Category Archives: Forestry

I learned of the battle over clearcut logging on Haida Gwaii in the 1970s. Forest companies had been denuding much of the islands by clearcut logging, which had generated growing opposition. In the early 1980s, I flew to Haida Gwaii to interview loggers, forestry officials, government bureaucrats, environmentalists and Indigenous people. One of the people I interviewed was a young Haida artist named Guujaaw, who had led the opposition to logging for years. Unemployment was high in Haida communities, and logging generated desperately needed jobs. So I asked Guujaaw why he opposed the logging. He answered, “Our people have determined that Windy Bay and other areas must be left in their natural condition so that we can keep our identity and pass it on to following generations. The forests, those oceans, are what keep us as Haida people today.”

An Vernon-based forestry company has come to the aid of the Okanagan Forest Task Force. The task force has been working on a documentary, What Lies Behind The Trees, in an effort to show the extent of illegal dumping in Okanagan forests. Earlier this month, Kane Blake posted on the OFTF Facebook page that the project had to be put on hold due to “major computer issues.” However, Vernon’s Tolko Industries stepped up to provide the non-profit group with a donation to get the documentary moving forward again. …The documentary will show what is happening in the mountains surrounding the Valley and the damage illegal dumping is causing to our forests.

This past September, the Alberta Forest Products Association held its annual meeting in Jasper, Alberta. While there, Aspen Dudzic, AFPA’s director of communications, sat down to record podcast episodes with our own Natalie Peace, plant manager at our Edson OSB plant, and Wendy Crosina, director of forest sustainability for Canada. Natalie shared her perspective on inclusion and the importance of diversity in the workplace, and Wendy talked about her career journey (including her recent Women in Forestry award from the Forest Products Association of Canada), wildlife management and how forestry can mitigate wildfire risk.​​​​​​​

Nathan Giede

Not even a head-cold nightmare could stop me from entering the fray after it was announced that Canfor was to close PG pulp. This is a betrayal of our entire community that has faithfully served the demands of lumber barons for decades. However it is not unexpected. …In case it wasn’t abundantly clear to you by now, neither Victoria nor the leaders of the Canfor (as well as a host of other flagship companies) care one wit about us. …What is to be done? Bluntly put, we seize the means of production by the backdoor, with the Lheidli T’enneh’s “unceeded territory” rhetoric as our unchallengeable wedge. PG Pulp’s imminent closure offers an opportunity for us to demonstrate moving forward as a community by bringing ownership of our resources and industries back to the local level via First Nations. 

The leader of an RCMP unit tasked with policing resistance to resource extraction in British Columbia says court-ordered injunctions justify his squad spending nearly $50 million on operations over its five-year existence. “We don’t have a choice,” said Chief Supt. John Brewer, commander of the Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG). “There is a clause in there that says we must enforce that injunction. We try to do it with the least amount of direct contact, but sometimes, when they’re blocking roads, impeding under the injunction, we have to act.” But one legal scholar who writes extensively on injunctions suggests the issue is more nuanced than that. While it’s true injunctions include enforcement clauses, Irina Ceric said they contain baked-in, boilerplate caveats providing police broad discretion on how and when to act. …CBC revealed the C-IRG spent $49.9 million enforcing court orders for pipelines… and old-growth logging between 2017 and 2022.

PRINCE GEORGE — The College of New Caledonia Research Forest Legacy Fund is seeking applicants for 2023. The successful applicant can receive up to $50,000 to continue their work sustaining and revitalizing local natural resources. The fund is open to individuals, business, community groups, First Nations communities, government agency, secondary schools and post-secondary schools. Launched in 2019, the fund is made available through the harvest and sale of timber affected by spruce beetles within the research forest north of Prince George. Since 2019, the fund has provided $190,000 to projects in northern B.C. Last year two legacy fund grants were awarded – to the Fraser Headwaters Alliance for their work upgrading the historic Goat River Trail and to the Nazko First Nation’s Landscape Recovery program for their work reclaiming native plants and restoring habitats.

Rob Schuetz is the President of Industrial Forestry Service (IFS), which is one of the largest natural resource consulting firms operating in British Columbia for the forestry, bioenergy, oil & gas, and mining sectors. Rob is past-president of the Society of Consulting Foresters of British Columbia. He specializes in the analysis of fibre supplies throughout BC and Alberta and has spent over 25 years consulting to the natural resource industries. …Jim Girvan is a Registered Professional Forester (RPF) who has dedicated over four decades of his life to the British Columbia forest industry. Jim’s name is synonymous across North America in respect to fibre supply forecasting and the varied lobby efforts on the part of independent timber harvesting contractors, consultants, forest licensees, and investors.

At the UN Biodiversity Conference nearly 200 countries agreed to adopt the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Among the 26 targets set out in the draft document is the much-publicised “30 by 30” commitment: to protect 30% of Earth’s land and marine surfaces by the year 2030. UN figures  indicate that only 17% of land and inland water ecosystems and only 8% of coastal ecosystems and ocean are currently protected …As scary as a 30% protected area target may be to the forest industry … we can’t ignore the issue. The papers I discussed in this essay don’t represent fringe beliefs; indeed, they have been published in mainstream journals, including Science and Nature. Moreover, the conservation biology community has been actively, and successfully, working to turn its ideals into political reality. What we can do is engage – with conservation biologists, policy makers, and all of the many other stakeholders in global forest management. If we don’t, we may find that many land use decisions are made without us.

VICTORIA — The B.C. government is planning an insecticide spraying program this spring to target invasive spongy moths, formerly known as gypsy moths.   The Ministry of Forests says the spraying is planned for the Greater Victoria area and Vancouver Island communities of Courtenay, Campbell River and Port Alberni.  The ministry says in a statement the spraying is aimed at minimizing the risks spongy moths pose to forests, farms, orchards and urban trees and to prevent the moths from becoming permanently established.   It says spongy moth caterpillars defoliate trees and if they become established, many tree species including Garry oak, arbutus, fruit, nut and ornamental varieties will be affected.  The ministry says it will spray the biological insecticide known as Foray 48B, which is used in organic farming and has been approved for use in Canada since 1961 after repeated scientific studies concluded the treatment poses no threats to people or animals.

…Over the past 15 years, a calamity has befallen B.C.’s deep-snow caribou — a caribou ecotype found nowhere else in the world. In 2005, B.C. had 18 deep-snow caribou herds. Today, only ten remain. All are on the cusp of local extinction. Nine deep-snow caribou herds once lived to the south of the Columbia North herd. Eight are gone. Only about two dozen animals remain in the ninth herd, an amalgamation of two herds. Bucking the dispiriting trend, and following costly interventions such as shooting wolves, in 2022 the Columbia North population grew by almost two dozen, to 209 animals. …Perhaps no other animal highlights Canada’s role in the planet’s unfolding sixth mass extinction event as much as caribou, the species engraved on the Canadian quarter. Worldwide, more than one million species face extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations report. In Canada, one in five species are at some risk of disappearing. 

Derek Menard

NANAIMO — A brief jail sentence is possible for a man at the centre of a pair blockades on the Trans Canada Highway on Vancouver Island last spring. Sentencing arguments for Derek Hugh Menard took place Wednesday, Jan 11 after he pleaded guilty to mischief and intimidation by obstructing a highway last year in Nanaimo and Langford. The 33-year-old scientist and longtime political activist joined several others in briefly blocking Trans Canada Hwy. traffic on April 8. 2022 in Chase River, while he helped orchestrate a lengthy disruption several days later north of Victoria. “Which of course is ironic because this is a protest about climate change and it leads the Crown to submit it’s a very misguided form of protest,” Crown Counsel’s Joel Gold said in reference to idling vehicles releasing carbon into the atmosphere during the incidents. He argued for a two week jail tenure for Menard followed by probation.

No one is surprised by the news of Canfor shutting down one of its pulp mills in Prince George. …The combination of a warming climate and forest practices that artificially inflated the amount of mature pine available led to an explosion in the mountain pine beetle’s population in northern and central B.C. By 2012, more than 18 million hectares of B.C. forest were infested. The government increased the annual allowable cut of forests, so trees could be harvested before they were no longer viable for the market. …Forest fires, the softwood lumber trade dispute with the U.S. and a worldwide recession are also having an effect, as are government policies aimed at protecting habitat for species like endangered mountain caribou. John Innes with the forestry department at UBC says… forestry is a multi-billion dollar industry that “supports schools, supports First Nations, supports hospitals and other services provided by the government” and that money won’t easily be replaced.

A Fraser Valley-based community forestry group says it’s been hit not once, but twice by thieves stealing large, expensive logs from one of their remote helicopter sites. Cascade Lower Canyon Community Forest discovered the first theft during the Christmas break when they noticed that two of their logs — worth $500 per metre — were missing from their helicopter logging site in the Silver Skagit area. General manager Matt Wealick said he was dismayed to see that six more logs …were taken Monday evening (Jan. 9), from their landing site, located halfway from the Flood Hope Road exit. …“This is very high value [logs] because we’re flying it by helicopter. So, it’s very valuable,” says Wealick, “they’re targeting cedar and they took certain pieces.” …“The Ministry of Forestry, who are supposed to be our RCMP, haven’t even answered my call from the first time,” says Wealick. “That’s the most disappointing thing in all of this.”

PRINCE GEORGE — With 300 fresh job losses in town, it’s time to ask who is running the forests. The megacorps are in the driving seat, of course, but where’s the political leadership? …There has been so many different forest ministers these past few years, I’m not sure who we can blame for the poor state of our forests. …No matter how bad the megacorps mismanage our forests they pretend to own… people from the Lower Mainland do not care. …It is delusional to think our ever-changing cast of forest ministers and our disinterested big-city electorate and media are providing adequate oversight of our forests. This leaves the real political power in the offices of appointed Victoria Ministry officials, and the Office of the Chief Forester in particular. And they run the show in concert with the megacorps, which they are meant to regulate, with near complete impunity.