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British Columbia's public dispute on Sustainable Forest Management

Are British Columbia's forests well managed?

by Anthony Britneff, 2011

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How to solve public disputes on forests?

In British Columbia, a dispute continues over just how sustainably managed are British Columbia’s publicly owned forests covering some 55 million hectares of the province, which is 94 million hectares in size.

At the heart of this dispute is the extent of productive forestland disturbed by wildfires, wind, diseases and insects that is not stocked with trees.  

You might be interested in reading this small booklet by Ben Parfitt as well

Over the last decade, some 17.5 million hectares of  lodgepole pine forests have been infested by the mountain pine beetle.  The beetle infestation has not been confined to mature forests but has also affected immature pine forests.

Over that same decade, British Columbia has seen some of the worst years for wildfire in recorded history with over a million hectares having been denuded by wildfire.   

With an inventory that is over 15 years old for much of the province, questions are being asked about the provincial extent of the not stocked area, which has implications for the rate of harvest, for carbon accounting, for sustainable forest management, and for forest certification.

With the forests ministry unable to generate a province-wide not-stocked area from its forest inventory and with wildly different estimates of the extent of the not stocked area being made by foresters in the media *, the public’s watchdog, the Forest Practices Board, has initiated a special investigation to clarify the status of British Columbia’s not stocked lands. The Board's special report is expected to be released early in 2012.  The terms of reference are posted at:

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About the author:
Anthony Britneff, retired after 39 years of public service with the B.C. Forest Service is still worrying about British Columbia’s forests and is therefore a valiant champion of the sustainable management of forests of his homeland.

You may draw your attention to this site as well: Healty forests and healthy communities - A conversation on BC Forests

British Columbia's dispute on Sustainable Forest Managment (SFM)

British Columbia’s Auditor General releases his timber management report

http://foresttalk.com/index.php/2012/02/17/british-columbias-auditor-gen...

19. February 2012
British Columbia Auditor General John Doyle has released his latest report, An Audit of the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations’ Management of Timber.
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FOREST PRACTICES BOARD CONFIRMS BELL UNDERSTATED FOREST PROBLEMS

http://bcndpcaucus.ca/en/forest_practices_board_confirms_bell_understate...

13. February 2012
The Forest Practices Board has confirmed that former forest minister Pat Bell has been grossly understating the true problems facing B.C.’s forests. New Democrat forest critic Norm Macdonald said Bell needs to explain why his estimate of crown lands that have not been adequately replanted was less than 10 per cent of the total the Forest Practices Board revealed Thursday. “Either the minister was badly misinformed or he was purposefully understating the problem facing our forests,” said Macdonald.
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Proof Is in: Our Forests Are Badly Mismanaged

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/02/03/BC-Forest-Mismanagement/

13. February 2012
On the second of February, I attended a presentation at the Western Silvicultural Contractors' Association AGM in Kamloops. The presentation was made by Marvin Eng, a special investigator at the Forest Practices Board, who is tasked with clarifying the status and implications of "not satisfactorily re-stocked" (NSR) forest in British Columbia. Eng presented Phase 1 of the Forest Practices Board report.
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Forests? Depends on who's counting

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/todays-paper/Forests+Depends+counting/...

13. February 2012
B.C.'s foresters are an argumentative lot, and for the past few years, one particular disagreement has repeatedly seized their attention. It's the question of how much forest land falls into the official category known as NSR - not satisfactorily restocked.
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Pine beetles part 3: A flood of problems for ranchers

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Pine+beetles+part+flood+problems+ranche...

20. December 2011
Watching the pine beetles kill off the Chilcotin's vast stands of lodgepole pine forest was bad enough for cattle rancher Randy Saugstad. But he argues the greater concern is the way the B.C. government has allowed salvage logging to take precedence on Crown forests at the expense of other land uses and the environment. Pointing to a clearcut on the hillside in the distance, he laments: "It's like a gold rush mentality. They have an insatiable appetite for this wood."
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'It looks like Armageddon': The destruction of B.C. pine forests

http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/looks+like+Armageddon+destruction+pin...

20. December 2011
VANCOUVER - Debbie Atha had a dream that went like this: Gregarious woman approaching 30 quits her well-paying pharmaceutical sales job in England to move to the B.C. Interior to invest her time and money building a dude ranch. "I had an early midlife crisis," she allows. "I wanted to do something special." And why not? The province had billed itself as Super Natural, the Best Place on Earth, a land where the government is officially committed to doubling tourism revenues by 2015.
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Forestry's 'perfect storm'

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/todays-paper/Forestry+perfect+storm/582...

20. December 2011
The Chilcotin's beetle-killed lodge-pole pine forests are saturated with water. The harvesting crews have been sent home. And logging trucks known as Super-B Trains, hauling 300 to 400 logs apiece, are inching their way through deep mud wallows. Tolko Industries Ltd. needs 125 loads per day to feed its two operating mills in Williams Lake, and likes to maintain a raw-wood inventory of a week or so. Conditions in the bush have reduced that to as little as one day when The Vancouver Sun visits.
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Pine beetle plague is being exploited to cut healthy trees

http://www.vancouversun.com/Pine+beetle+plague+being+exploited+healthy+t...

20. December 2011
I wish to commend The Sun and Larry Pynn for the excellent series of articles "In the Wake of a Plague." This sober second look at the issues and myths surrounding the mountain pine beetle panic is long overdue. I have lived in the Chilcotin since 1980 and seen more than one beetle out-break, and each time the cries of fire, devastation and control through logging come to the fore. Unfortunately this series of articles is more than a factual assessment, it is a post-mortem.
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Pine beetle plague is being exploited to cut healthy trees

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/todays-paper/Pine+beetle+plague+being+e...

20. December 2011
Ask who caused this plague destroying our province's biodiversity. Those who go to our backcountry are familiar with our huge clearcuts and the damage done. "How goes the raping and pillaging?" is a greeting used by our truck-loggers that dates to the 1970s for its origin, well before the beetle infestation. Truck loggers daily, monthly, annually watch the clearcuts grow. All who drive our Coquihalla Connector have seen the vast areas, some freshly logged with this season's smoking piles of wood wasted.
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In the wake of a plague

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/wake+plague/5800904/story.html#ix...

06. December 2011
The plan was simple: Log and sell as much dead pine as possible before it decayed or burned. But the environmental costs of the large-scale salvaging of Interior forests are still being tallied... The province sold the epidemic as unprecedented in North American history. Biblical plagues of mountain pine beetles sweeping across the Interior landscape in dark clouds, leaving a dead zone more than five times the size of Vancouver Island in their wake.
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'Dead' pine forests very much alive

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Dead+pine+forests+very+much+alive...

06. December 2011
Phil Burton calls this place a jungle. It's not the tropical Amazonian rainforest or even B.C.'s temperate rainforest, but a stand of lodgepole pine located off the Pelican Forest Service Road about an hour's drive southwest of Prince George. The federal forests researcher estimates the pines were about 30 years old when the mountain pine beetle epidemic swept through here in 2005.
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Forest denizens struggle in clearings

http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Forest+denizens+struggle+clearing...

06. December 2011
Salvage logging of B.C.'s Interior lodgepole pine forests is having major consequences for wildlife by eliminating vast stretches of habitat used for activities such as feeding, hiding and keeping warm or cool.
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Fiery debate surrounds benefits of salvage operations

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Fiery+debate+surrounds+benefits+salvage...

06. December 2011
Logging B.C.'s beetle-killed pine forests can, in theory, reduce the risk of a wildfire. But when fire ecologist Bob Gray visits a logging site, he can see just the opposite: a heightened fire risk because of so much uneconomic wood left on the ground. "There's more of a mess afterwards," he said. "If we're just going to highgrade and take the best logs, that's not good. We're exacerbating the problem. Some sites you're walking four feet off the ground on logs."
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Reporting the Results of Forestry Activities: Compliance with Section 86 of the Forest Planning and Practices Regulation

http://www.fpb.gov.bc.ca/SIR33_Reporting_the_Results_of_Forestry_Activit...

01. December 2011
Reports from the forest industry about the effects of their activities have always been important to managing the public forests. However, forestry in BC is in a new era that differs from the past in two important respects in the context of reporting.
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SCIENTISTS WARN B.C. MINING RUSH WOULD HARM ALASKA AND B.C. SALMON, CLEAN WATER

http://forestindustries.eu/content/scientists-warn-bc-mining-rush-would-...

http://www.terracedaily.ca/show8937a/SCIENTISTS_WARN_BC_-_MINING_RUSH

18. November 2011
Download the PDF here... November 15, 2011 The Honourable Christy Clark Premier of British Columbia PO Box 9041 Station Provincial Government Victoria, BC V8W 9E1 Dear Premier Christy Clark,
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B.C. should use policy, not dollars, in carbon fight

http://www.timescolonist.com/technology/should+policy+dollars+carbon+fig...

28. September 2011
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, natural gas prices were high and many major gas consumers worried that continued high prices posed serious risks to future profitability. One of the more concerned sectors of British Columbia's economy was the commercial greenhouse industry, which uses lots of gas to heat the massive glass structures growing all those hothouse peppers and tomatoes we eat. Back then, some greenhouse operators began installing new woodfired boilers to avoid burning so much gas.
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Minister responds to MP’s columns

http://www.bclocalnews.com/opinion/128278518.html

06. September 2011
In response to Alex Atamanenko’s claims in his Aug. 2 and Aug. 16 columns, I believe the readers of your newspaper deserve and need to know the facts. While there have been changes in the provincial government’s natural resource ministries over the last year, what hasn’t changed is this government’s commitment to sustainable forest management.
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New solutions needed for wildfire woes

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/solutions+needed+wildfire+woes/5260188/...

06. September 2011
In the aftermath of the disastrous wildfires in 2003 that burned hundreds of homes and caused millions of dollars in property damage in and around the communities of Kelowna and Barriere, the City of Cranbrook began doing what hundreds of other communities across B.C. must do if they wish to better protect themselves from future wildfires.
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Missing out on green job potential

http://www.vancouversun.com/Missing+green+potential/5239620/story.html

06. September 2011
Ever since United States house prices peaked in mid-2006 and the great economic slump began south of the border, British Columbia's government and forest industry alike have been understandably anxious. Dependent as we have been on the U.S. market for billions of dollars in forest product purchases, B.C. naturally yearned to open up new markets. Given its spectacular economic growth, China became the focus, and before long B.C.'s marketing efforts yielded gains in both the volume and dollar value of forest products exported.
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How we all pay to 'conserve' forests

http://www.theprovince.com/technology/conserve+forests/5287924/story.html

06. September 2011
In January, a deal was struck between the Pacific Carbon Trust (the provincial Crown corporation responsible for buying carbon "offsets") and one of British Columbia's biggest logging companies - a deal that would allegedly result in hundreds of thousands of tonnes of additional carbon being stored in trees.
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