David Broadland

July 23, 2023

23 hours ago, Guest ToeJam said:

Would not Vancouver be replaced by a more expansive population rivaling Delhi or Tokyo per square meter? The absolute density of sequestering forest would be a magnitude higher would it not?

No. Primary and old forests are being replaced with managed forests. The logging industry plans to cut those managed forests (Langford) long before the carbon density becomes anywhere near what it was in an old forest (Vancouver). Those plantations will never become a Vancouver, let alone a New Delhi or Tokyo.

If the logging industry continues to hold sway in BC, managed "forests" will toggle between Lytton and Langford until it's too hot and dry for forests to grow. Then they will become grasslands (Regina).

September 22, 2022

This new front in the logging industry’s continued misguided self-justification is sadly predictable. When you have been bull-shitting for 70 years, it’s hard to suddenly become a straight-shooter.

The basic underlying premise of this report, that logging at the scale being practiced in BC is “sustainable”, is certifiable nonsense. Just because the Canadian logging industry created and funds a “certification” industry that then gives the logging industry a guaranteed stamp of approval doesn’t hide or undo the damage the industry is doing:

Through logging's associated carbon emissions and consequential reduction in the natural level of carbon sequestration, the industry is making an over-sized contribution to global heating and climate instability. That's not sustainable.

Clearcutting eliminates practically all biodiversity in the area of a clearcut. Allowing several thousand clearcuts every year relentlessly reduces biodiversity over a wide swathe of BC—200,000 to 250,000 hectares—every year. That's not sustainable.

The growing prevalence of those clearcuts raises forest fire hazard above the level of a mature or old forest. The plantations that follow the clearcuts raise the fire hazard even higher, in many cases for decades. The result is a frightening new era of forest fires that are initially harder to control, grow faster, and lead to larger fires and exponentially higher carbon emissions. That growing area of logged and burned forest is resulting in more frequent and more devastating flooding. All of this is made worse by the increased temperature, longer periods of drought and higher wind speeds resulting from climate change—each of which, in turn, are made worse by the scale of logging in BC. None of this is sustainable.

The industry is also liquidating BC's old forests to far below levels needed to sustain biodiversity, claiming that plantations will, in the distant future, turn into new old-growth forests. This notion, that a future logging industry would somehow be more responsible than the current industry and will allow nature to recover, is nonsensical. Thinking nonsense isn't sustainable.

The only aspect of logging at the scale being undertaken in BC that can be counted on in the future is the damage the industry does. The foolish course adjustments the industry is now taking—including green-washing reports like this one—will only make it more likely that damage will be sustained.

So let’s dispose of the underlying premise of this report, that the 85 percent of wood used in making pellets that comes from "sawmill and harvest residuals" is somehow “sustainable”. It isn’t.

And what about the 15 percent the report claims comes from “low-quality logs and bush grind rejected by other industries”?

Bull-shitting is a slippery slope. Only someone sliding uncontrollably down that slope would be unable to recognize that calling a natural forest “low-quality logs” or "bush grind" is the kind of semantic invention that occurs just before the inventor falls over the edge into the abyss.

That so much waste is being created that it needs a new industry to grind and burn it away is a situation that arises only because the scale of logging that has been occurring in BC is so vast. Eighty-five to ninety percent of that waste is created to provide cheap wood products for other countries, mainly for the US, China and Japan. As a result of that relentless over-cut—combined with the long decline in the market for pulp and paper—BC mills would be drowning in their own waste were it not for the pellet industry.

But the solution to that overwhelming level of waste is not to grow a green-washed pellet industry. When burned for thermal energy, pellets produce as much carbon emissions per unit of energy generated as does coal. Coal! Pellets are a solution to nothing but the logging industry's embarrassment of widespread waste.

The only solution for an industry drowning in waste from the over-cutting of publicly owned forests is for government to reduce industrial access to those forests. Logging should be limited to only what British Columbians need for their own use.

March 19, 2022

Just found this interesting reporting in Northern Beat by Jeff Davies: BC Wildfires—more than just climate change.

In the story, Robert Gray acknowledges the role logging is playing in BC's large forest fires. For example, he states, "The fire problem is no longer unmanaged stands. The fire problem is all the managed stands full of slash."

Davies reported: "Gray says many of the big fires in B.C.’s southern Interior over the past year ravaged forests that had already been harvested, were being harvested, or had nothing the industry considered worth harvesting."

Referring to the White Rock Lake fire in the Okanagan in 2021, Gray told Davies, "That fire was driven by cutblocks…When you look at the fires that threatened Ashcroft and Savona and the White Rock Lake Fire and all those fires, the July Mountain one up on the Coquihalla, they were all burning through leave stands—they weren't harvested because of poor economics or poor accessibility—and harvest blocks."

That article was published a month before the Times-Colonist op-ed with Lori Daniels.

Yet none of Gray's awareness of the role clearcuts and plantations are playing in making forest fires bigger and more numerous can be found in his op-ed with Lori Daniels.

March 17, 2022

You can judge the character of an industry by the messages it uses to justify its continued existence in the face of clear evidence that it is causing permanent damage to our life support systems. Consider how fossil fuel companies have protected themselves in the face of evidence that they are causing irreparable harm. They simply assert facts that can't be proven or disproven. Likewise, the BC logging industry is making simplistic claims that can't be proven or disproven.

For example, what does it mean by "BC" in "BC will never run out of old growth?"

And what does it mean by "run out of"? What does it mean by "old-growth"? What does it mean by "Truth"?

If by "BC" the billboard means the forest industry, the industry is certainly going to run out of old-growth forest that it can cut, either before all the primary forest that's currently in the timber harvesting land base has been cut, or after it has been cut. The industry is hoping for the latter. Land defenders are aiming for the former. Either way, the industry is going to run out of old-growth forest.

To make such a slippery, bumper-sticker-like statement and assert that it is "Truth" is Orwellian double-speak.

If the industry feels it needs to rely on Orwellian double-speak to justify what it is doing, that's probably a good indicator that efforts will soon be made to run it out of BC.

Forest scientists have determined that a certain minimum percentage of forest in a given bio-geoclimatic variant needs to contain old trees in order to maintain biodiversity. Below that level, there is a danger of biodiversity loss. Biodiversity is an essential characteristic of Earth's life-support systems. That's hard to but on a billboard or a bumper sticker.

March 17, 2022

Thanks for your comment Virginia. I agree, it is shocking. I can still remember the sense of dismay I felt when I first started going through the satellite imagery of BC. It's sickening. But also, at least for me, motivating. It made me ask, "What do we need to do to stop this and restore our life support systems?"

I encourage everybody to spend a few hours touring BC via satellite imagery. The best, most up-to-date high resolution imagery can be found in the "Maps" app of anyone who has an Apple device. I'm not sure if there is a similar program for PCs.

Google and Bing satellite imagery are okay, too, but not as up-to-date as Apple Maps, in my experience. For an area that I know well, Maps is about 1 year behind.

You might also check out other countries, especially the USA, China and Japan, BC's main customers for wood products and raw logs. Good luck at finding the clearcuts, except those on private land in the USA.

February 11, 2022

Well said Herb and Ben. Thanks for joining the conversation.

Herb: Many of us agree that a culture that ignores ecological realities will get deeper and deeper in trouble, including by over-exploiting forests. We can see the results of that over-exploitation in the forest fires, floods and species loss and the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. If there were a first step to be taken toward ecologically-based, precautionary decision-making, what is that step and how do we start to take it?

Ben: Isn't clearcutting an effect rather than a cause? What causes clearcutting? Yes, chainsaws and feller-bunchers, but why are those machines in the forest in the first place? It doesn't happen for no reason, especially at the scale (~250,000 hectares per year if we count both publicly owned and private land) that its occurring in BC. The ultimate cause is the export market for lumber. That market demands lumber for building homes and other structures, mainly in the USA. Those exports are the cause of the clearcuts. How do we convince British Columbians that we can't afford to be an environmental sacrifice zone for the USA, China and Japan? Our two biggest clearcut-causing customers, China and the USA, are also the #1 and #3 largest exporters of wood products, according to 2016 Natural Resources Canada data (see table below).

What is the first step to take to get influential British Columbians—folks like Daniels and Gray—to understand that logging is creating as much economic damage in BC as economic gain? Or is it causing more?

February 7, 2022

The BC forest-industrial complex will need to continue such public relations contortions since it can’t exist at its current scale without creating vast areas of highly flammable clearcuts and plantations. Both of those conditions have a higher fire hazard rating than mature and old forest, and the hazard stays high until the plantation reaches 30-ish years of age.

It’s unclear whether Daniels and Gray are calling for “forest thinning” of plantations or “thinning” of primary forests. The latter simply translates to “logging.” Most of the area of primary forests near population centres in the Interior has already been logged once.

If it’s plantations Daniels and Gray have their sights on, a more realistic approach would be to acknowledge the high fire hazard clearcuts and plantations are creating and then stop creating them at the current scale (around 250,000 hectares each year including both public and private land in BC). Between 80-90 percent (depending on the year) of the volume logged is for export. Yet this contributes only a tiny fraction of BC’s GDP.

BC is paying far too high a price for those exports, including all the impacts Daniels and Gray list.

American forest and fire ecologist Chad Hanson, in his book Smokescreen (and elsewhere), has argued that calls for “thinning” as a response to forest fire hazard are thinly disguised calls for commercial logging by the “political allies” of the forest industry.

In a chapter of Smokescreen (What You Aren’t Being Told About “Thinning”) Hanson writes, “All around the world, from North America to western Europe to Australia, the logging industry and its political allies—which include some nongovernmental organizations—are telling the public that forest “thinning” will prevent large wildland fires, reduce tree mortality, and make forests more resilient to climate change. This message has become so pervasive that many people accept it as truth without examining the evidence, which tells a very different story. One of the most fundamental faults with this narrative is that current research, using field-based data, has found that logging conducted under the rubric of thinning for fire management results in a large overall reduction in the amount of carbon stored in forests and a large increase in carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Stated differently, thinning kills far more trees than it saves, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that it reduces fire intensity in a given area, which it often doesn’t. A key problem is that thinning does not take into account the well-established fact that only a tiny percentage of the tree biomass (on average, 1 to 4 percent), and therefore tree carbon, is consumed in forest fires.”

(Hanson, Chad T. Smokescreen (p. 110). The University Press of Kentucky. Kindle Edition.)

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