“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

You may have seen the headline in the Toronto Globe and Mail this week or heard it on CBC –“Canada lost 8.6 million hectares of forest in 2023 more than anywhere in the world.”

Although they didn’t break it down to the provincial level, B.C. had its worst forest fire year on record; 2.84 million hectares burnt, hundreds of homes destroyed, millions in government funds spent to fight the flames and a catastrophic loss in wildlife and plant ecosystems in “Beautiful B.C.”

And with a generally low snow pack the past winter many in the province fear even worse fire destruction this year. But as bad as all this is, it’s not the most destructive challenge facing our forest lands this year, or any other year for that matter. Far from it. No, by far the greatest challenge facing our precious woodlands is something we all participate in one way or the other – industrial logging.

Much of the public still retains a Smoky the Bear image of firefighting and logging – burly men of the woods who enjoy the outdoor life of felling trees and fighting fires that threaten those precious trees. Not so today. In today’s world, most trees are cut by mechanical means using chain saws, giant feller-buncher machines and other mechanized equipment to virtually mow the forest down like mowing a lawn.

Using this devastating equipment, modern loggers can level entire valleys of trees in a matter of weeks or months which used to take years to cut. And “cut” is the key word here because forestry in B.C. is mostly by “clearcutting,” a process that doesn’t leave any prisoners.

But don’t blame the loggers! They are only doing their jobs as directed by registered professional foresters who to a man or woman are true believers in industrial forestry where “all” the trees are cut because it’s easier for heavy equipment to operate and trees can be moved to the mill faster and bigger profits made.

As for the debris left behind, it’s either piled and burned or just left to rot and pump more carbon dioxide into our already saturated atmosphere. It ain’t pretty, but that’s the destructive way logging has been practiced in B.C. for the past 150 years and over that century and a half it has made B.C. rich, and in many places, ugly.

But time is running out on this wanton destruction of our heritage. Some experts claim we only have five to 10 years of old growth left in the province and old growth is where the money is. Second growth forests are much more difficult to log because many of them have been partially logged or damaged by fires or suffering from disease. Hence profit margins are smaller leaving logging corporations drooling over cutting larger old growth trees.

As a result, sawmills are running out of harvestable trees to be cut and closing all over the province. Some 40,000 forest sector jobs have been lost in B.C. since the early 1990s according to Statistics Canada with the losses especially large in rural and northern B.C.

If we don’t change our ways, the economic future of forestry in B.C. looks grim. Cut and run forest management has the province on its knees. But there is a way of practicing forestry that could change the forestry paradigm in the province and reverse the damage that 150 years of destructive clearcutting has done to both business and the environment in B.C.

The heavy hand of industrial forestry must be replaced with a more environmentally friendly approach that would end the carnage in the woods and put strict limits on the amount of trees cut and clearcutting banned period. Harvest levels will have to be drastically reduced and this would result in more layoffs, but it would still allow loggers to log and insure there will be trees to log in the future including harvesting the mountains of wood waste left on the ground by industry now.

In other words, the greed and profit taking that has characterized the industry in the past has got to go. We’ve logged at an unsustainable rate for more than a century. The larder is almost empty If we don’t act now Beautiful B.C. will become only a sad memory.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who believes logging and environmental values can survive together.

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