A BC Supreme Court judge has ruled in favour of First Nation treaty rights, recognizing the cumulative effects of natural resource development. In other Business news: US inflation reaches a 13-year high; lumber is down but house prices stay high; and New Brunswick tree sellers aren’t reaping the rewards of recent lumber prices.
In Forestry/Climate news: police and a protester are assaulted at BC’s old-growth blockade; US forest growth outpaces removals by 60%-100%; how biomass energy from forests is carbon neutral; and Western Forest Products’ forest practices influence on climate change. In forest product news: wood use is celebrated at Portland’s International Airport; in US modular housing; for biophilic design in India; in Vietnam’s sauna manufacturing sector; at Japan’s Osaka 2025 World’s Fair; and at a public transit station in China.
Finally, BC’s 2020 Wood Design Awards goes virtual, today at 3:45 PST.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has ruled against the province in a case alleging widespread and long-standing violation of a First Nation’s treaty rights, a decision which could have implications far beyond the province’s borders. In Yahey v. British Columbia 2021 BCSC 1287, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Emily Burke ruled the province had infringed the rights of Blueberry River First Nations under Treaty 8… which protected Indigenous peoples’ traditional way of life but gave the province the power to “take up lands” for things like natural resource development. …To date, the cases in which First Nations have argued there have been infringements of their Aboriginal and treaty rights have largely focused on single projects or resource developments. But here Blueberry argued that the cumulative effect of activities such as oil and gas development, forestry, mining and hydroelectric infrastructure on their lands had infringed the treaty. (to access the full story, a subscription may be required)
VANCOUVER, BC/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tgam/Q4NYDC6PFBFTHFSM6FILJJNEVU.JPG)
Today we announced the launch of a new website for our millwork business. This 
After rising to shockingly expensive levels this spring, lumber prices have fallen so far that they are starting to look cheap to some buyers. …July futures ended Tuesday at $599 per thousand board feet, down nearly two-thirds from the high of $1,711.20 hit in May. …More actively traded futures for September delivery settled at $649.90, just $10.90 above the pre-pandemic high. The decline is benefiting builders and do-it-yourselfers and helping to allay fears of runaway inflation. Still, buyers of new homes should not expect discounts. …Home builders say they expect to collect higher profit margins rather than drop asking prices. …Retail prices remain high relative to historical levels, but the cuts show the decline in futures and mill prices is trickling down to shoppers. [And] the lower prices are beginning to beckon buyers, especially developers, which shelved construction plans when prices reached unprecedented levels. [we respect the copyrights of the source publication – full access may require a subscription]
Roadless national forests in the American West burn more often and at a slightly higher severity than national forests without roads, but the end result for the roadless forests is greater fire resilience, Oregon State University researchers say. The findings, published today in Environmental Research Letters, provide a key piece of the puzzle for a region trying to develop better approaches to living with fire in the wake of a 2020 fire season that brought historically disastrous blazes. …Differences in fire extent and fire escape—a fire getting beyond the area you think it should stay contained in—are strongly associated with roadless vs. non-roadless management, James Johnston, a researcher in the OSU College of Forestry said. But the real drivers of fire severity—i.e. tree mortality—are differences in environment and not land use designations.
The issue of carbon neutrality for wood-based bioenergy just won’t go away. Politico, The New York Times, and CNN all have run high-level stories that take the Europeans to task for using wood pellets from the U.S. South because of concerns that wood-based biomass is not carbon neutral. The problem with all these stories is creating biomass energy from forests in fact is carbon neutral. …economic analyses consistently show that wood-based bioenergy is not only carbon neutral, but it reduces the net climate impact of household electricity consumption when it substitutes for fossil-based electricity. Many scientists don’t want trees planted and harvested for anything, let alone energy. So they argue that wood bioenergy isn’t carbon-neutral at all. …Many of the arguments made against wood bioenergy … sound compelling, but fall apart when contrasted with reality. …It’s simple economics really, anything that makes wood harvesting more profitable leads to increased investments in growing wood.
