuts across the centre of the photo. The smaller Nicola River is in the foreground. One of the town’s mills is visible in the background. Photographs of the Merritt flood posted online show that the Coldwater River was swollen and moving much faster than the meandering Nicola River. While not much rain fell directly on Merritt, precipitation was even lower towards Kamloops. The wave of water, then, likely originated south of Merritt near the headwaters of the Coldwater. That area, too, experienced a large forest fire last summer. The 20,000-hectare July Mountain Fire was contained almost entirely within the Coldwater River’s watershed. The same physical factors associated with severely burned forest that caused the washout of the Tank Hill Underpass were in play in the July Mountain Fire area, but in this case the burned area was 25 times larger. As well, there was a much larger area of recent clearcuts and young plantations in the watershed that had severely diminished the watershed’s natural ability to slow the rate at which water could move over the land before it reached the creeks and rivers that led to Merritt. UBC forest scientists XuJian Joe Yu and Younes Alila have found that removing forest in BC has a much greater impact on flooding than previously believed. They found, for example, that even small rates of logging can double the frequency of flooding and large rates of forest removal can result in up to fourfold increases in the frequency of large floods. Extensive clearcut logging has been allowed throughout the watershed since the early 1980s, but the rate of logging accelerated dramatically after 2009 when the ministry of forests introduced a salvage logging program. The program’s objective was to remove lodgepole pine killed by the Mountain Pine Beetle, but the logging companies were permitted to remove all trees. In the Lillooet and Merritt Timber Supply Areas, only 20 percent of the logging between 2010 and 2019 was related to salvaging dead pine. To make the salvage logging more commercially attractive, companies were permitted to take stands of any species of healthy trees as well. The result was widespread devastation of healthy primary forests and loss of hydrological function in the Coldwater watershed. The time-lapse video below, which runs from 1984 to 2020, shows a portion of the Coldwater River’s watershed that was burned by the July Mountain Fire. Watch for the sudden acceleration in the cut that occurs in 2010. Time-lapse video of logging in the area of the Coldwater watershed that was subsequently burned by the July Mountain Fire (Google Earth Time-lapse generator) Seventy-five kilometres southeast of Merritt, Princeton also flooded. It lies at the confluence of the Similkameen and Tulameen rivers. The town saw 66 millimetres of rain—just over 4 inches—over the 3-day period between November 13 and November 15. The last big flood there occurred in 1972, but that event was dramatically different from the November 14 flood. 1972’s soaking was the result of warm temperatures quickly melting a huge winter snowpack in late May. No record of a November flood ever occurring in Princeton could be found by this reporter. But, like the Coldwater, the Similkameen watershed experienced a large forest fire this past summer, entirely within its watershed—the 15,000-hectare Garrison Lake Fire—and extensive clearcutting has been allowed throughout the watersheds of both the Similkameen and the Tulameen. The time-lapse video below records the logging from 1984 to 2000 in the area of the Similkameen’s watershed that was burned by the Garrison Lake Fire. Time-lapse video of logging in the area of the Similkameen River watershed, 1984-2020, that was subsequently burned by the Garrison Lake Fire in 2021 (Google Earth Time-lapse generator) If forest fires are an important factor in flooding and water damage to infrastructure—and the scientists tell us that they are—then BC is likely in for a hell of a ride in the coming years. The current forest policy of liquidating as much primary forest as is necessary to compete in the export market for wood products—80 to 90 percent of logging in BC is for exports—is creating roughly 250,000 hectares of new clearcuts each year. Clearcuts and plantations have a higher fire hazard than primary forest, and as the fraction of BC that’s covered by clearcuts and plantations grows, forest fires are becoming larger. More and more of BC will be in that state that the forest scientists described as having “flashier hydrographs” and “can produce peak-flows orders of magnitude greater than pre-fire conditions.” More and more of BC will be unable to control movement of water across the landscape, whether it has burned or not. In short, the government’s current obsession with “export competitiveness” is leading directly to hell. You can see where all this is heading, can’t you? The cost of the flooding in Merritt and Princeton alone will likely be in the hundreds of millions. The cost of repairing the highway infrastructure and making it more flood and landslide resistant could be of a similar magnitude or greater. The wise thing to do next—now that we can see how climate change and the current forest management regime in BC are going to synergistically combine to produce physical chaos and social misery—would be to reduce the amount of logging in BC. Let the Chinese and American buyers of BC forests figure out some other way to grow. Instead, the logging companies will keep denuding the land as quickly as the export market will allow. The political class will decide that highways and bridges and flood-prone communities will now need to be reengineered and rebuilt to withstand higher levels of water and sliding hillsides, at whatever great cost. The financial and emotional costs of flooded-out lives will just have to be paid. But who will pay? Not the logging companies who caused it. Not the American or Chinese consumers of our forest products. Not the government officials who allowed it to happen. The cost of mitigating against climate change will become just another part of the immense public subsidization of the logging industry in BC. The blissfully unaware public will pay whatever is needed without even knowing they are paying for it. David Broadland does not consent to the destruction of life on Earth.

In 1998, the net capacity of BC forests to absorb carbon from the atmosphere was about 86 megatonnes each year. At the time, the province’s total emissions (not including forestry-related emissions) were 66 megatonnes. Those are the emissions that result from burning fossil fuels, making cement, creating and managing waste, agricultural-related emissions and so forth. So BC’s net emissions at that time were -20 megatonnes per year. In other words, our forests absorbed more carbon than we emitted from all other activities. By 2019, however, BC’s annual emissions had grown to 69 megatonnes while its forests’ ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere had dropped below zero; the forests had become a net emitter of carbon. This means BC’s net emissions rose from -20 megatonnes in 1998 to 69 megatonnes in 2019. That’s a net growth in annual emissions of 89 megatonnes per year. What a spectacular fall from grace. What happened to our forests? It’s common practice to blame the Mountain Pine Beetle (and lately, fires) for BC’s fall from grace, but this is—to be kind—disinformation created by the people who were mismanaging BC’s forests on behalf of the logging industry. Logging was responsible for 60.5 percent of the loss in merchantable volume in BC, followed by the Mountain Pine Beetle (30.5 percent) and forest fires (9 percent) between 2000 and 2019. The cost of our lost carbon sequestration capacity is immense. When calculated at the value of BC’s Carbon Tax—based on its value in each year since 2010—the cumulative loss for just the 10 years between 2010 and 2019 is about $22 billion. Since 60.5 percent of that loss results from logging live, healthy trees, logging has cost BC over $13 billion in foregone carbon sequestration over just the past 10 years. Since all the volumes above are based on lost merchantable volumes—the volume of biomass killed that could have been removed as merchantable logs—the values for lost carbon sequestration capacity shown are actually only about one-half of the total loss in sequestration capacity. In 2019, forest scientist William Moomaw published the peer-reviewed paper Intact Forests in the United—Proforestation Mitigates Climate Change and Serves the Greatest Good. Moomaw writes, “The recent 1.5 Degree Warming Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies reforestation and afforestation as important strategies to increase negative emissions, but they face significant challenges: afforestation requires an enormous amount of additional land, and neither strategy can remove sufficient carbon by growing young trees during the critical next decade(s). In contrast, growing existing forests intact to their ecological potential—termed proforestation—is a more effective, immediate, and low-cost approach that could be mobilized across suitable forests of all types. Proforestation serves the greatest public good by maximizing co-benefits such as nature-based biological carbon sequestration and unparalleled ecosystem services such as biodiversity enhancement, water and air quality, flood and erosion control, public health benefits, low impact recreation, and scenic beauty.” To restore BC’s long-term 90-megatonne forest carbon sequestration capacity, there needs to be a halt to logging of primary forests in the Timber Harvesting Land Base. Protected carbon reserves need to be established in the most productive forests where there is a low likelihood of large, intense fires. This would include mature second-growth stands.

I FIRST WROTE THIS INTRODUCTION in mid-2020: After Veridian Ecological produced BC’s Old-Growth Forest: A Last Stand for Biodiversity, but before Gorley and Merkel’s A New Future For Old Forests; before the Ministry responded to Gorley and Merkel with a set of deceptive deferrals that changed almost nothing but helped an NDP-led government get re-elected; before the Fairy Creek blockades turned into Canada’s largest ever act of mass civil disobedience; before a second panel was assembled to review old growth; before the ministry announced 2-year deferrals on 2.6 million hectares of old forest—subject to First Nations’ approval within 30 days—and before Grand Chief Stewart Phillip chided the Horgan government for using coercion to get First Nation approval for those 2.6 million hectares. By the time you have finished reading this sentence, the situation may have changed again, and I will be re-writing this introduction. That is to say, the struggle to protect as much remaining primary forest as possible has heated up, is fluid, and the momentum in the battle does not appear to be on the side of the logging industry. But who really knows? In going from mid-2020 to late 2021, the extent of primary forest that scientists and conservationists say should be taken out of the 22-million-hectare Timber Harvesting Land Base has grown. In mid-2020, the concern was for primary forest that contained “large” or “very large” old trees. Forest scientists Karen Price and Rachel Holt, along with forester Dave Daust, had estimated that an area of only 415,000 hectares of such forest remains in BC. Price, Holt and Daust, along with Gary Merkel and Lisa Matthaus were appointed to a Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) by forests minister Katrine Conroy earlier in 2021, and now their focus has shifted to 7.6 million hectares of “Big Tree Old Growth,” “Ancient Old Growth” and “Rare Old Growth.” Of that 7.6 million hectares, 5 million hectares is unprotected. The ministry of forests, advised by TAP, has prioritized 2-year logging deferrals on 2.6 million of those 5 million unprotected hectares. TAP’s recommendations were based on ministry records indicating where primary forests remain and the risk that logging could occur in those areas in the next two years. It is too early to say whether the ministry is genuinely considering deferring logging on 2.6 million hectares of at-risk primary forest. Given its record of deception on the deferrals it announced in mid-2020 before the provincial election, there’s good reason to be skeptical. It might be the case that the bad publicity from the Fairy Creek blockades has forced the ministry to devise a communications plan that proposes a course of action that sounds good on CBC and makes the public think the issue has been settled, but that the ministry has no actual intention of following. We’ve seen that before. Nor is it clear what a “deferral area” means to the ministry of forests. At the November 2 press briefing before the announcement of the 2.6-million-hectare priority deferral areas, the assistant deputy minister of forests was asked by a reporter: “In the past, old-growth deferral areas still allowed for logging of second growth, cutting new forestry roads, that type of thing. People saw some major activity in and around some major trees. Is that still allowed here? Is it still allowed to have activity in deferral areas, logging in and around the rare and ancient trees?” David Muter didn’t say “no,” and instead referred to the deferral areas announced a year before where, he admitted, logging has been, and will continue to be, allowed. When asked about this the day after, Muter still didn’t clarify whether logging would be allowed. If the ministry has a genuine commitment to fully protect these areas of primary forest and logging is not going to be permitted, surely he would have said so. We asked Rachel Holt if leaving old trees in the deferral areas while removing younger but merchantable trees would serve the purpose of protecting biodiversity—one of the key concerns about loss of primary forest. Holt simply responded: “No.” The grounds for skepticism about the government’s intentions don’t stop there. The priority deferral areas, the ministry stipulated, required approval by First Nations. Indigenous governments were given only 30 days to make that decision. First Nations were promised some money to help them with the work of determining what impact the deferrals would have on them, but apparently no such support materialized. Further, accurate mapping of the deferral areas, essential for First Nations to know what it was they were being asked to make a decision about, wasn’t provided. On the 29th day of the 30-day decision period, the president of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, Grand Chief Phillip Stewart, expressed concern about the government’s intention. “Let’s be clear,” Stewart said, “What we want is a moratorium on old-growth logging. Period. We don’t want some convoluted, concocted, deceitful notion of deferrals, of kicking the ball down the road and allowing the industrialized devastation of logging in British Columbia to continue.” So it’s difficult to know at this date (December, 2021) whether the deferral announcements are a step in the direction of the “paradigm shift” called for by Gorley and Merkel in their report, or just a devious communications plan created by the ministry to make business-as-usual look like a resolution to the question of how much of BC’s remaining primary forest will be allowed to be converted to plantations. To make things even more complicated, all of the numbers and descriptions about how much area of primary forest remains—and what’s in them—that were used by the Technical Advisory Panel are all guesses based on databases that everyone admits are badly flawed. Over the years, the ministry of forests just hasn’t done the work necessary—ground-truthing—to be able to say how much primary forest is left, where it is and what’s in it. One thing that is clear, especially following the mid-November flooding of Merritt, Princeton and the Fraser River Valley, as well as the widespread damage to highway infrastructure: For conservationists, the “old growth” goal has expanded from protecting the remaining forest that contains large old trees to protecting all remaining unprotected primary forest. The Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project will follow and report on this story as it unfolds. But we are going to go further than that. We see the need for the case to be made for protecting all remaining primary forest. We will help to make that case. But so far, all the back and forth between government and industry and the conservation side about how much primary forest is left in BC—and where it is—has been based on computer models that have not been ground-truthed. Lines need to be drawn on maps—lines that are informed by actually knowing what’s inside the lines. Government hasn’t done this work and the question is: What will it take for the ministry of forests to do the work of determining where primary forest still exists and, where it exists, what’s in it?

BC logging companies export 80 percent of the products made from our forests. As a result, BC’s record of forest loss, per capita, is worse than Bolivia’s and far worse than Brazil’s. This rate of forest loss, made worse by losses to insects, forest fires and disease, is neither sustainable nor ethical. WHILE MANY British Columbians loathe clearcut logging—especially clearcut logging of old-growth forests, these are mere symptoms of a much bigger problem: the over-exploitation of BC forests. Over the last 20 years, industrial logging of live, healthy trees has destroyed more forest than the Mountain Pine Beetle, disease and forest fires combined. This has created a remarkable outcome. Among the ten most-forested states on Earth, BC has the highest per capita rate of forest cover loss. This is a measure of how completely BC’s logging industry has seized control of publicly-owned forests. BC experienced an immense amount of forest loss as a result of the beetle infestation over those 20 years. It also experienced significant growth in the size and intensity of forest fires. Yes, nature has taken its toll on our forests, especially under the influence of human-created climate change. But those natural forces are at work in those other countries, too, so BC’s record can’t be excused by blaming it on nature. In fact, if we take the forest loss due to natural causes out of the numbers for BC and leave them in for all the other countries, BC still has the worst record of forest loss on planet Earth: So why is this vast forest removal project occurring? Let’s consider the rationale offered by the proponents of primary forest liquidation and then come back to why it’s really happening. Industry and government in BC often cite a purely economic rationale for why we should use our forests to the extent we do: We need employment, building materials, foreign currency and government revenue. But if forest removal in BC was occurring at a rate necessary to meet those needs, the rate of removal per capita would align with other countries with similar economic needs, like the USA. Instead, BC’s per capita rate of forest loss is much, much higher than the USA’s. In fact, comparison of BC’s per capita forest removal with heavily forested but economically poorer states around the planet leads to the inevitable conclusion that something in BC has gone very haywire over the past 20-30 years. Consider Bolivia. It’s the 8th most heavily forested country in the world. It has an area of 1.099 million square kilometres, just slightly larger than BC’s 944,735. Between 2001 and 2019, Bolivia lost 5.68 million hectares of forest as a result of logging, fire, disease and insect infestation. In that same period, BC lost 7.88 million hectares to all causes. During those 20 years, Bolivia’s average population was 10.4 million, BC’s was 4.74 million. When you do the arithmetic, Bolivia’s forest loss from all causes over those 20 years amounted to .545 hectares per capita. BC lost 1.66 hectares per capita, more than three times Bolivia’s loss. Yet Bolivia is considered an international pariah when it comes to forest loss. While government and industry claim that the rate of forest removal in BC is as high as it is because it’s necessary to feed forestry families, there’s little evidence that this is actually the case. Protest against forest conservation by the BC Truck Loggers Association in Victoria (Photo: Global TV) Between BC and Bolivia, there’s no question about which country has the greatest economic need to exploit its forests. In 2010, the mid-point of the 20-year period we’re considering, Bolivia’s per capita GDP was around $1900 per person. BC’s was $41,327. In other words, Bolivia had a much greater economic need, per capita, to exploit its forest resource than BC did. Yet BC’s per capita rate of forest loss was over three times as high as Bolivia’s. Keep in mind that BC’s high per capita GDP had little to do with the forest industry, which in 2010 accounted for only about 2.5 percent of BC’s GDP, according to the BC government. By 2019, that had fallen to 1.8 percent. So the “we need to feed our families” rationale for why BC needs to devastate its primary forests is completely bogus, a fiction used by the industry to divert the attention of BC’s TV and newsprint journalists away from the world-class clearcuts. The employment rationale is undermined by the facts, too. Direct jobs in the forest industry were cut in half during the 20-year period we’re considering, yet the area of forest removed in a year may have fluctuated in response to market conditions but is slightly higher now than 20 years ago when there were twice as many people working in the industry. Moreover, the fraction of total employment contributed by the forest industry to BC’s economy got smaller and smaller. In other words, contrary to what they say, there is no commitment by government or industry to link the extent of forest removal with employment. Logging industry supporters point to BC’s need for foreign currency as justification for the high level of forest removal. This is almost laughable, especially when we consider how BC is marketed to the international tourism market: Super, Natural BC. Tourism is a bigger industry in BC than the forest products industry, and international tourism brings foreign currency directly to BC. Those tourists don’t come to see clearcuts, they come for BC’s purported scenic beauty and wildlife, both of which are being threatened by the extent of logging. If BC needed more foreign currency, it would be more effective to attract more tourists, not create the conditions that will drive them away. Government revenue? There is no net revenue for government from the forest industry. Once you include the huge hidden cost of direct public subsidies involved, there is a huge net loss to the public purse, a cost that is greater then the industry’s contribution to provincial GDP. Finally, what about BC’s need for wood products, like dimensional lumber and toilet paper? Since 80 percent of the wood products made from forest removal in BC over the last 20 years were exported to other countries, there is no justification for the claim that forest removal is as high as it is because BC needs the wood products for its own use. And it is that very high level of exports that is the underlying cause of the over-exploitation of BC forests. Only 20 percent of the forest logged in BC is used to meet BC’s needs. The rest is exported, mainly to the USA, China and Japan. It is noteworthy that those three countries now have much higher levels of protection for their own primary forests than BC does. China banned all logging of its primary forests in 2020. In the US Pacific Northwest, where forests are comparable to BC’s, clearcut logging in old-growth forests on public land was ended in the 1990s. The Biden administration recently ended clearcutting of old-growth forest in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. A survey of satellite images of Japanese forests shows little to no clearcutting is taking place in that country. It’s also noteworthy that China and the USA are two of the world’s largest exporters of wood products. They import wood from BC, remanufacture it to a higher value and then sell it to other countries. Teal Cedar Products, for example, has a mill in Surrey that produces rough lumber. It then ships that lumber across the border to its remanufacturing facility in Sumas, Washington and adds value to it there. While export markets are the main driver of primary forest removal in BC, it is the policies of the forests ministry—which, to put it bluntly, have been written by the logging industry—that allows such a vast over-engagement with that market. Large companies, through the Council of Forest Industries, have effectively executed a regulatory capture of the provincial forests ministry and de facto privatization of BC’s purportedly “publicly owned” forests. That story is covered elsewhere on this site. The resulting over-exploitation of BC’s forests is now highly evident in satellite images of almost every landscape across the province. To experience this destruction on the ground can be both shocking and motivating. Satellite image of BC above Paradise Lake near Peachland Clearcut near Peachland. On the ground, the physical size of the clearcuts permitted by the ministry of forests is shocking. (Photo by Will Koop) Our purpose in this section of the site is to develop an understanding of how much of BC’s allowable annual cut could be eliminated in order to conserve forests as a response to the climate and biodiversity crises, and how much of the cut would need to be given up just to bring BC in line with less extreme members of the global community, like Bolivia and Brazil. BC has, basically, three options. The first is to ignore the fact that it is, by global standards, over-exploiting its forests and will soon be seen, in this era of climate emergency and biodiversity collapse, as an international pariah, like Brazil and Bolivia, only worse. Making sure international customers are aware of what’s happening in BC will be essential if the ministry continues to be unresponsive to the unfolding climate and biodiversity crises in BC. The second option is to reduce the cut so that it just meets our own needs and no more. Let the USA, China and Japan figure out how to meet their own needs without using BC as a sacrifice zone. The third option would be to make a paradigm shift to ecosystem-based forest management, where “extraction of timber” would only occur at a level that didn’t degrade ecosystems. In that case, we would need to adjust our “need” to what’s actually available without harming our life support system. Those of us who have a conviction that all this forest destruction is unsustainable and harming humanity’s future on Earth need to act. The forest destruction that’s occurring just to feed the export market is a huge target begging for action. The current government, advised by industry and ministry of forests personnel who relate to forests in terms of “fibre” and “feedstock,” seems unaware that BC has fallen so far into industrial extremism. Our challenge will be to wake them up and get them moving in the right direction.

Currently, publicly owned forests on the islands are managed for the economic gain of a small number of people. The essential ecological services provided by these forests are largely ignored. THE MILD, WET CLIMATE of the Discovery Islands has, in the past, produced lush forests containing large, long-lived trees that stored immense quantities of carbon and supported unusually large numbers of forest-dependent plants and animals. The evidence for this can still be found in scattered groves of old-growth forest around these islands, and in the huge, decomposing stumps left behind by early hand loggers. Where the groves remain, you can find plants and animals that can’t be found anywhere else. These remnants of primordal forest contain critically important characteristics that current circumstances—namely the collapse in biodiversity and growing climate instability—demand be conserved and more broadly restored across the islands. But the forests of the Discovery Islands are being treated just like any other forest in BC: as a “natural resource” that can be used for the generation of private wealth, no matter what the long-term impacts may be. This private seizure and destruction of an essential common life support system has long been characterized by those benefitting from the seizure as “in the public interest”: logging pays the bills of government, is essential to the province’s economic growth and is “sustainable,” they claim. But our so-called “publicly owned” forests are not being cut down to “pay the bills” for government services. The cost of running the ministry of forests between 2010 and 2019 exceeded all forest-related revenues by an average of nearly $1 million per day. Nor are BC forests being logged to meet British Columbia’s own need for wood products. Between 80 and 90 percent of the wood products obtained from BC forests are exported, mainly to the USA, China and Japan. Essential ecological services provided by forests have been legislated into oblivion by the “unduly” clauses in regulations governing logging of BC forests. No matter what beneficial services forests provide—habitat for fish and wildlife, protection of biodiversity, regulation of water quality, temperature and flow, and so on—current legislation protects those services “only to the extent that it does not unduly reduce the supply of timber from British Columbia’s forests.” Any private economic benefit derived from logging comes at the cost of hidden losses: Loss of stable, unfragmented wildlife habitat; loss of the capacity of forests to provide climate stability, loss of the hydrologic functions of mature and old forests, including filtering and moderating the temperature of salmon bearing streams; and loss of low fire hazard. The resulting widespread over-exploitation of BC forests, including those on the Discovery Islands, provides few economic opportunities for ordinary British Columbians. Once an important part of BC’s early economic development, the now-highly-mechanized industry has lost 50 percent of its workforce in just the last 20 years and now contributes less than 2 percent of the province’s GDP. The industry has become a noose around taxpayers’ collective neck, constantly pulled tighter by the influence of industry insiders who pass through the revolving door between the Council of Forest Industries and deputy ministerial postings. The industry is simply not economically viable without taxpayer support. The tenuous economic nature of the industry is illustrated by a claim made by Mosaic Forest Management, the logging company doing the greatest damage on the Discovery Islands. In 2020, according to Globe and Mail reporter Justine Hunter, the company’s Chief Forester Domenico Iannidinardo claimed that “the company’s cost of harvesting usually exceeds what local mills are paying for logs.” Mosaic made that claim as it pressured the federal government to remove all restrictions on the export of raw, unprocessed logs to overseas markets. Mosaic Forest Management owns no mills of its own in BC and is the largest exporter of raw logs. Destroying forests for raw log export may keep a few local road builders, fallers, truckers and a handful of professional foresters employed, but their employment is highly subsidized by both BC taxpayers and nature. It is a common experience that personal submissions to the ministry of forests or the logging companies—from people concerned about the myriad impacts on their community of logging for the export market—have little or no effect, no matter how well-considered they are. De facto privatization of BC’s publicly owned forests in 2003 transferred the obligation to ignore public concerns from government to industry. Since then, the main role of the forest ministry has been to create the conditions that keep wood exports flowing to the US, China and Japan, at as high a rate as the market allows. Even when other government agencies have tried to limit the amount of logging on the islands—for example, by the establishment of Special Management Zone 19 on Quadra Island by the 2001 Vancouver Island Land Use Plan’s Higher Level Order—the Ministry of Forests has undermined the effort and reasserted its own control over the extent of logging on Quadra. The ministry operates as though one set of forest policies fits every part of the province equally. And those policies have been designed for one purpose: to allow an aggressive liquidation of BC’s mature and primary forests in order to meet the export market for wood products and generate private wealth. But differences in geography, wildlife occurrence, human population density and economic need all demand a thorough reassessment of this industry and its subsidies, community by community. Besides, emerging new economic opportunities are turning logging on its head. An example of what’s coming is illustrated by the March 2022 announcement by Mosaic Forest Management of its “BigCoast Initiative.” (Mosaic is the joint management company that performs certain task for both TimberWest and Island Timberlands, which are two separate corporate entities. TimberWest is owned by the BC Investment Management Corporation and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board. Island Timberlands is owned partly by the BC Investment Management Corporation and partly by its equivalent in Alberta.) Under the BigCoast Initiative, TimberWest will cease logging on approximately 40,000 hectares of its privately-owned forest land on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii. Why? Iannidinardo, Mosaic’s chief forester, told The Globe & Mail, “We expect to make at least as much from the BigCoast initiative as we would earn from harvesting these forests.” The BigCoast initiative will sell carbon offsets instead of logging its forests. If it makes more economic sense for TimberWest not to log its own property, then surely it makes just as much sense for the ministry of forests to stop logging public land on the Discovery Islands, too. No matter what you think about “carbon offsets,” Mosaic’s direction reflects a new understanding that forests have a crucial role to play in mitigating climate change. A paradigm shift in the human-forest relationship is already underway. The role the Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project will play in that shift will be to gather and curate accurate information about the forests on each of the Discovery Islands, and present ideas and opportunities that reflect the need for greater conservation of those forests.

The 2001 Vancouver Island Land Use Plan, which included Quadra Island, was a decade in the making and was supposed to resolve conflicts on publicly owned land between logging and other values. An example of how the objectives of that planning have been undermined is illustrated by the logging of old forest at Hummingbird Lake. IN JULY 2019, on a hike just east of Newton Lake on Quadra Island, my wife and I came across a logging operation on the north side of Hummingbird Lake. It was a Sunday, and work was paused. From previous visits to Hummingbird Lake and from research on where past logging has occurred on Quadra, I knew this was what is known as “primary” forest: no roads had ever been built and there had been no previous logging. Such areas—undisturbed by industrial activity—are now exceedingly rare in places that have significant human populations living nearby, including Quadra Island. The old-growth forest contained many large, veteran Douglas firs that had survived previous natural disturbances, including 1925’s large fire that burned much of Quadra Island with varying intensity. Since that fire, a mix of hemlock and fir had grown back between the big, old Douglas firs, which had continued to thrive. This forest is in the CWHxm2 biogeoclimatic zone and, coast-wide, the remaining old-growth forest in this zone is at 9 percent. Below 10 percent, forest ecologists say, biodiversity is at high risk. The logging road Okisollo Resources punched through an old-growth forest north of Hummingbird Lake in 2019 Finding a logging operation in this extraordinary place was disappointing. This was exactly the type of forest that was supposed to have been left undisturbed under the provisions of the 2001 Vancouver Island Land Use Plan’s Higher Level Plan Order. Quadra Island had been included in that ground-breaking attempt to end the heated conflict on Vancouver Island between logging and other values. One of those values was conservation of biodiversity. In Quadra’s case, the VILUP gave biodiversity conservation a higher priority than timber extraction. And that boiled down to protecting the remaining old-growth forest (>250 years old) and managing logging so that there would always be at least 25 percent of the area covered with mature forest (>80 years old). The fact that Quadra Island was the only non-Vancouver Island area to have been selected for a Special Management Zone is testimony to the land use planners’ understanding—25 years ago—of the high level of non-timber values present in Quadra Island’s forests, and the strong interest in the community to protect those values. On the day I visited the site, the logging company, Okisollo Resources of Ladysmith, were in the process of cutting the younger hemlock and fir that had grown up since the 1925 fire. Except for some old-growth felled to build the logging road, the old firs still stood. The operation seemed poised to take out everything but the old fir vets, a practice that has been employed throughout SMZ 19 by TimberWest to meet the old-forest obligations of SMZ 19. The old-growth forest in the midst of being logged by Okisollo Resources This practice—cutting between the old trees—doesn’t actually protect biodiversity, according to forest ecologist Rachael Holt, even though that is the intent of the old-forest provisions for SMZ 19. But it appeared that Okisollo Resources was, like TimberWest, going to leave most of the big firs—about 50 of them remained—spread over a 3-hectare cutblock. I estimated another 5 to 10 had already been cut to build the roads. That many old firs on that small area is as dense as any old-growth stand I have ever found on Quadra Island. About a month later, I was able to obtain a satellite image that seemed to confirm that Okisollo had left the veteran firs. It showed most of the big trees not in the roadways—now about 45 of them—had been left. In the satellite image below, the west end of Hummingbird Lake is visible at the bottom. This beautiful little lake is a short distance east of Small Inlet Provincial Park and close to the southern edge of Octopus Islands Provincial Park. Neither of those parks has a comparably-sized area of old-growth forest within its boundaries. Satellite image of Okisollo Resources cutblock just north of Hummingbird Lake, on Quadra Island, in August 2019 RETURNING TO THE SITE about 9 months later, we found that all but 5 of the old Douglas fir vets in the cutblock had been felled. A number of big logs still lay beside the road. The growth rings of one of those showed it had been about 370 years old when cut. The tight-grained log was sound and appeared to be high quality wood. The Ministry of Forests’ Harvest Billing System, which records the volume logged and the stumpage paid for trees cut on Crown land, shows that Okisollo Resources likely paid about $3800 in total stumpage for the 50-or-so old-growth Douglas fir trees it felled in August of 2019. That’s roughly $75 per tree. Those trees definitely met the ministry’s definition of “old” (greater than 250 years of age) and, under the provisions and intentions of SMZ 19, should have been left standing. View of the cutblock at Hummingbird Lake in June 2020. This is the same area as is shown in the drone photograph at the top of this page, which shows the abundant wood left in the cutblock. Logs left behind by Okisollo Resources showed the old-growth had been around 370 years old The requirements for biodiversity conservation stipulated for SMZ 19 were that at least 9 percent of the entire area of Okisollo’s Woodlot Licence tenure should be left as old forest (greater than 250 years of age), and at least 25 percent of the area would be covered with “mature” (greater than 80 years of age) forest. These were the levels of old and mature forest for areas where an “intermediate” level of biodiversity conservation was the objective. Okisollo’s Woodlot Licence tenure was one of the few areas on Quadra Island where the “at least 9 percent” might have been achieved. Given the history of extensive logging on Quadra Island since 1880, establishment of SMZ 19 meant conserving all remaining old forest since less than 10 percent of the area in the zone is covered by old-growth. The specific strategy to reach the required percentages of old forest and mature forest recommended by the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan for Quadra Island was to “maintain existing old forest in the zone, as well as second growth with [a] high portion of veteran trees...” That was the strategy that extensive land use planning had determined should be applied to the 3 hectares where Okisollo Resources had just cut about 50-60 large, old Douglas firs and all of the younger trees between them. But since SMZ 19 was created in 2001, the Campbell River District office of the Ministry of Forests had slowly but surely introduced more and more Woodlot Licence Program tenures into the zone, a form of tenure that is immune to the objectives for old and mature forest established by the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan. There are now 11 Woodlot Licence tenures in SMZ 19, occupying roughly half of the zone—each of them virtually free to ignore the requirements established by the plan. Okisollo Resources was granted such a tenure in 2010, 9 years after SMZ 19 had been created and 6 years after regulations for Woodlot Licence tenures had been rewritten so that they didn’t have to meet government objectives for old and mature forest. This repeated location of Woodlot Licence tenures in a Special Management Zone has the appearance of the Ministry of Forests intentionally undoing land-use planning. Following our discovery that Hummingbird forest had been felled, I filed a freedom of information request for the record of communications between the Ministry of Forests and the forester responsible for the planning and approval of this cutblock. I have often heard the logging industry claim that a company has to satisfy dozens of stringent regulations before it can cut old-growth forest. This seemed the perfect opportunity to find out what those regulations were. The records provided by the ministry showed that the company’s forester—who is also a principal of Okisollo Resources—advised the ministry in an emailed “notice of commencement” that, “There are scattered [fir] vets in the block, as well as evidence of fire.” The forester also provided a brief description of the ecological community in the understory. The response from the ministry was: “Thank you for the NOC. Please be advised that in order for me to add the cut blocks to Woodlot CPs; you need to send the following information (as noted below) which shows both Gross & NAR hectares.” That was it. There was no information exchanged between the ministry official and the company forester that would have allowed the ministry to assess whether “scattered vets” might actually be a rare stand of old forest adjacent to two provincial parks that had next to no old forest themselves. All that mattered to the ministry was the gross area that would be cut. The biodiversity and other objectives stipulated for SMZ 19—and for all the other 20 0r so SMZs scattered around Vancouver Island—are still legally in effect. In 2021, the Forest Practices Board reported on a complaint regarding logging by BC Timber Sales in SMZ 13, which is in the Nahmint Valley on Vancouver Island. In its report, which was critical of BC Timber Sales, the board wrote, “The public needs to be confident that objectives established in land use plans will actually be carried through and implemented in forestry operations.” It is difficult to see how the Quadra public can have confidence that “objectives established in land use plans will actually be carried through and implemented in forestry operations” in SMZ 19. By transferring land in SMZ 19 into the Woodlot Licence Program, the Ministry of Forests was knowingly undoing the protections that had been worked out by 10 years of land-use planning undertaken in concert with the Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Mines. Those protections were intended to end “the War in the Woods,” as it was called back then. The Forest Practices Board—the independent watchdog which is supposed to be there for the public interest when logging operations go awry of regulations—has recently confirmed that it isn’t going to do anything to rectify the problem on Quadra Island. Soon after my second visit to Hummingbird Lake, Quadra Island resident Rod Burns filed a complaint with the Forest Practices Board, raising the issue of Okisollo Resources cutting old forest. The Board undertook an investigation; in June 2022, the board issued its findings. The report stated, in short, that Okisollo Resources had complied with “legal requirements.” The investigation, however, clearly did not establish the actual facts of the case. The report admitted that no investigators had actually visited the site, yet it authoritatively described the old forest there as “scattered old trees,” just like Okisollo had described it to the ministry. I contacted Forest Practices Board Chair Kevin Kriese following release of the report. Kriese clarified that it was the Board’s understanding that only 10 trees had been cut, a number Okisollo Resources apparently did not disagree with. As mentioned above, however, between 50 and 60 old trees were cut. Without having done an independent on-site assessment of what forest had been there before the logging—easily ascertainable by counting stumps—the Forest Practices Board report lacks credibility. But the Board’s report did contain an interesting paragraph outlining why Woodlot Licence tenures aren’t expected to manage for old growth values and, more importantly, what became of the legal responsibility for meeting the requirements of SMZ 19. It stated: “When members of the BC Legislative Assembly first debated [The Forest and Range Practices Act], the Minister of Forests discussed the exemptions in section 13(3) of FRPA. The Minister explained that it is not practical to regulate old-growth forests on the small scale of a woodlot licence. Instead, government regulates old-growth forest management at the landscape level. For the Quadra landscape unit (Figure 1), which covers the woodlot licence and tree farm licence 47, this means that the holder of the tree farm licence addresses the legal requirements to manage old-growth forests under their forest stewardship plan. Again, the woodlot licensee is exempt from following government’s objectives for the retention of old-growth forests.” There are two things about that statement that I would draw your attention to. First, the Board’s conviction that old and mature forest are being managed on Quadra through the “Quadra landscape unit (Figure 1)”—will be news to the local district office. No such plan exists. It has been promised for many years—a promise going right back to the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan days, but it has never materialized into the public realm. Second, the Forest Practices Board report puts all of the legal responsibility for ensuring that the provisions for old and mature forest in SMZ 19 are met on TFL 47—which is tenured to TimberWest (aka “Mosaic Forest Management”). The physical area of SMZ 19 is exactly the same now as it was in 2001—approximately 16,000 hectares. But now, instead of the requirement for managing for old and mature forest being spread over the entire area of SMZ 19, that responsibility now falls entirely on about half of the original area of SMZ 19, the area occupied by TFL 47. It has been pointed out to TimberWest that if the entire legal responsibility for providing the spatial requirements for old and mature forest falls to them, they are almost out of room to log on Quadra Island. TimberWest’s response has been to claim that it will “coordinate” with the Woodlot Licence tenures to ensure the requirements of SMZ 19 are met. Does this make sense in terms of protecting the public interest? No, of course not. Such “coordination” would require, as TimberWest has admitted, that TimberWest negotiate with some of the other Woodlot Licence tenure holders to put some of their old and mature forest in permanent reserve so that TimberWest could keep cutting on TFL 47. But that would only happen, of course, if some entity existed that could reliably ensure such legal agreements were actually made and were enforced. The Ministry of Forests, obviously, has no interest in seeing such an agreement in place. Its actions over a number of years precipitated this bizarre, unworkable situation in the first place. It will take concerted public involvement and vigilance to ensure that the minimal biodiversity conservation provisions set up for Special Management Zone 19 are implemented. While were at it, it’s time to raise the level of biodiversity conservation from “Intermediate”—as set out for SMZ 19—to “High.” That would be more in tune with what we now know about the collapse in biodiversity and the need to conserve forests to mitigate climate change.