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  • Fact-checking mindustry myths

    David Broadland
    The BC logging industry can be relied on to mislead in the push toward reducing carbon emissions.
     
    IN A RECENT op-ed in Business in Vancouver, Linda Coady, president and CEO 0f the BC Council of Forest Industries, wrote that “forestry is key to growing a resilient bioeconomy in BC”.
    “Globally, the shared challenge of moving towards a net-zero economy and reducing emissions is vital”, Coady wrote. “In British Columbia and Canada, we have a unique opportunity with a sustainable and regenerative natural resource like forestry.”
    But Coady’s argument was based on a misleading account of how much of a logged forest is utilized in BC.
    She wrote: “The Canadian forest sector has a critical role to play in meeting this challenge. The forestry industry in BC strives to use virtually 100 per cent of every tree. Almost half becomes lumber for high-value wood products, with the balance becoming residual wood chips used to create pulp and paper, packaging, novel bioproducts and bioenergy—a growing part of the bioeconomy.”
    Coady is mixing up “trees” with “merchantable logs”. These are two very different things, and the difference just disappears into thin air in her half-baked bioaccount of what happens to BC forests after they are razed by logging. Here’s a more realistic account:
     

     
    Coady wants us to believe that logging can somehow reduce carbon emissions. But let’s consider the premature forest carbon emissions caused by logging. The merchantable portion of a tree contains 0nly 41 percent of the carbon in a humid BC forest and 39 percent in an arid forest (see “The relative size of pools of carbon in a logged BC forest”, here). Coady ignores the other 60 percent.
    When a forest is logged, over 80 percent of the forest carbon that was left in the clearcut takes a shortcut back to the atmosphere compared to what would have happened had the forest not been logged. The carbon in branches, undersized tops, unmerchantable trees, rotten wood, waste, breakage and coarse woody debris that are piled and then burned goes straight back to the atmosphere. Understory plants are killed and their carbon quickly returns to the atmosphere. The same applies to small and fine woody debris that lay on the forest floor before logging.
     

    Western Forest Products burn piles in a logged area of humid old forest near the Klanawa River on Vancouver Island. (Photo: TJ Watt)
     

    TimberWest burn piles in a logged area of humid second-growth forest near Granite Bay on Quadra Island. (Photo: David Broadland)
     

    Tolko slash piles ready for burning in an arid forest near Peachland (Photo: Taryn Skalbania)
     
    Logging regulations require a certain amount of coarse woody debris to be left in the clearcut. The carbon that debris contains, along with the carbon in stumps and roots, returns to the atmosphere more slowly, but faster than would have been the case if the forest had not been killed by logging. In the meantime, during fire weather, all of the debris left lying in the clearcut makes the fire hazard associated with that clearcut higher than it had been in the mature/old forest that preceded it. As a result there is a higher likelihood of this residual logging debris becoming part of a forest fire, an event that would quickly release much of the remaining carbon in the clearcut or plantation to the atmosphere. Lastly, with the forest cover removed, the forest floor is exposed to the sun and soil temperature rises, causing a higher rate of decomposition and a quicker release of soil carbon to the atmosphere than would have otherwise occurred.
    And what about the approximately 40 percent of the forest carbon that was trucked out of the clearcut as merchantable logs? The Ministry of Forests’ own research (see graph below) shows that about 50 percent of the carbon in BC forest products has returned to the atmosphere after 28 years. After 100 years that rises to 80 percent.
     

    BC Ministry of Forests’ graph
     
    Coady says BC and Canada have a “unique opportunity” for reducing emissions in the global push to get to “net zero”. She’s right, but the “opportunity” isn’t what her industry hopes it will be. The industry and the Ministry of Forests want the public to subsidize a tiny, token cleanup of the mess it leaves after logging, and then to be able to greenwash themselves with claims of an imagined “bioeconomy” that will reduce emissions. But with logging being the largest single source of carbon emissions in BC, the only realistic path to substantially reduce those emissions is to reduce the volume of forest cut in BC each year.

    David Elstone
    A story that ran in both the Prince George Citizen and Victoria Times Colonist, "More mill closures inevitable as BC forest industry crisis deepens", got the basic facts wrong.
     
    I read with concern a recent editorial that featured perspectives from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ resource industry analyst Ben Parfitt. The author’s paraphrasing of and quotes from Mr. Parfitt provide false impressions about how BC’s forests have been managed and the needs of the forest products manufacturing sector.
    As per the article, “Parfitt says, the lack of fibre stems from the B.C. government encouraging harvesting of beetle-killed pine and spruce forests after infestations began in 2009, which depleted supplies and created an overabundance of mill capacity that has deepened the crisis.”   To correct Mr. Parfitt, infestations did not begin in 2009. Mountain pine beetle outbreaks in the BC interior’s lodgepole pine forests are a natural phenomenon. In the late 1990’s and early 2000s these outbreaks expanded into an epidemic with the amount of pine being killed each year reaching a peak in 2005. By 2015 the epidemic was well over, with a reported 731 million+ cubic metres or 54% of the BC interior’s merchantable lodgepole pine having been killed.   For context, in the early 2000s the annual interior sawlog harvest averaged 50 million cubic metres – that means the mountain pine beetle killed 15 years’ worth of harvest!   Faced with such a catastrophe, the government had two options. Option 1. Do nothing and let the dead timber decay, and possibly burn in wildfires (adding to global carbon emissions). Option 2. Encourage the industry to use as much of the decaying timber as possible by temporarily increasing the harvest before it rotted. For a time, some of the pine could be made into lumber.   The later scenario was adopted, and a significant volume of dead pine was salvaged, which in turn created jobs and boosted the local rural economies. At the same time, salvage harvesting created the opportunity for the prompt regeneration of these vast dead forests (thereby restarting the land base’s forest carbon absorption engine).   It was well known as early as 2007 that eventually, the rate of harvest and allowable annual cut would have to come down and sawmills would need to adjust or risk closure. There was no definitive timeline, given the variable length of time the dead pine would remain viable for milling (referred to as having a “shelf life” of upwards of 15 to 20 years).   Yes, harvesting, and lumber production rose to levels well above historical averages, but it was done with intention – this was no secret! Following the upswing in harvesting and milling activity, it was always known there would be a return to a sustained yield basis of forest management, but at lower harvest level than that prior to the beetle-epidemic. Some 23 years past the start of the epidemic, much of that pine is no longer suitable for making lumber so sawmills must now adapt or close.   So, it was surprising then that Parfitt said ”in my view we have made mistakes in the past by putting so many eggs into one basket, in this case into the pellet basket”.   The BC pellet industry grew in response to a European Union mandated target to use more than 20-per-cent renewable energy by 2020 which included biomass energy (as in wood pellets). At the same time, the practice in BC was to burn post-harvest residue in slash piles, while sawmills’ sawdust and shaving would go into beehive burners – all of which were the perfect wood supply for making pellets.   It was obvious there was a win-win solution to this increased renewable energy demand in Europe and the surplus of low-quality wood fibre (as dead forests or from increased sawmilling) because of the beetles. Entrepreneurs saw the opportunity, understood their costs of production, secured contracts to purchase the sawdust and shavings and post-harvest roadside debris from local sawmills, got investors, built pellet mills, hired people, and created rural community jobs. How could this possibly have been a mistake?   The article says, “Parfitt said the province would have been better off to give secondary value-added forest companies access to timber supplies the pellet industry is now using”. In addition, Parfitt is quoted as, “Those pellet plants are consuming an immense amount of wood, about five million cubic metres equivalent per year, which in my view has effectively taken wood away from companies that could have added more value and produced more jobs with that wood”   I believe these comments provide a misinformed and false impression of the pellet industry. A recent study conducted by a team of forest professionals and academic experts found that 85% of the BC pellet industry’s fibre supply comes from by-products of sawmills and allied industries, and the remaining 15% is supplied from the forest including low-quality logs not suitable for lumber production and post-harvest residue.   Perhaps there may be an innovator that could use some of this fibre, but not likely at the same scale of the pellet industry. More importantly, what secondary value-added product could be made with sawdust, shavings and logging slash? What products could be made using this fibre that could have added more value and produced more jobs than pellets? Despite the plethora of wood fibre available due to the epidemic, no other industry was developed.   In this situation, pellets become the value-add product of choice because of the costs to produce are less than the value of the product in Europe. The alternative would have been to leave the fibre to rot in the woods or have it burnt, without creating jobs.   One last quote from Parfitt needs addressing, “We are running out of forest…Too much has been cut too quickly and we’re facing that inevitable day of reckoning and if we want to start to move away from the crisis we’re in it’s by getting the industry to start to do very different things from what it is currently doing, and that will take time and investment.”   Harvest rates were not such that “too much has been cut too quickly” – this is an absurd proposition given the decision was to harvest the dead timber before it rotted or burned – there was no option to stave off harvesting the dead timber for later.   Today, the BC interior industry is in the midst of a timber supply fall-down as a result of the beetle and other natural factors. To be clear, however, we are not running out forests overall, rather we have reached limits in some areas on what is economically available to harvest – that is a big difference.   Exacerbating today’s situation is that in many areas across the province there are forests affected by the government’s imposition of new policy initiatives that limit harvesting of non-dead timber (like forests set aside for old-growth management and other non-timber production values).   The article is correct in providing the message that “there’s every reason to believe that we’re going to see further mill closures”, but this is not news to anybody in the industry and mill closures cannot be blamed on the incorrect notions that the industry was overharvesting (dead timber) or the rise of the pellet industry.”

    David Broadland
    The BC government is committing a 220,000-square-kilometre, biodiversity-killing, climate-destabilizing fraud on its own citizens and the international community.
     
    THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF WRITING over the past year about the “Big Lie” in American politics: A deliberate, gross distortion of the truth, repeated over and over, even in the face of evidence that what’s being claimed is false.
    This isn’t just a sickness affecting American politics. Month after month, around the globe, scientists uncover more of the truth about how badly humanity has overshot Earth’s ecological limits. Perversely, the scientists’ dire warnings simply cause governments, corporations and their political proxies to respond with measures that protect the status quo. Rather than addressing the issues head-on and making plans to address the overshot in a meaningful way, these entities resort to greenwashing, denial and deliberate, gross distortions of the truth.
    The British Columbia government has its own version of a Big Lie, which it uses to manufacture continued public consent for the immense transformation of 220,000 square-kilometres of BC’s publicly owned primary forests into clearcuts, permanent logging roads and managed, short-rotation monoculture plantations.
    BC’s deliberate, gross distortion of the truth has two parts: First, that this transformation is being conducted under strict, science-based regulations that ensure “sustainability.” And second, that the liquidation of natural forests is being carefully monitored using powerful information technology to ensure we don’t exceed natural limits.
    Both of these claims can readily be shown to be false, yet government and industry make them so often that almost everyone believes them.
    Real progress at turning away from the endless, destructive exploitation of nature in our province won’t be possible until the BC government acknowledges the deception behind its claims of strict regulatory control and creates an accurate inventory of what remains of nature in this province—and a plan for how to restore it where it is most damaged.
    If new Premier David Eby’s commitment to sustain BC’s biodiversity by doubling the amount of protected area by 2030 is to be successful, it’s essential that his initiative doesn’t become just another exercise in protecting more rock and ice and adding more territory to BC’s Big Lie.
     

    This satellite photo of logging west of Kelowna covers an area of 63 square kilometres. The 220,000 square kilometres of primary forest in BC that is being converted to clearcuts, logging roads and plantations is 3,500 times greater than the area shown here (click image to enlarge). For context, the entire state of Washington covers 184,827 square kilometres.
     
    Does BC have strict, science-based regulations that ensure the “environmental sustainability” of converting primary forests to managed plantations?
    The short answer to that question is “No.” Converting primary forests, most of which are old, to short-rotation industrial plantations in which trees will never be allowed to grow old, profoundly changes the nature of a forest. Just one example of that change: The species of animals that need old primary forest—like Marbled Murrelets, Northern Goshawks and Mountain Caribou—won’t survive for long in a landscape covered by clearcuts, logging roads and managed plantations. It would take hundreds of years for an old forest ecology to re-emerge, but that’s not in the government’s plan. So how could the conversion ever be considered “environmentally sustainable”?
    It follows, then, that when anyone claims logging in BC occurs according to strict regulations that ensure environmental sustainability, the only part of that claim that might be true is the “strict regulations” part. So let’s examine that.
    After the BBC recently caught the British energy corporation Drax in the act of logging primary forest southeast of Prince George and turning it into fuel pellets, one of the defences Drax CEO Will Gardiner offered was this: “Areas identified by the [BC] Government for harvest are carefully selected by them using an exhaustive list of environmental criteria that includes but is not limited to; old growth management; landscape and site level biodiversity; age class distribution (old growth); riparian management; watershed management; wildlife management; visual quality; species at risk; rare and sensitive ecosystems; cultural heritage resources; soil quality; species diversity; site productivity; as well as social and economic considerations.”
    Gardiner was repeating the first part of the lie: Logging companies in BC labour under a great weight of stringent science-based regulations imposed by the government that are designed to ensure environmental sustainability.
    A more succinct expression of this part of the lie was recently offered by then BC Forests Minister Katrine Conroy, who explained to a Business in Vancouver reporter why other countries—like Japan—prefer to buy wood products from BC: “They recognize that we have some of the most stringent regulations for environmental sustainability when it comes to how we take care of our forests, as well as how we harvest them.”
    But the claim that BC has “stringent regulations for environmental sustainability” is not actually supported by forest legislation. Instead, all of BC’s legislated, science-based “stringent regulations” aimed at protecting non-timber values can only be enforced to the extent that they do not “unduly reduce the supply of timber from British Columbia’s forests”.
    That constraint on regulation, by its use seven times in the Forest Planning and Practices Regulation, legally limits the extent to which wildlife, soils, fish, riparian areas, sensitive watersheds and biodiversity (at both the landscape and stand levels) can be protected when an area is logged.
    To what degree are conservation objectives limited by the “unduly” clauses? Pretty darn close to 100 percent.
     

    Logged and burned primary forest in the Klanawa Valley (Photo by TJ Watt)
     
    That detail is not spelled out in the Forest Planning and Practices Regulation itself. But a Ministry of Forests’ document written by staff of the Forest and Range Evaluation Program in 2003, just before the Regulation was enacted, stated that the impacts of conservation objectives on timber supply were to be capped at no more than 6 percent—province-wide (1).
    The reason for the “unduly” clauses in the Forest Planning and Practices Regulation was also made clear in the document: “The intent of this language is to ensure that conservation of non-timber values is undertaken in balance with economic benefits”.
    That lop-sided, politically determined “balance”—94 points for logging and 6 for conservation—makes it clear that imposing “stringent regulations” was never the purpose of the legislation.
    The purpose was to create laws that appear to impose stringent regulations without actually imposing stringent regulations.
    The Forest Planning and Practices Regulation and its hidden cap on timber supply impact have allowed 20 more years of nearly unfettered destruction of primary forests, while at the same time providing excuse-makers in government and industry with credible “proof” that it’s all under control.
     

    Can you spot the protection of conservation values in this clearcut east of Prince George? (Photo: Sean O’Rourke/Conservation North)
     
    The office that’s supposed to enforce those “stringent regulations” is the Natural Resources Compliance and Enforcement branch (C&E). But its record of protecting BC’s forested ecosystems suggests that it knows it’s not supposed to do anything that might impact timber supply. Over the last 11 years, C&E has failed to get even a single administrative penalty, administrative sanction or court conviction against any company or individual under the Forest and Range Practices Act, the Forest Act, the Forest Stand Management Fund Act, or the Forest Practices Code of British Columbia Act, according to its public record of such cases.
    You might think that’s because no one in the logging industry has done anything wrong in the last decade.
    But I know of one slam-dunk case in which old primary forest on Quadra Island was logged in contravention of the tenure-holder’s commitment to retain old forest—and C&E declined to investigate due to budgetary and staff constraints.
    According to the BC government directory, C&E currently employs 8 people as “investigators” of infractions of forest-related laws. To cover the entire 22-million-hectare timber harvesting land base—the area in which logging is occurring in BC—each investigator would be responsible for an area about the size of Vancouver Island.
    By putting a 6 percent cap on the impact that conservation measures can have on timber supply, the forests ministry long ago signalled to its managers, employees and the logging industry that it wasn’t watching to see if science-based objectives were being met—or any other nicety of “environmental sustainability” either.
    By the way, this idea of arbitrarily limiting the impact of conservation measures on timber supply wasn’t invented by Gordon Campbell’s Liberals. Under the 1990s NDP government that preceded the Liberals, provisions for protecting biodiversity were subject to a 4 to 4.3 percent cap on timber supply impact (2). Different government, same message, same reason: To ensure that conservation of non-timber values is undertaken in “balance” with economic benefits.
    You might be wondering: “What should the balance between logging and conservation have been?” Let me answer that question and that will lead us to the second part of BC’s Big Lie.
     

    Logging of primary forest near Prince George (Photo: Sean O’Rourke/Conservation North)
     
    If BC did have stringent, science-based regulation of logging, what should the balance between logging and conservation be?
    The basic consensus of provincial forest scientists back in the 1990s and early 2000s was that logging would not threaten biodiversity unduly if it mimicked natural disturbances. After all, nature itself eventually turns old forest into young forest: by blowing it down, burning it, infesting it with insects or infecting it with disease. If logging mirrored the rate at which old forest is naturally turned back into young forest, the scientists reasoned, then logging would present only a low risk of biodiversity loss.
    But it has turned out that the natural rate at which old forest is turned into young forest is much slower, and the areas impacted are smaller in size, than had been understood in the 1990s when land use planning for BC’s publicly-owned forests began.
    A 2003 study (3) by forest ecologist Dr. Karen Price and forester Dave Daust found that forests on Haida Gwaii and on the central mainland coast were disturbed far less frequently—and those disturbances involved much smaller areas—than forest scientists had previously understood.
    That finding meant that, in their natural state, BC forests would have contained a much higher percentage of old forest than had previously been estimated. If the rate of logging was going to mimic nature, then in order to protect biodiversity and other ecological values, a much higher percentage of old forest than government had planned to leave would need to be left for nature.
    For example, where I live on Quadra Island, the return interval for stand-replacing natural disturbances was estimated at 200 years in 2001 (Biodiversity Guidebook). The minimum old forest retention target on Quadra Island, based on that return interval, was 9 percent. But the 2020 Interim Assessment Protocol for Forest Biodiversity in British Columbia, which has built on Price’s, Daust’s and other forest scientists’ findings, now estimates the stand-replacing disturbance return interval on Quadra Island and surrounding area to be 700 years. It’s now estimated that old forest (greater than 250 years old) would have covered about 70 percent of the forested area of the island (4).
    According to other work (5) done by Price, Daust and forest ecologist Dr Rachel Holt, keeping the risk of biodiversity loss to “low” would mean maintaining at least 70 percent of that area of old forest. So at least 49 percent (70 percent of 70 percent) of the forested area of Quadra Island would need to be old forest to keep the risk of biodiversity loss to “low”—far above the 9 percent used as a guide to manage old forest there since 2001.
    On Quadra Island, the imposed “balance” of 94 to 6 in favour of economic use over conservation of old forest should have been more like 50-50. But under the current management regime, the area of old forest has been allowed to fall to just under 4 percent of the original forested area on Quadra Island (6).
    The impact of all those years of logging old forest far past the limits of ecological sustainability in BC has left us with a collapse in biodiversity and a critical need to draw lines around the remaining old forest. The most advanced forest scientists tell us we urgently need to implement our new science-based understanding of how much old forest is needed to protect biodiversity. We would do that by identifying suitable old forest, providing it with legal protection, and if that’s not enough, then recruiting the balance needed from mature second-growth forests in the timber harvesting land base.
    And that brings us to the second part of BC’s Big Lie: That the BC government has a reliable inventory of the provincial forest, and, in particular, the extent of old forest that remains, and where it is.
     

    Removal of primary forest in the Inland Temperate Rainforest (Photo: Mary Booth/Conservation North)

    Is the liquidation of primary forests in BC being carefully monitored?
    First, let’s consider why having a reliable inventory of old forest is essential.
    A New Future for Old Forests, the report of the Strategic Review of How British Columbia Manages for Old Forests Within its Ancient Ecosystems, appeared in September 2020. Since then the Ministry of Forests has struggled to implement temporary logging deferrals in some old-growth forests. One of the criticisms of the deferral process has been that logging has continued in old forests despite the deferrals. But there is an even more fundamental problem with the process: The Ministry of Forests doesn’t have a good understanding of how much old forest remains, or where it’s located.
    Yet an accurate assessment of each of these will be critical to the success of the current old-growth logging deferral process and Premier Eby’s promised doubling of protected areas by 2030. If an area is deferred because the ministry believes it contains old forest but it doesn’t, and another area that does contain old forest isn’t deferred, the process could end up being a pointless exercise in drawing meaningless lines on maps.
    To identify at-risk old forest, the deferral process has relied entirely on a Ministry of Forests’ inventory called the Vegetation Resource Inventory (VRI) that estimates, among other things, the age, site index and dominant tree species growing in almost every stand of BC’s publicly owned forests. The database is used in decisions about where to log and how much can be logged and it is held up by the Ministry of Forests as just one of the many powerful, science-based tools it has for managing the “sustainable” liquidation of old forest.
    But is VRI accurate? No. In terms of locating old forest, throwing a dart at a map would be just as accurate.
    Over the past four years, the Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project has been mapping the remaining old forest on Quadra Island and other islands in the Discovery Islands area. Like the Ministry of Forests, the project uses analysis of satellite photography. But unlike VRI, the project complements satellite image analysis with local knowledge, extensive drone videography and, finally, on-the-ground confirmation that old forest is indeed present.
    There is very little similarity between the mapping of old forest being used by the Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) to identify old forest and the Discovery Islands project’s mapping of old forest. In general, VRI puts old forest where there isn’t any and misses the vast majority of actual old forest on Quadra Island. Of the 171 small fragments of old forest the project has mapped so far, only 19 of those overlap with areas in TAP’s Priority Deferral Map. Since the total area of old forest on Quadra Island is down to around 4 percent of the area of the original forest (6), old-forest-dependent biodiversity could hardly be at higher risk. All the remaining old forest needs to be deferred.
    Yet logging of old forest is still occurring on Quadra Island and the ministry’s inventory doesn’t even know it’s there.
     

    Priority deferral areas (solid green) on Quadra Island have little overlap with actual areas of old forest (outlined in yellow) found and mapped by the Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project (click image to enlarge).
     
    One particular failure by VRI to identify old forest seems emblematic of its inaccuracy: The TAP Priority Deferral Map, using VRI, shows there are only two small remnants of “Ancient Forest” remaining on the Discovery Islands. TAP says that this is forest that has been “identified as over 400 years old”.
    The Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project visited one of these two areas of “Ancient Forest”, a 5.7-hectare patch at Rosen Lake on Read Island. Unfortunately, this “Ancient Forest” had been logged sometime early in the 20th century and is now covered with second growth. On our visit we observed two or three large, old Douglas firs that undoubtedly were over 400 years old, rejected by the first loggers.
    Yet VRI showed the “projected age” of the forest as “833 years”. By the way, this area was in Read Island Provincial Park and is an Old Growth Management Area. So there was no need for it to be mapped as a priority deferral area.
    Perhaps even worse, though, a portion of the road into Rosen Lake was also given priority deferral. Just the road mind you, not the forest on either side of the road.
     

    Above: The forest at Rosen Lake, one of just two areas of “Ancient Forest” on the Discovery Islands, according to the Vegetation Resource Inventory. The inventory says it is 833 years old, but it had been logged in an era when loggers used spring boards, axes and crosscut saws. (Photo: David Broadland)
     
    On the other hand, the Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project has identified several areas of “Ancient Forest” on Quadra Island that aren’t acknowledged in the VIR database.
    I have no reason to believe that VIR’s inaccuracy in predicting where old forest is on the Discovery Islands is any different from the province as a whole.
    To be fair, TAP warned that such errors were going to occur and that the Vegetation Resource Inventory would be the source of the inaccuracy. It’s not the deferral process that we need to be wary of. It’s the quality of the tools the Ministry of Forests has created to conduct its program of old forest liquidation that are the problem. They certainly don’t work for identifying old forest, but the problem is much larger than that.
    All timber supply reviews and allowable annual cut determinations in BC over the past 20 years have relied on the Vegetation Resource Inventory to predict the existing volumes of wood remaining in unmanaged forests. Yet the inventory is hopelessly inaccurate. I’ve written previously about the failure of the ministry’s growth and yield models to accurately predict growth and yield in managed plantations, its failure to incorporate uncertainty in its calculations, and its refusal to be guided by the precautionary principle. The ministry’s tools and operational choices seem ideally suited for producing self-delusion: The ministry has an unshakeable belief that it knows what it is doing and what the outcomes will be. But in 2021, a year of record market demand and high prices for BC wood products, what publicly owned forest could be found to log only amounted to 62 percent of what the ministry timber-supply experts had long predicted would be available.
     
    Is it a Big Lie—or just a Big Delusion?
    For BC’s “Big Lie” to meet the definition of a lie, the tellers of the lie must know that what they are saying is not true but say it anyway. There needs to be an intention to mislead.
    But did former Forests Minister Conroy know about the “unduly” clauses in BC’s forest legislation? Did the minister know about the 6 percent cap on the impact of conservation measures on timber supply? Did she know about the under-resourced Compliance and Enforcement branch and the failures of her ministry’s vaunted information technology? If she didn’t, then whenever she boasted about the “environmental sustainability” of BC’s logging industry, she wasn’t really telling a lie.
    She was merely suffering from an unshakable belief in something that’s untrue—a delusion.
    We can only hope that new Premier David Eby and new Forests Minister Bruce Ralston are neither liars nor prone to delusion. But only time will tell.
    David Broadland started working for the Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project in 2018 and thinks other people would enjoy the experience of discovering old forest that—according to the Ministry of Forests—doesn’t exist.

    Evergreen Alliance Staff
    In the press release below, the Wood Pellet Association of Canada claims that, along with “sawmill and harvest residuals” only “low-quality logs” are being used to make pellets. What are the facts?
     
    September 20, 2022 – Vancouver, British Columbia – A new study confirms that wood pellets in British Columbia are sourced entirely from sawmill and harvest residuals or from low-quality logs and bush grind rejected by other industries.
    The study was commissioned by the Wood Pellet Association of Canada. Respected forest experts and Registered Professional Foresters, Professor Gary Bull, Dr. Jeremy Williams, Dr. Jim Thrower and Mr. Brad Bennett analyzed government and industry databases, confidential commercial data, and audit reports and conducted personal interviews with individual pellet plant operators and local communities.
    “We reviewed the data for virtually every truckload of fibre for each pellet mill in the province and were able to source forest-based residuals down to the forest harvesting block for each mill,” said Bull. “The findings were clear: 85 per cent of the fibre for pellets comes from the by-products of the sawmills and allied industries, and the remaining 15 per cent comes from bush grind and low-quality logs where the only other option is to burn the low-grade logs and brush piles on site in order to reduce fire risk.”
    In addition, almost all the pellets produced in B.C. are certified under the international recognized Sustainable Biomass Program and the fibre is from sustainably managed forests in B.C. certified under the Canadian Standards Association, the Forest Stewardship Council or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative.
    “The notion of harvesting whole stands of timber or displacing higher value forest products for the purpose of producing wood pellets is counter to the overall economic and environmental objectives of using wood pellets,” added Thrower.
    The study also concludes the B.C.  pellet sector:
    Utilizes and creates value from the mill residuals;
    Works with Indigenous and other communities to improve forest health, support local economies, and strengthen community resiliency;
    Creates an additional revenue stream for sawmills and other facilities;
    Eliminates smoke and particulate emissions associated with beehive burners or landfills;
    Utilizes low quality biomass that comes from natural disturbances;
    Creates viable economic opportunities and employment;
    Contributes to managing wildfire risks; and
    Increases the substitution of renewable energy (biomass) for fossil fuel (coal).
    Around three quarters of the world’s renewable energy is from biomass.  Bioenergy accounts for about 10 per cent of total final energy consumption and two per cent of global electricity generation.  In the United States and the European Union, bioenergy accounts for 60 per cent of all renewable energy. In fact, over the past 20 years, bioenergy  is responsible for the most greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, much in the form of bioheat, which has a 90 per cent share of the EU renewable heating market.
    “Today our sector is taking what was once considered waste and instead is enhancing forest health, creating jobs, and reducing wildfire risk and GHG emissions from slash burning,” said WPAC Executive Director Gordon Murray.  “British Columbia wood pellets are a vital solution in the global fight against climate change by replacing fossil fuels like coal and providing a gateway to the bioeconomy.”
    The study also looked at the impact of pellets in both the broader forest sector and in communities like Burns Lake where the pellet plant has played an important role in addressing the mountain pine beetle epidemic, providing an outlet for local sawmills and low-quality roundwood and strengthening the local economy.
    “As a community forest that surrounds much of the community’s recreational playground, if we didn’t practice complete utilization we would hear about it in town from the public,” said General Manager Frank Varga, Burns Lake Community Forest. The Community Forest is owned by the Village of Burns Lake which equally shares its revenue with the Tsi’lKazKoh and Wet’suwet’en First Nations communities. “Without the Burns Lake Drax facility, we wouldn’t have a home for a significant component of our low-grade harvesting profile and the level of waste would not be socially acceptable.”

    Taryn Skalbania
    BCTS SAYS IT IS SAFER TO CLEAR CUT LOG IN A HIGH RISK AREA THAN LEAVE PROFITS ON THE TABLE!
     
    https://www.saobserver.net/news/province-likely-to-proceed-with-salvage-logging-in-high-geohazard-risk-areas-near-sicamous/
     
    BCTS planning forester, Chomitz goes on to explain how the proposed salvage operation will “make the Wiseman and Sicamous Creek watershed more resilient.” This includes the deactivating and rehabilitation of historic trails and roads in the vicinity and the replanting of trees as quickly as possible.
    “The fire has created an abundance of trees that are susceptible to the Douglas Fir bark beetle, which is likely to cause an increase in the beetle population in the area,” said Chomitz, noting this will add to the hydrologic issues in the watershed.
    “I acknowledge the importance of protecting the safety of those in your community,” said Chomitz, adding BCTS values input from the CSRD to ensure management of the watersheds “is done with the best interest of the community safety and forest ecosystem in mind.”
    Will Hydrologists argree with this RPFs interpretation?

    Taryn Skalbania
    The Truck Loggers' Association (TLA) is paying for billboards across BC to share their version of forestry facts in BC Each one starts with "TRUTH", as if it is trying to convince its members.  So diluted and confusing are its messages and data, i hope someone can take the time and make sense of this: can we post the real numbers?
    https://www.tla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/TLA-Old-Growth-Forests-Facts-FAQs-2022.pdf
    https://www.tla.ca/forestry-truth/?fbclid=IwAR0WvyMAjmeVbbqMrztT9kuT4T6bXmNljw85AHuGZNWv83HcZETZUCJvDdo#:~:text=British Columbia leads the world,Columbia's total area is harvested
    TLA could be ''sued'' for false advertisement ! This sign on Pat bay highway being a good example of false advertising. 
    Don't advertisements have to be true? We could launch complaints...I suppose the TLA is including parks as OG protected areas.  Someone suggested a complaint to Ad Standards as a first step Then an email to Coast Outdoor,  with an image of the sign, letting them know it is an unverifiable statement, and Ad Standards have been contacted .
    https://adstandards.ca/complaints/how-to-submit-a-complaint/


    David Broadland
    The following opinion piece was written by Lori Daniels and Robert Gray, two well known BC experts on forest fires, and was published in the Times Colonist on February 4, 2022.
     
    AGAIN, IN 2021, record-breaking wildfires burned in British Columbia, fuelled by the heat dome, drought, wind and excessive forest fuels. Our homes and communities are vulnerable—flammable structures surrounded by forests and mountains with limited evacuation routes made even more hazardous by thick smoke. Entire communities have burned—businesses, homes and, tragically, lives lost. The cascading effects of torrential rain on burned and exposed mountainsides contributed to the catastrophic floods that severed transportation routes and further disrupted lives and livelihoods.
    The costs are in the billions of dollars, without accounting for the indirect price of trauma and smoke on human health or damages to drinking water and wildlife habitat. Again, we find ourselves calling for urgent transformation of forest and fire management to reconfigure our forests and communities to be resilient to wildfires fuelled by climate change and outdated forest practices.
    Record wildfires have also ravaged the western United States—sparking action. Last week, the U.S. Federal Government announced plans to spend USD50B over the next decade on wildfire mitigation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are earmarked for forest thinning and prescribed burning on public lands, incentives for private landowners and support for Indigenous communities to enable fuel treatments, and subsidies for bioenergy products from hazardous fuels. Investments are holistic—buffers around communities called the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI for short) supported by strategic treatments of surrounding landscapes. 
    BC sits at a crossroads: do we go big and bold like the US? Or, do we continue with the small-scale, individual-WUI approach that has been in place since 2004?
    BC’s approach has focused on the narrow buffer of land around communities, minimizing costs and impacts on timber supply. Not all communities benefit.
    Funding is prioritized on communities with high housing density and in the driest parts of the province—as a result, large communities, often with expensive homes, get the lion’s share of the money. And recently, some funding for proactively treating hazardous fuels has been redirected to education efforts to convince homeowners to take more responsibility to FireSmart (RT) their homes and properties. If 100 per cent of the community fully subscribed to FireSmart, and that’s a very optimistic scenario, physical homes and businesses could survive a fire, but the “community” would not.
    BC’s WUI-focused strategy surrenders our landscapes to severe fire effects —as we witnessed in 2017, 2018 and 2021. The costs to our society are mounting, as witnessed here in BC and the US, Australia, and other places impacted by extreme wildfires.
    Each year that hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests burn, BC residents and everyone downwind of us will suffer hundreds to thousands of premature deaths every year due to chronic smoke exposure, not to mention premature births and increased incidence of cognitive impairment. Watersheds delivering drinking water will require expensive rehabilitation and secondary water quality treatment. The timber harvesting land base will continue to shrink, resulting in mill closures, unemployment, and increased resource conflicts. Businesses such as agriculture and tourism will suffer from direct and indirect fire damage. Levels of social anxiety, depression and substance abuse will increase. Increasingly, municipal and provincial budgets will be consumed by reactive fire suppression and rehabilitation expenses. 
    Governments avoid going “big and bold”—it is politically risky. Going “small” spends less money and delivers short-term tangible results within an election cycle. Going “big and bold” requires long-term vision, but the dividends don’t accrue until well into the future. But adapting to wildfire is larger than politics—it is the difference between a future with options and opportunities for our children and grandchildren versus a future of very limited options and few opportunities. 
    Going “big and bold” for BC does not mean spending $50B over 10 years. Instead, it requires a significant shift in wildfire and forest management objectives and a change in priorities. The Province needs to heavily invest in WUI hazard reduction and radically shift landscape management from short-term timber supply to long-term resilience of ecosystems, habitats and productivity.
    Going forward, we need immediate, sustained, equitable, and large-scale action; we need to go “big and bold.” 

    Robert Gray is an AFE Certified Wildland Fire Ecologist and Dr. Lori Daniels is a Forest Ecologist at the University of British Columbia.

    Evergreen Alliance Staff
    A comparison of the carbon sequestration capacity of younger and older forests was posted by CBC and was read as a question on Quirks and Quarks:
    “With all the recent attention being paid to climate change and decarbonizing our atmosphere, I am curious, which takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere —100 hectares of mature old growth forest, or 100 hectares of young forest?”
    Gregory Paradis, a forester, engineer, and assistant professor of forest management in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia has an answer.
    “Trees capture carbon from the atmosphere by converting sunlight to cellulose through photosynthesis. When trees die and fall to the ground, they gradually emit most of this captured carbon back into the atmosphere. Young vigorous stands grow and sequester carbon at maximum speed. As stands get older, the tree canopy closes and individual trees begin to die off from self-thinning and other causes. 
    Very old forest stands can reach a sort of carbon neutral equilibrium state where trees are dying and decaying at approximately the same rate as they are growing back.
    So, taking into account both growth and mortality, 100 hectares of young forest will generally speaking have a higher net carbon capture rate than older but otherwise identical stands.”
    Paradis said that research has shown that the optimal landscape-level carbon sequestration policy may be to harvest and replant stands when they reach their peak growth rate. This is typically between 80 and 120 years old for most Canadian forest ecosystems, much younger than what is typically called old growth. 
    Ideally we would use the harvested forest material — wood and fibre — to displace as much fossil fuel, steel, and concrete as possible, to reduce carbon dioxide releases.

    Evergreen Alliance Staff
    COFI—the Council of Forest Industries—recently circulated a one-page informational paper (see link below) that stated, in the first paragraph: “BC is recognized globally for its expansive forests, natural beauty and biodiversity. Today, more than 52 % of BC’s land base—totaling [sic] 14.5 million hectares, more than 4.5 times the size of Vancouver Island—is protected or under some form of conservation measure.”
    The extent to which COFI’s claim is wrong is surprising. Geographers have determined that BC’s land base is 94,473,500 hectares, and 52 percent of that would be 47,236,750 hectares, not 14.5 million hectares.
    COFI is correct in stating that 14.5 million hectares of BC’s land base is in some form of legally protected status. That amounts to 15.3 percent of BC.
    But since COFI is really only interested in the forested land base, you might wonder why they are not focussing on how much of BC’s forested land base is protected. That might be because the number is a lot smaller: 6.53 million hectares. By comparison, about 22 million hectares of forested land base—over 3 times the area that’s protected—is available to logging.
    For its own survival, COFI needs to create a cloud of misinformation that obscures why such a small number of people employed by the forest industry are permitted to destroy so much forest for so little social benefit. It is, of course, to keep the opposition to the industry focused on the number of trees and the area protected so that no one talks about who is making the billions the industry claims it creates. When we understand that, we can understand why COFI consistently produces such wrong-headed misinformation.
     


    Evergreen Alliance Staff
    IN AN APRIL 7, 2021 INTERVIEW with CBC Victoria’s Gregor Craigie, Premier John Horgan claimed his government had already responded to the Gorley-Merkel report on old-growth forests in BC. The premier claimed that logging had been deferred on “hundreds of thousand of hectares” of old growth. Forest scientist Karen Price, one of the co-authors of BC’s Old Growth Forest: A Last Stand for Biodiversity, has pointed out that Horgan’s deferrals apply to only 3800 hectares of high-productivity old growth. FOCUS has shown that a large portion of the biggest deferral included about 100,000 hectares of already protected Strathcona Park. Other deferrals are mainly rock and ice or second-growth forest.
    Horgan’s grasp of forest-related issues was further clarified by his claim to Craigie that “just in the Lower Mainland, 500 million hectares of land has been set aside just to protect the Spotted Owl.” What’s wrong with that? Watch the 1-minute video below.
    The problem for British Columbians is that Horgan seems clueless about the environmental damage being created by the forest industry in BC, and even more unaware about how his government is responding to that. Or maybe both his claims about the logging deferrals and the area protected for Spotted Owls were a slip of the tongue, or a joke.
    Either way, Craigie didn’t fact-check the premier on either matter. Is British Columbia’s mainstream media unintentionally enabling the unfolding ecological catastrophe in BC forests?
    Neither the CBC or the premier’s office made any public correction of the misinformation Horgan provided. That’s why the Evergreen Alliance has created the Fact Checker Action Group.
    If you have heard something about BC’s forest industry in the media that you think is doubtful, including what you read on this website, please let us know in the Fact Checker Database and we’ll fact-check that piece of information.
    Thanks to Dave Cuddy for drawing to our attention John Horgan’s surprising plan to save the Northern Spotted Owl.

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