Jim Pine

The closure of the Crofton pulp mill is the latest symptom of forest mismanagement. How did we get to this point? The Indigenous people were always here, but we Europeans started as a colony of Britain, hence the name British Columbia. …The purpose of a colony was to grab the land and to send wealth back to the colonizing country. Here, that meant forest products, fish and minerals. We still retain that colonial mentality. …Herein lies the great paradox. We have handed over our natural legacy to distant corporations with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits… Short-term thinking is incompatible with long-term life cycles. What’s to be done? Switch from corporate control tree farm licences to community forest licences; Implement an immediate moratorium on all old-growth logging; Ban raw log exports; Ban the export of cants; Appropriately tax “Managed Forest Land”; Pass the Species At Risk Act; and Support value-added manufacturing.