On Haida Gwaii, Falling Trees at the End of an Era

By Aaron Williams
The Tyee
May 7, 2024
Category: Forestry
Region: Canada, Canada West

‘The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era,’ is a newly published book from Harbour Publishing. The book follows Williams, a third-generation logger who has mostly found employment elsewhere, as he treks to Haida Gwaii to embed with a mostly aging workforce and document the twilight of conventional logging as a new set of possibilities opens in B.C.’s forests. Excerpt: …In North America, falling is second only to fishing in terms of danger. For most of his career Dave has made his odds worse by doing a difficult sub-species of the job known as right-of-way falling. This is the falling done to open up new roads to new cutblocks. Fallers working in a cutblock quickly create an opening in the canopy — a safer space — into which most other trees are felled. On a right-of-way, an open space is never achieved. 

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