Todd Loewen

Two additional air tankers and two-night vision-equipped helicopters are being added to the province’s list of equipment to be prepared for wildfire season 2024. These pieces of equipment are contracted out. Alberta now has three-night vision helicopters on hand. As wildfire behaviour is usually subdued at nighttime with lower temperatures and higher humidity, Minister of Forestry and Parks Todd Loewen says the two additional helicopters will help with overnight operations. An additional $14 million will be going to the Community Fireguard Program administered by the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta. The program is in place for communities so they can clear areas to make fire breaks by cutting off fuel sources that could potentially drive towards infrastructure, properties, or other values at risk. There is now $19 million in place for the Community Fireguard Program.

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?

Angela Davidson

British Columbia’s highest court has ordered the Green Party of Canada’s deputy leader to be released from custody pending her appeal of a 60-day jail sentence (issued April 24) for her role in old-growth logging protests on Vancouver Island. Angela Davidson, also known as Rainbow Eyes, was convicted earlier this year of seven counts of criminal contempt for breaching a court injunction blocking protesters from disrupting logging activities in the Fairy Creek watershed. …Davidson filed an appeal of her sentence two days later, and was ordered released on bail Monday pending the appeal hearing, according to the B.C. Appeal Court and the B.C. Prosecution Service. A spokesperson for the court said the Crown did not oppose granting Davidson leave for appeal, nor did it oppose granting her release from custody pending the appeal hearing. Davidson said her efforts to “braid the laws” of the Crown and Indigenous communities will continue.

Central Okanagan Public Schools offers alternate learning options that extend beyond sitting on a chair behind a desk. One such different learning path is the school forestry program offered at Rutland Senior Secondary under the instructional leadership of teacher Marshall Corbett. Jayden Shkrabuik and Nova Kidder, both enrolled in the program, appeared before the Okanagan Board of Education on April 24 to illustrate how their participation in the program has forged new career paths they never previously envisioned. Both talked about the learning excitement that comes from being outdoors four days a week and the lessons in life they are exposed to while learning about trees. …Local forest companies like Gorman Bros. and Tolko have also been partners to the program, providing logs for students to develop their chainsaw operation and equipment maintenance skills on at the RSS wood compound, a familiar site to school visitors at the southeast corner of RSS.

In a historic victory for the Nuchatlaht First Nation, the Supreme Court of BC has recognized the aboriginal title to more than 4 square miles of land on Nootka Island, including a pristine salmon lake, salmon stream and forest that had been threatened by industrial logging off the west side of Vancouver Island. The ruling by Justice Elliott Myers recognized Nuchatlaht’s title to the remote coastal strip of land. With the ruling, the Nuchatlaht Nation of just 160 people has become the second-largest aboriginal titleholder in B.C. And the Nation is just getting started: Nuchatlaht is weighing going back to court on appeal for acknowledgment of a far larger claim. …Nuchatlaht’s victory marks the first time a B.C. trial court has recognized a First Nation’s aboriginal title of its ancestral territory.

Climate change, not habitat loss, may be the biggest threat to the survival of threatened caribou herds, new research suggests. “We might need to do additional management actions if our goal is to conserve caribou,” said Melanie Dickie, lead author of the study. For years, biologists have pointed to sustained industry-caused damage to the old-growth forests preferred by caribou as the reason the species is now threatened. …But climate change has also been at work in the forests. Slowly warming temperatures have greatly expanded the range in which whitetail deer can thrive. …Using an extensive network of camera traps that captured tens of thousands of images of whitetail deer, the researchers concluded that the north-south temperature gradient made a much larger difference to deer density than the east-west differences in human disturbance. …If Dickie’s paper is correct, no amount of tree-planting and cutline remediation will be enough.

The April newsletter includes:

• 2024 BCCFA Conference & AGM, June 11 – 13 in Mackenzie, BC: Conference sessions, accommodations, field trip, and carpooling.
• Wildfire Resiliency and Training Summit review and report.
• BC works with communities to boost wildfire prevention, preparedness
• Updates from the Forest Investment and Reporting Branch
• Commercial Thinning  – A Practical Guide for Woodlot Licensees in the North-Central Interior of British Columbia 
• Fire is medicine –  Westbank First Nation’s Ntityix Resources – Home of the Westbank Community Forest 
• Kootenay Community Forest Seeking a Mill Manager