Region Archives: Canada West

The Province is contributing $10 million to the BC Parks Foundation to help strengthen the long-term protection of B.C.’s natural beauty and provide more opportunities for everyone to connect with nature. Minister George Heyman said, “This $10-million contribution further ensures the foundation’s long-term sustainability, so that together we can preserve many more of the most beautiful places and unique ecosystems in B.C.” …Established in 2017 through an initial $10-million grant from the Province, the foundation has attracted tens of thousands of supporters. Donors have collectively contributed $150 million, including the largest gifts in B.C. and Canadian conservation history. Contributions have helped protect 23 valuable places. …In September 2022, the BC Parks Foundation launched its latest initiative – the 25×25 campaign to protect 25% of B.C.’s land and waters by 2025 in partnership with Indigenous Peoples and the Province. 

Tara Bergeson

Melissa McHale

Mike Larock

WEBINAR: Cities are complex, interconnected systems that support habitats and livelihoods. Their outwards and upwards growth has transformed the landscape at an unprecedented rate, uprooting native species and introducing invasive ones. Human activity has altered waterways and drainage systems; the composition of flora and fauna; fire risk and the presence of heat islands; along with the global climate. Managing this newfound complexity within the urban environment requires the specialization and expertise of a team of individuals, including the urban forester. Join us for a conversation with experts in the field who will delve deeper into some of the most pressing challenges facing the urban forestry profession today and the work underway to find solutions. Mike Larock, Director of Practice for the Forest Professionals of BC will moderate with speakers Tara Bergeson, RPF, Urban Forestry Supervisor, City of Kelowna and Melissa McHale, Associate Prof, UBC. 

In this newsletter: 

• Our 2023 Conference is sold out! Thank you to all who are participating – we can’t wait to see everyone in Kamloops next week. There is still room on the June 6th pre conference field trips to Clinton and Lower North Thompson CFs Important conference details will be sent on June 1st to people registered for the conference.
• Province issues long-term licence to Squamish Community Forest Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) and District of Squamish are celebrating a major milestone for the Squamish Community Forest with the final approval of their application for a community forest.
• Wells Gray Community Forest Partners With Simpcw Resources Group 
• Erin Robinson, Forestry Initiatives Manager at The City of Quesnel – Recipient of the Lynn Orstad Award  – Women in Wildfire Resiliency

A new task force has been formed to help protect and preserve the B.C. watersheds.  The Interior Watershed Task Force is a group of grassroots organizations that are coming together to face what it calls a “crisis point” of impacts from the commercial logging industry in the B.C. watersheds. In a news release in May, the task force also stated that commercial logging has caused clear-cutting to become “unreasonably large” and also added excessive roads amount other factors.  These activities have led to “poor water quality and supply, extreme flooding events, destructive landslides, wildfires, and degraded wildlife and plant life diversity,” with climate change making all of these effects worse, said the group. …“We need to stop seeing public forests as resources and see them as a public trust held for future generations,” said Herb Hammond, retired B.C. forester and forest ecologist.

Amanda Lewis

“Hiking Capilano River Park with Stephen Hui and heading into the Cap watershed to find large Pacific yew. Safety,” I texted my sister Jenny, the Official Safety Checker for all my hikes, early one morning.  …We drove to Capilano River Regional Park in North Van and parked at the salmon hatchery.  …The University of British Columbia’s BigTree Registry lists the Champion Pacific yew as 23.5 metres in height (about the height of a seven-storey building) with a 0.91-metre diameter at breast height and 10.4-metre crown — huge for a yew, indicating a great age for this usually small and slow-growing tree.  …The Champion Pacific yew is in the Capilano watershed, one of the few closed watersheds in North America, and entirely off-limits to the public.  …Back at the parking lot, we followed Stoltmann’s map to find three Pacific yews near the garbage cans. 

On June 8, a pair of old-growth logging deferrals protecting Fairy Creek on southwest Vancouver Island are set to expire. …But, despite having two years to prepare for the white-hot political deadline, the B.C. NDP government has yet to reveal any hint of a post-deferral plan. The B.C. Ministry of Forests said in a written statement; “We continue to work together with the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations on the long-term strategy for managing old-growth in the area. An extension of the Fairy Creek watershed and central Walbran deferrals is under consideration and an update will be available soon.” …None of the three First Nations whose territory encompasses the deferral areas responded to The Narwhal’s interview requests. …Teal-Jones’ director of Indigenous engagement, told The Narwhal. “We also don’t know what the province might do with the deferred areas. They have not been communicating with us.”

Bob Simpson

The Quesnel Future of Forestry Think Tank… showcased a stellar collection of industry minds, all focused on how the city in B.C.’s heart of gold could take the forest sector to whatever its next levels might be. …Bob Simpson, former MLA and mayor for Quesnel, started off with a written statement: “The City of Quesnel is at the epicentre of the beetle epidemic, and to illustrate the depth of this problem, it will be useful for the members of this Legislature to hear what this community faces in the next few years.” …The four big asks of government, with the help of opposition parties, said Simpson, is to quickly streamline regulations, invest heavily in the new forestry realities, establish programs to ensure it won’t sputter after initial launch, and start buying mass-timber-construction buildings for schools, social housing, public offices, etc.

The Horsefly River Roundtable and stakeholders are requesting an immediate moratorium on all industrial forest-related activities in the Horsefly River Fisheries Sensitive Watershed. “Obviously we don’t want logging to stop but we would like to put on some pressure to have the area assessed by boots on the ground,” said Helen Englund, a member of the roundtable. A meeting focused on concerns about forestry activities in the area will be hosted by the roundtable on Saturday, June 10 at the Horsefly community hall. Englund has invited both industry and the ministry of forests as well as local residents to attend the meeting. Last year, the Horsefly River Roundtable held a community meeting in May with Tolko Industries Ltd. representatives present. More than 100 residents, property owners and concerned citizens attended the meeting and filled out a survey.

A proposal to clear-cut log two areas laced with popular hiking and cycling trails west of Bragg Creek should be axed or significantly altered, say critics. Spray Lakes Sawmills (SLS) plans to begin logging areas amounting to 900 hectares in 2026, a prospect that would severely denigrate the popular recreational areas, said Shaun Peter, who promotes tourism in Kananaskis. …He acknowledged SLS has a right to log the area following the adoption of a Forest Management Plan (FMP) it signed with the province two years ago. But given the impact it would have on outdoor recreation and the tourism industry, it’s economically short-sighted, said Peter. …SLS’s logging plans in the area could change and will be subject to public consultation several times between now and 2026, said Ed Kulcsar. …The government has yet to sign off on the SLS plan to log the two timber blocks.

Amanda Lewis

BRITISH COLUMBIA — What is it with B.C.’s big trees? Forestry has long been a cornerstone of the provincial economy, of course, and calls to protect old-growth forests have created political flashpoints for decades. But there’s also something else, something a bit more like awe or wonder, that captures many of us when it comes to being in the presence of a big tree. They’re often older than us; they can be broad and tall, impossible to take in at a glance. And if they’re in a forest with other old growth, that forest just feels different than other forests. The Tyee is featuring a Q&A with big tree hunter Amanda Lewis. …Do you think we’ll see an end to the logging of big trees, and old growth, in B.C. anytime soon? “I think that we are moving in the right direction.”

A combination of an insect infestation and rising temperatures led Vancouver’s park board to increase its forest fire risk in Stanley Park.

The setting was idyllic: a clearing of tawny grass, ringed by ponderosa pines under a robin’s egg sky. …Within a couple of hours, some of those trees were on fire. Smoke was billowing … crews were dispatched to various locations to control the blaze. But they weren’t extinguishing it. They were continuing to light it, using drip torches… and keeping a close eye on boundary lines the flames were not supposed to cross. The exercise, carried out over two days in late April on the ʔaq’am First Nation near Cranbrook, B.C., was a prescribed burn: fire set intentionally to meet specific objectives, such as reducing wildfire risk. …“We’re going to get a lot more big, ugly fires unless we do more prescribed burns,” said Robert Gray, a B.C.-based wildfire ecologist who helped plan the ʔaq’am burn. …Wildfire experts like Gray say prescribed burns can help prevent wildfires by reducing fuel build up. 

MACKENZIE — After lengthy consultations the Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) for the Mackenzie Timber Supply Area was released in early May resulting in a 20% reduction of available fibre, not a surprise according to the Mayor of Mackenzie Joan Atkinson. …The longtime Mayor argues the issue in BC is not fibre supply in some areas, it is forestry policy. According to stats provided by the District of Mackenzie roughly two-thirds of the AAC will be rolled down the highway away from the community. …Pre-2003 when appurtenancy was still law in BC, forestry companies had logs tied to local communities. When that clause was thrown out, it opened the door to the situation we have now. The BC Liberal government of the day was the one behind the move, one now brought to the forefront 20 years later.

Vancouver resident John Vaillant’s new book focuses on one day in May 2016, in the small city of Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta. But from there it sweeps two centuries into the past, around the world to California, Europe and Australia, and brings us back to our own hot, smoky spring and ominous future. It is a fast-paced narrative of a disastrous wildfire and of the culture that both created the fire and was damaged by it. And it is a brilliantly written description of our own insights and follies: we saw the present disaster coming long ago. We could have prevented it, and we let it happen anyway. …Vaillant ends his book with the discovery of “revirescence,” the return of life to fire-blasted land. The forests are reviving around Fort McMurray, and in the ashes of its Abasand neighbourhood Vaillant saw tulips blooming.

Alan Westhaver

Community Wildfire Preparedness Roundtables around the region are hosting FireSmart presentations by Alan Westhaver MSc., a 30-year veteran of wildland fire, now a wildland-urban expert. Westhaver and his fellow fire researcher Dr. Jack Cohen, a world-renowned fire physicist with the U.S. Forest Service, recently completed a report on the Lytton Creek fire which destroyed that community in 2021 which focused on how homes ignited, and how fire then spread throughout the community. What Westhaver had to say may surprise many members of the public. “We’ve long considered this to be a wildfire control problem however, it is really a problem of so many homes and structures being so easily ignited,” he states in his presentation. Instead, he emphasized the answer to saving urban areas from these disasters will not come from more planes, helicopters or tanker trucks, but from mostly small measures property owners can take, over time, to make buildings less susceptible to igniting and burning.

Jared Hobbs

…For thousands of years, northern spotted owls, a subspecies of the spotted owl, lived in southern British Columbia, their range extending through Washington, Oregon and into northern California. In Canada, as many as 1,000 owls probably once lived in the cathedral-like forests. But generations of industrial development and logging have fractured the landscape and gutted their habitat. When Jared Hobbs began working for the provincial government as a species-at-risk biologist in the 1990s, there were an estimated 40 breeding pairs, but the numbers kept dropping. He noticed the adult owls were living into old age but the juvenile owls were dying before they could acquire a territory of their own and produce young. …In recent years, when the young owls left the nest to seek out new food sources and establish their own territories, they had to negotiate a patchwork of forest broken up by cleared areas or development. 

Provincial officials say the wildfire response will continue to be a marathon, but more evacuees are being allowed to return home and fire bans are set to change in some regions. Fire bans …across most of the province will be replaced with a fire restriction, which comes into effect Friday. That means wood campfires are allowed in designated campgrounds and on private property, like backyard fire pits. Under the fire restriction, all outdoor wood fires are still banned on public lands, including backcountry and some camping areas. Alberta Wildfire information unit manager Christie Tucker said that because the northern portion of the province received less rain recently and the fire danger is still high, a fire ban and off-highway vehicle restriction is still in place in the High Level and Fort McMurray forest areas. It also remains in effect for Yellowhead County, where there are still active wildfires.