Anthony Britneff

March 21, 2023

David Elstone’s ablution of the forest industry is history by omission, a version that does not withstand closer scrutiny.

What Elstone fails to tell readers is that the forest industry made its own bed and is responsible, not for the mountain pine infestation itself, but for the way in which it chose to log dead wood and where.

The forest ministry’s own records show that the industry did not log only dead trees but also plenty of live trees in its salvage operations, often more valuable tree species than beetle-infected lodgepole pine. The ministry's own data shows that in several interior timber supply areas, non-salvage logging exceeded its mid-term timber supply projections.

Additionally, the ministry’s records of cutblock layout and of permit dates indicate that the forest industry deliberately first logged infested pine forests closest to their mills thereby making worse the problem of finding timber economical to log at a later date.

Perhaps these two facts give rise to an alternative version of events to that portrayed by Elstone and explain how the forest industry exacerbated the timber supply crisis of today.

As to Elstone’s trumpeting of a recent study that found that 85 per cent of the B.C. pellet industry’s fibre supply comes from byproducts of sawmills, we are left asking: Who financed the study? Drax. Who provided the data? Drax. And why didn’t the UBC faculty member and forest professionals who authored the study use the same data sourced by Ben Parfitt from official government records?

Finally, Elstone is vexatious to impugn Ben Parfitt for saying that the date on which infestations began was in 2009. This is obviously a reporting or editorial error, not one made by Ben Parfitt, who wrote a major documentary titled “Battling the Beetle" in 2005.

December 20, 2022

On the one hand, Mike Harcourt's NDP government introduced the Forest Practices Code of BC Act BUT, on the other hand, it invoked a policy to limit the impact of non-timber values (e.g., biodiversity, water soil and visual quality) on timber supply to six (6) per cent.

December 17, 2022

Thank you. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism that ties together so much of what scientists, conservationists, informed citizens, and even bureaucrats courageous enough to speak the truth, have been saying ever since Claude Richmond, the last Social Credit forests minister, initiated in 1990/91 the Old Growth Strategy (1992) and the Protected Area Strategy (1993).

The Harcourt (1991), G. Clark (1996), Miller (1999), Dosanjh (2000) and Campbell (2001) provincial governments all failed to implement the Old Growth Strategy and ignored it. The opportunity to conserve biodiversity was largely lost by the time Christy Clark became premier in 2011. The Protected Area Strategy ended up protecting far more rock and ice than it did biodiversity.

The six (6) percent cap as policy to limit the impact that non-timber values (e.g., water, soil, biodiversity, visual quality) could have on the province's timber supply was initiated by the Harcourt NDP government after Andrew Petter, the forests minister, had introduced the Forest Practices Code of BC Act (1995), which preceded the Forest and Range Practices Act (2002).

Originally the Harcourt government set the overall cap at 6 per cent. However, the biodiversity measures increased the impact on timber supply to 8 per cent. In order to reduce the overall cap to 6 per cent for all non-timber values including biodiversity, the forests ministry reduced the impacts for visual quality to gain back the 2 per cent(1).

Most of the member foresters of the Association of BC Forest Professionals have never understood the science of conservation biology as it was not part of their education. As a consequence, most professional foresters tasked with managing public forestlands are ecological illiterates(2) incapable of advising Eby and Ralston against continuing to promulgate the "big lie".

References

Old Growth Strategy(1992): https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/library/documents/Bib1569.pdf

Protected Areas Strategy (1993): https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/library/documents/bib7332.pdf

Footnotes
(1) Source: Ministry of Forests, "Forest Practices Code - Timber Supply Analysis" (February 1996). The report shows how new management practices under the Code will affect timber supply when compared to pre-Code practices (see attachment).
(2) Including myself . . . at least I recognized this deficiency in my forestry education fairly early in my career and made an effort through self-study to learn about conservation biology and rudimentary ecology.

MOF_FPC_Timber-Supply_Feb 1996.pdf

February 7, 2022

Re: “B.C.’s wildfire strategy is leaving whole communities behind,” op-ed, Times Colonist, Feb. 4.

Lori Daniels and Robert Gray do not mention the role played by clearcuts and young plantations in the recent mega-fires.

These mega-fires were mostly ignited in clearcuts and then spread rapidly through vast areas of highly flammable, young plantations. This observation appears to be borne out by satellite imagery. Yet, in this op-ed, the words "plantation" and "clearcut" are not to be found.

Surely the role of clearcuts and plantations in the recent mega wildfires has not escaped the notice of these two leading forest-fire experts? So, why the omission? Is it deliberate? If so, why?

For two authors that advocate "going big and bold”, why would they not recommend that the forest industry and government take remedial action to mitigate against wildfire (and against massive carbon emissions from logging) by reducing or stopping industrial clearcutting? That would certainly be bold.

December 15, 2021

Assistant Professor Gregory Paradis’ answer withholds the larger truth about carbon storage in plantations compared to primary forests. He fails to tell listeners and readers that a primary forest has stored way more carbon than would an equivalent area of short-rotation plantation on the same site.

Therefore, Paradis ignores telling two important points about logging primary forests:
(1) Substantial carbon emissions from above and within the soil are immediately released into the atmosphere through the act of clearcut logging of primary forests; and,
(2) The lost carbon capacity created by logging primary forests and replacing them with plantations is huge, a carbon debt that will never be repaid under short-rotation industrial logging.

In his answer, Paradis is focusing on the wrong metric to mitigate against climate change in times of climate crisis. The key to understanding what Paradis is saying is the word "rate". The rate (i.e., how fast) at which a plantation captures carbon is not what is important. What is important is the absolute amount of carbon captured, which is much higher in primary forests than it is in plantations.

Essentially, Paradis is saying that the City of Langford outside Victoria has the highest rate of population growth in B.C.; what he is not saying is that Vancouver has a much higher absolute population but a lower rate of population growth than does Langford. If the object is to populate the province densely as much as possible, it would not make sense to raze Vancouver to the ground and put a "Langford" in its place because a "Langford" has a higher rate of population growth than does a “Vancouver". In this analogy, it is the absolute amount of population that is important, not the rate at which population grows; the same is true for carbon.

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