David Elstone
It’s outrageous to demand an end to old-growth logging without acknowledging the impact to people and communities. For decades, even more so over the past year, there have been many catastrophic headlines trumpeting the rhetoric from environmentalists who state that British Columbia’s old-growth forests are endangered and warning that if we’re not careful we’ll soon run out. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Fifty-five percent of remaining old-growth forests, 500,000 hectares, are protected on Vancouver Island alone and will never be harvested. There are also millions of hectares of old-growth trees protected on the BC coast. These crucial facts are often ignored in the articles and arguments intended to pressure the government to end old-growth logging.
There have been continuing suggestions that the forest industry needs to transition from old-growth to second-growth harvesting. This is completely unrealistic.
A moratorium on old-growth harvesting would deal a deadly blow to the Island’s forestry economy. From 2012 to ’17, about 47.7% of the harvest was from old-growth trees. Ending old-growth logging on the Island would shut down four sawmills, a pulp mill and kill thousands of jobs.
It would also eliminate much of the value-added wood product manufacturing that relies on access to high-quality timber that only comes from old-growth forests.
Old-growth wood is used to manufacture doors, mouldings, flooring and decking found in most people’s homes in BC. It’s valued for its knot-free, tight grain, which is stronger and more visually appealing than wood harvested from second-growth trees.
Let me be clear: BC is the most sustainably managed forest region in the world. The province has more forested land under third-party environmental certification than any other country in the world.
BC takes old-growth conservation seriously. The Great Bear Rainforest Act, Old-Growth Management Areas and other safeguards were created to make sure we will never, ever run out of old-growth forests.
The vast majority of old-growth forests are part of the provincial forest resource and owned by all British Columbians. Crown forests are managed with myriad values in mind, including recreation, soils, sustainable timber supply, wildlife, water, fish, biodiversity, visual landscapes and cultural resources. Industry harvests only 0.3% — 27,000 hectares — of the coast’s 8.5 million hectares of operational forest per year.
Much of the negative attention focuses on clearcutting. It’s often described as an unsustainable, unethical and ugly harvesting practice.
In fact, clearcutting is the most cost-effective and silviculture-friendly way to regrow trees. Reforestation, which is legally mandated in BC, ensures our forests will be sustainable for generations to come. And the newly planted trees help our fight against climate change by fixing carbon as they grow.
More than 200 million trees are planted every year in BC. Carbon stored in wood products made from BC forests can remain sequestered for 100 years and beyond.
It’s also not widely known that not all trees are harvested within a clearcut. BC’s legacy tree policy requires that qualifying old-growth trees be left standing and there are successful examples of previously harvested clearcuts where legacy trees still stand tall.
As the voice of timber harvesting contractors, who harvest the trees, we need to ensure governments at all levels understand the catastrophic economic consequences that would befall BC’s rural communities if pleas to ban old-growth logging were heeded.
The public needs to consider the disaster that an old-growth logging ban would spell for the livelihoods of rural families. The coastal forest industry provides well-paying jobs for nearly 24,000 workers and that’s not counting the reliant indirect jobs and businesses — grocery stores, restaurants, hotels, teachers, nurses and doctors.
Often forgotten, too, are the relationships between the forest sector and backcountry tourism for skiers, mountain bikers and hikers who gain access to the forest on forest-industry service roads. None of this would exist if not for a forest resource sector that includes harvesting some old-growth timber.
Most importantly, the public needs to know that all timber-harvesting contractors in BC believe in conservation and are respectfully committed to sustainable old-growth forest management.
It’s time we started celebrating the current conservation investment in millions of protected hectares, which too often is forgotten and ignored.
It’s outrageous to demand an end to old-growth logging without acknowledging the impact to people and communities. Our working forest needs protection from the misguided efforts of a few environmentalists who don’t have the province’s best interests in mind. They shouldn’t headline the news by making false claims against harvesting practices of BC’s most valued resource.
David Elstone is executive director of British Columbia’s Truck Loggers Association.
