Anthony Britneff

With many forestry communities upset with the poor stewardship of their local forests and with contamination of their drinking water from clearcut logging, one wonders why appeasing initiatives like the Old Growth Strategy (1991), the Protected Areas Strategy (1993) and the Old Growth Deferral Initiative (2021) have not delivered. The only substantive changes to how forests are stewarded, or not, have resulted from new legislation. Politicians eager to appease public concerns about forestry without conviction (i.e., without changing the law), do so by offering up these flavour-of-the-month initiatives, which are bound to fail because their requirement is not rooted in law. …Astonishingly, in 2024, the forest ministry has no stewardship purpose for the conservation of biodiversity, soil and water, for the maintenance of ecosystem health and for the sustainable use of forest resources. We need to rewrite the purposes of the forest ministry to include a stewardship purpose in a new Ministry of Forests Act.