Greg Jadrzyk

Many of the reporters providing coverage on the mountain pine beetle epidemic in this province are too young to know how it truly unfolded and led to last weeks announcement of Canfor closing the PG Pulp Mill. …I was President of the Northern Forest Products Association (NFPA), which represented the interests of all the sawmills in the northern half of BC. The mountain pine beetle has always been in our forests and always will be. …However, as winters warmed up in the late 90s the beetle found a foothold in Tweedsmuir park and its populations started to explode. NFPA took up the fight in 1998 with a massive public awareness campaign in BC and numerous trips were made to visit MPs in Ottawa. …British Columbians will also have forgotten that forest industry attempts to log the initial infestation in the park to avoid its spread was opposed vigorously by the entire environmental movement and government.

What of course unfolded was a historic firestorm of beetles with immense populations that ravaged and killed over 85% of the lodgepole pine forests in the interior, including young plantations, over the next 10 years. NFPA member attempts to speed up logging to contain the spread of the beetle were met with opposition from within government, thereby allowing the vast areas of healthy timber to be infested and die. Yes portions of those dead forests were logged over the last 25 years but the fiber was not the same value and many areas simply died because the size of the devastation was too great. …It took 15 to 24 years to begin to feel the full effects of the epidemic but those effects, namely closure of interior mills due to a lack of timber have occurred, with Prince George Pulp being one of the latest casualties. Regrettably, there will be more closures in the years ahead as the fiber supply shortages continue.