The Times Colonist has recently printed an opinion piece by the Endangered Ecosystem Alliance’s Ken Wu. For brevity several key lines were cut. We print the original article here in its entirety followed by a link to the online article in the newspaper:
Nov. 24, 2019
Hope for old-growth forests – or more Talk and Log?
by Ken Wu
The maxim “Justice delayed is justice denied” is nowhere more true than regarding the fate of BC’s endangered old-growth forests.
The battle over BC’s magnificent old-growth forests has been one of the most enduring conflicts in the province’s history. For half a century, hundreds of thousands of British Columbians have placed their time, money, and freedom on the line to protect these globally significant forests, home to trees up to 2,000 years old.
Their unique characteristics require centuries to develop: the immense trees that support tourism and First Nations longhouses, their distinctive structure that supports unique wildlife, and their massive storage of carbon, more per hectare than even the Amazon rainforest. However, under BC’s system of forestry, they are to be re-logged every 50 to 80 years, never to become old-growth again. Therefore old-growth logging in BC is a non-renewable activity akin to extracting fossil fuels.
This is a time-constrained issue. Already 80% of the original, productive old-growth forests on Vancouver Island have been logged, including well over 90% of the valley bottoms where the largest trees grow. About 10,000 hectares of old-growth forests are logged each year on the Island, the size of the city of Vancouver, while only 8% of the original, productive old-growth forests are protected in parks and Old-Growth Management Areas.
The BC NDP’s 2016 pre-election platform created hope for many by promising to “sustainably manage BC’s ecosystems, forests and old growth” by “using the ecosystem-based management of the Great Bear Rainforest as a model”- a system which resulted in 85% of the forests there being reserved from logging. However, selective amnesia may have set in, as they have not mentioned their promise since coming to power.
Instead, they have continued with the policies and talking points of the previous BC Liberal government, that logging old-growth forests is vital for jobs – which is akin to arguing that we need commercial whaling in order to have food. The fact is that over 80% of BC’s productive forest lands are now second-growth, and the rest of the industrialized world is almost exclusively logging second and third-growth forests.
In addition, the evidence and research shows that protecting nature bolsters the economy by creating and attracting wealth from a diversity of sectors. Protected areas and old-growth forests not only boost the tourism and recreation industries (witness the economic rise of Port Renfrew as Canada’s “tall tree capital”, and the prosperity of Tofino), BC’s number one employer, but also enhance real estate values in nearby communities, provide carbon offsets, sustain non-timber forest products like wild mushroom harvesting, provide clean water and habitat for recreational and commercial fishing, and attract skilled labour like high tech workers who locate in communities with a higher environmental quality of life.
The diversified, modern, and smart economies supported by protected areas are often more prosperous and resilient compared to those based on the industrial resource extraction industries like old-growth logging, which squander these opportunities.
The BC government also continues to spin-doctor the stats of how much old-growth remains and is protected, by including vast tracts of stunted “bonsai” trees in bogs and subalpine rocky mountainsides to inflate their figures, and by removing the context of how much old-growth forests have already been logged.
However, currently there are several government initiatives that could finally end BC’s “War in the Woods” if the political wisdom exists.
A provincial panel chaired by foresters Gary Merkel and Al Gorley is soliciting public and stakeholder input until January 31st on how to manage BC’s old-growth forests, submitting its findings to the province next spring. Now is the time for the BC public to fully speak up.
In addition, amendments to BC’s forest practices regulations, the Forest and Range Practices Act, will be introduced in the spring of 2020. Public input last spring overwhelmingly favoured amending the act to include science-based targets that would save BC’s old-growth forests.
The federal government’s support for increasing Canada’s international commitment to protect 17% of its land base by the end of 2020 to 30% by 2030, is also adding pressure on BC to expand its protected areas. Currently BC sits at 15% and Canada at 12% protection. The BC NDP have yet to support any of these protection targets which are endorsed by the party’s federal counterpart, and which includes supporting Indigenous Protected Areas with additional financing – an absolute necessity by the province if the protection of old-growth forests is to be achieved.
So let’s hope the BC NDP government is not simply looking to buy more time with the ongoing “talk and log” processes currently underway, with extended timelines, no old-growth logging moratoria anywhere, and more vague promises and no action. If they are cynically strategizing to drag this out further into a “just elect us in 2021 and then we’ll do the right thing for old-growth forests afterwards” plan, they will deserve the same fate as the ancient forests whose demise they are supporting.
Ken Wu is the executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance and has worked to protect B.C.’s old-growth forests for 28 years.
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See the Times Colonist article here: