Book Review – “Loggerheads” by Bruce Hornidge: Loggerheads is a candid account of the “Clayoquot Sound land-use scuffle” between logging protestors and forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel, and the “world media hype” that accompanied it. It’s a peppery book, written by a man who had (caulk) boots on the ground: Ex-Clayoquot Sound forest worker Bruce Hornidge, who at times was “dripping saliva from [his] teeth” while protestors were “[chaining] themselves to logging equipment and [obstructing] forest workers from doing their jobs.” …Regardless of one’s opinion of logging, it’s undeniable that Loggerheads is insightful, well-documented and at times poetic, and as its passionate author — now retired and living in Ontario — fittingly says, his “personal clarification of events” has been “Written, ironically, not on tables of stone like commandments, but on paper. From wood.”
I am not against saving old-growth trees — but I am against the ridiculous statements that keep getting thrown out there. Every tree planted is on its way to be an old-growth forest. The existing old-growth forests don’t last forever, as some would like you to believe. Some trees last a long time and others not so much. The end game is not years, but hundreds of years. Take large areas of new forests and plan to make them old-growth forests. …Compensate the owners and get on with it. All you keep hearing is how the old growth will never come back. How the biodiversity will be destroyed and never come back. Well, think about it. Fires have, since the dawn of time, destroyed the forests and the biodiversity. They came back. At one time, there was 1,200 metres of ice covering all B.C. …That probably lasted thousands of years. It all came back, didn’t it?
The Swampy Cree have met with all branches of government. There are three signatory tribes, Swampy Cree Tribe, The Pas Mountain, and Moose Lake. There are quite a few newly formed bands like IR20, IR21, that try to take over lands that belong to the long-established Swampy Cree Tribes. The government used the Indian Act to amalgamate. It called Indigenous treaties, it says we are not Indigenous. We are not Indian Act. We are the signatory treaties. Nation to nation as long as the sun shines, river flows, and grass grows. Why is the Saskatchewan government giving and signing off lots of acres of land for deforestation that belongs to the Swampy Cree Nation? No conciliation mean while crown corporations are selling the land to companies for logging, mining, and peatmoss processing. These activities are doing damages to the environment.
For months, officials in Western Canada have been warning that this year could be a dangerous wildfire season, after a warm, dry winter and a lower than usual snowpack left conditions primed for ignition. This week, it appears the predictions may be coming true. In Alberta, the government officially declared the start of wildfire season 10 days early… allowing the province to issue fire bans to limit the risk. There have been five emergency alerts about wildfires already this year. BC’s first evacuation order of the season was issued this week as a fast-growing blaze, fanned by strong winds, posed an immediate danger to life near the District of Chetwynd. …The orders were all swiftly downgraded to evacuation alerts, but they represented the first in what wildfire officials know will be many more this year. [to access the full story a Globe and Mail subscription is required]
Three First Nations seek to protect treaty forest land and may take a logging company and the province to court. The Pine Creek, Wuskwi Sipihk, and Sapotaweyak Cree nations allege that the logging company Louisiana-Pacific did not have an approved forest management plan in place during their activity on Treaty 4 territory. These actions could violate the Manitoba Forest Act if the allegations prove correct. Chief Derek Nepinak of Pine Creek noted in a press release that “In 2012 Manitoba agreed to consider other logging practices to protect moose habitat, More than 12 years later Manitoba is still without a viable plan”.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — From trees felled in protected national parks to massive swaths of jungle razed for palm oil and paper plantations, Indonesia had a 27% uptick in primary forest loss in 2023 from the previous year, according to a World Resources Institute analysis. But the loss is still seen as historically low compared to the 2010s, it said. “Deforestation has been declining from six or so years ago,” said Rod Taylor, global director of the forests program at WRI. “It’s good news and commendable for Indonesia. But others saw cause for concern in the uptick, and tied some of the more recent deforestation to the world’s appetite for mining Indonesia’s vast deposits of nickel. …Since 1950, more than 74 million hectares of Indonesian rainforest have been logged, burned or degraded for development of palm oil, paper and rubber plantations, according to Global Forest Watch.
NEW ZEALAND — In a sector that has been knocked about by rule changes in the past few years, Keith Woodford plots the way ahead. …Many of my forestry presentations have focused on flaws in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). This presentation was different. I simply took the rules as they are and looked at how farm foresters could best respond in their own interests, be they economic interests or broader issues coming from the heart. My starting point was to briefly look at the journey NZ’s production forestry has taken in recent decades. …Almost 90% of NZ’s log exports go to China. …NZ is now the only country that exports significant volumes of softwood logs to China. Countries like Russia now only export lumber, not logs. Also, China is becoming increasingly self-sufficient in timber, with big eucalyptus plantings in the south of China.