On May 2 volunteers will converge on the Bush Creek hatchery in Ladysmith to haul illegally dumped waste out of the surrounding forest and watershed. Over the past three years, the community cleanup, run by the Ladysmith Sportsmen’s Club, has removed nearly 160 tonnes of garbage. “Illegal dumping is a serious offence, one that harms our forests and puts communities at risk,” said Ravi Parmar, minister of Forests. “But because of this initiative, we’re reducing the risks and protecting our environment. We’re adding to the 160 tonnes already removed, through on-the-ground, people-led land restoration.” Mosaic Forest Management, which manages approximately 585,000 hectares of private forest land across Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast, will once again supply staff volunteers, donated materials and disposal support for the effort. Volunteers can email judsonboys@shaw.ca to get involoved. More information on Mosaic’s reporting pilot will be available at MosaicForests.com this summer.

Extreme weather events in northern Manitoba are challenging to navigate, and the lack of weather radar sites in the northern part of the province only adds to that challenge, experts say. “We experienced that a lot last summer during our forest fire,” said Mike Funk, the emergency co-ordinator for the City of Flin Flon. “We would get reports from Environment Canada, [saying] ‘We’re expecting rainfall,’ and they were great at predicting the time that it would hit [elsewhere]. But by the time it got close to your area, nothing happened.” Last spring, Flin Flon, more than 600 kilometers northwest of Winnipeg, was nearly encircled by wildfires. The city of roughly 5,000 was evacuated for weeks. Funk said a weather radar station in the north would give his community a clearer picture of what type of weather they could expect.

Ben Parfitt

As pulp mill and sawmill jobs plummet in number, British Columbia’s Forests Ministry is opening the door to more exports of unprocessed logs, including those produced from trees cut down in old-growth forests. Under current rules, companies … pay a “fee in lieu of manufacturing”… But in February, the provincial government quietly lowered those fees. The reduced fees will make it more profitable to ship logs away, and although the government says it will incentivize more logging, others warn that the change risks undermining  jobs in the province’s struggling forest industry. …Arnold Bercov, a former worker at the Harmac pulp mill and former president of the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada, warns that the move will hurt B.C.’s forestry sector. …[Saying] the government’s surplus test is “a trap.” “The more logs you export, the more mills that shut down,” he said. “And the more mills that shut down, the more exports you have.”

Mother Nature is the expert on growing forests, but sometimes she needs a helping hand. This hand is especially helpful when something disrupts her well-honed process in the first place. Such is the case with the forestry plantations in qax mot and the effort to restore these areas by the Comox Valley Land Trust (CVLT). Located at the Morrison Creek headwaters up Lake Trail Rd., the qax mot Conservation Area consists of 22 hectares of riparian forests and forestry plantations. …About 9 per cent of qax mot consists of forestry plantations. While it might seem like planting trees is always a good idea, the way the Douglas fir plantations were installed prohibit the natural regenerative cycle essential to a healthy forest. The trees were planted too closely, making it nearly impossible for light to break through the canopy, leaving the forest floor virtually barren of the undergrowth species we associate with a thriving West Coast forest.