Quesnel is only one of the Interior towns that will be devastated. According to Bob Simpson, in a letter to the local, in our case, Williams Lake papers, these corporations, like West Fraser, are operating on a 2 year capital return and 10 year mill lifespan. This means that they'll recoup their investment in 2 years, rake in the huge profits for 8 and by the time the bugkilled timber runs out they can close the mills and take off, leaving the communities to rot.

This is the result of the crime wave instituted on our world by the neoclassical market economy theory, taught in our universities.

The solution, of course, would be diversification and the establishment of locally based economic infrastructures and supply system, but again, these are prevented by the neoclassical theory that brought us the NAFTA and the WTO, tying the hands of communities from helping themselves.

Overcapitalization was strictly discouraged by old time economic textbooks, which meant investing more than 1 wage year in a job, now it is running wild with economists and governments encouraging it to raise the phoney GDP, with millions invested in every job. This is called "increased productivity"

The plan is clearly to depopulate the rural areas and jam everybody into mega cities, where they must depend on the handouts of multinational corporations. Then, import slave labour under the coming GATS to exploit the resources with skeleton crews in ghost towns.

Our school district has been losing students every year since the Campbell gang took power, 250 this year alone.

This shows that the plans are working. But how long will people just stand there like idiots and permit this crime wave to continue? This is the only thing that baffles me.
Ed Deak, Big Lake.

The oddest thing about all this is the fact that the damn beetle has freed up the most enormous amount of timber resource ever for immediate exploitation. Years and years worth.

And yet, in the face of this windfall, rather than planning and devising ways to take advantage of the situation by concentrating our logging efforts there and making some valuable products out of the dead trees, taking the pressure off the remaining healthy forests and creating thousands of good jobs to do it, we listen to these slick corporate types click their tongues and offer to help us out in our 'misfortune' if we only agree to empty our savings account into their pockets.

The tragedy is compounded by the fact that our government has completely thrown in with these flim flam folks.

I can't tell if it's because they're naive rubes who have bought the pie in the sky patter, or if they're actual accomplices.

I suspect it's some part of both, since all good confidence tricks play on the greed and gullibility of the marks.

Wealth can not be created, only taken. Costs can not be cut, only transferred on other sectors, or the ecology.

This is a good example of classic taking and cost transfers. This has been going on for a million years of human history, but instead of learning the obvious lessons, humanity is still on the path of self destruction in the hands of priesthoods. They may now be called economists, but in reality they're priests.

As far politicians are concerned, when I look at their faces on TV, sometimes I have wonder how they've learned to tie their own shoe laces?

We can read some good examples of this intelligence level on these interactive blogs.
Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Just as in the U.S., crime families abound. We elect them and we are in their thrall.

The pine beetle has delivered B.C. a windfall.
Full stumpage should apply that should be benefitting its citizens as oil is currently benefitting Albertans (or should be)

To the point of tedium, to hell with what the U.S. Administration thinks, fast-track the planting of hemp in some of those cleared areas so that we can get the paper, building products, oil, food and clothing this much more versatile "plant" provides.

Anyone want to verify the role of monoculture in the pine beetle destruction?

I notice the Liberal government's signs -- their singular response to the epidemic -- is a nice little show and tell about nature and the environment. Others immediately make note of global warming. But are forests of pine and nothing else truly natural?

"The oddest thing about all this is the fact that the damn beetle has freed up the most enormous amount of timber resource ever for immediate exploitation. Years and years worth."--Posted by Bailey.

From what I understand, the bug causes the wood to turn a bluish colour, and is being harvested and exported to Asia. Apparently the Asians love the quality of the wood. I'm not sure where I heard it (maybe CKNW?) but for some unknown reason the government doesn't really want to promote and sell this wood here in Canada, despite an interest by lumber suppliers. If anyone knows why not, I'd sure be happy to find out.

Tawnia

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the wood on account of the colour. It is now marketed as "denim pine". The objection is pure hysteria. I wouldn't be surprised if it is part of the corporate campaign to keep the unaffected forests of spruce and fir open for clearcutting.

I wasn't aware that the Asians would love the blue and purple of the pine, but, on the other hand, what difference does it make whether a stud in a wall is blue, or yellow ? Nobody can see it anyway. As I understand, the Japanese are the worst and pickiest customers. That's why we have only the junk in our own lumberyards.

We're lucky, that we only have a small number of pine on our land, which are now dying. The biggest worry is if they'd mutate and start going after other species. Which could happen, as the bugs of the world are the "fittest", as we can see with the immune varieties to antibiotics.

What we need is -45 C for a week and the whole epidemic would end right there, as the tent caterpillars have ended 10 years ago. But we haven't had any cold winters since then.
Ed Deak, Big Lake.

"I wasn't aware that the Asians would love the blue and purple of the pine, but, on the other hand, what difference does it make whether a stud in a wall is blue, or yellow ? Nobody can see it anyway. As I understand, the Japanese are the worst and pickiest customers. That's why we have only the junk in our own lumberyards."

They don't love the blue and purple of the pine, they love the quality of the wood. I believe it's actually the Japanese who are special ordering this wood. Maybe that's why Canada is not marketing it here - the Japanese want (and get) first dibs? I have to say I agree with Bailey - cash in on an otherwise dead lottery - market it here. Heck, go really outside the box and look into manufacturing them into products here.

Thanks for your response.

Tawnia

I have heard that there are a number of other species of trees at risk of disease in our forests right now...and that concerns in this regard are being overlooked and not effectively addressed as well.

Ben Parfitt is a naive idiot if he believes that, "An unprecedented insect infestation, fuelled by global warming, is turning vast areas of local forest to carpets of dead trees".

The idea that the interior pine beetle epidemic is "fueled by global warming" is a screen of utter PR bullshit intended to protect the responsible and guilty from justified public outrage. You might as well say that the Titanic was sunk with 1500 souls onboard by an iceberg. The Titanic was driven into an iceberg and it was sunk by human arrogance, deliberate blindness, dereliction of professional responsibility, treachery, corruption, careerism and wilfull ignorance. British Columbia's liquidation and conversion forest policy was identically driven into the pine beetle epidemic by similarly motivated self-serving professionals who though paid by the public to navigate a safe course were corrupted to protect and defend the forest industry from our long term public interest.

Many biologist, ecologists and even some professional foresters who would not be silenced, warned for six decades that large scale liquidation and conversion forestry would result in vastly less resilient simplified monocultures inviting serial catastrophic failures far beyond our capacity to influence. With or without any level of climate change these grossly impoverished and simplified forests will repeatedly experience catastrophic failures on the way to a new entropic equilibrium. Bark beetle epidemics are only the first of many ecological "readjustments" that our ecology will experience.

As a result of self-interest and short term thinking our forests are going to be a lot less ecologically diverse, vastly more volatile and far less hospitable to slowly reproducing and long lived species (including us). Bark beetles are endemic in BC. Beetles dynamically respond to available opportunities and they were and still are bounded by natural constraints. Industrial forest simplification removed the huge complex of ecological constraints and intentionally frustrated the beetle outbreak predator response with the use of metharsonate. Now, the pine beetles are only bounded by the accelerating availability of distressed trees, the absence of predators and disturbance from other environmental factors including climate.

Before radar, safe ships adjusted their speed and put sharp-eyes in the rigging to identify and navigate hazards in the way. In British Columbia, we put a UBC credentialed manikin for show in the rigging and when we experience a collision, our bureaucrats, academics and managers pretend that we have been stalked by an unpredictable malevolent animated iceberg. Parfitt is either incredibly stupid or a forest industry apologist working within the bounds and framing authorized by forest industry strategic PR.

Parfitt deflects culpability for the travesty of BC forest mis-management by supporting the industry alibi that climate did it. After the Titanic sank, there was an investigation, and perhaps even a whitewash but the public interest was focussed and responsibility and accountability were assigned, practices changed and sea travel actually became safer. Our industrial forest policies have devasted the ecological processes and resilience of BC forests but instead of an investigation we get greenwash. Michael Major\\

touchwood, thanks for venting, passion is a rare commodity these days hence the current problems.

Two years ago for the first time my cherry trees stopped producing. I was dumbfounded and wandered what was up. Well I guess I wasn't the only one, many cherry producers pondered the same question. Well, once fear became wide spread the MSM reported that a bee virus had killed of many bees and this was the reason for the non pollination. Well I asked around and this virus was typical for bees that had lost to much habitat by deforestation in short over development. As a society we treat fundamental problems like a car crash,( do nothing but wait and clean up the mess
at 10 times the cost, usually not without permanent damage) currently we are driving drunk the lights are out and we're going 100 mph. (all of us and not just Gordo)

P.S Allot of cherry producers not hire bee keepers at $ 100 an hour.

now hire bee keepers.

Interesting ... I'm unfamiliar with metharsonate. Could you expand how its use "intentionally" frustrated the outbreak predator response?

This allegation comes as a surprise, since Ben Parfitt has written relatively critical, progressive, if not outright blue-sky books on alternate approaches to forestry, such as "Forestopia".

There's no question that the forests have been mismanaged. The biggest fraud is the yearly report on how many millions of trees and acres have been replanted, without mentioning that most of those seedlings will die within 3 years.

The third year seems to be the most critical, that's why the government and companies send out silviculturists to count the survivors of the first 2 years, because after the 3rd there may not ne any left. I know areas that have been planted 3 times before some trees survived.

The biggest problem is clearcutting, which is "cheap". In other words, it is a cost transfer and more expensive ecologically.

On the other hand, we have to admit that global warming has contributed a lot to the problem, because the eggs survive. Those little bugs can fly 30 km with a good wind. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Clear-cutting, mono-culture, monster logging equipment ravaging the land, aerial spraying of insecticides, silviculture by fire ... there's not enough bird habitat left.

Birds eat bugs. And there will always be bugs.

What I can't figure out is this: when big dead trees, loaded with pine-beetles, comes crashing to the ground ... don't those bugs jump off and find new hosts??

I used to live in Truckee, California in the Tahoe Basin, where they also face a huge problem with the bark beetle. I asked some locals why some trees looked just fine, and others were dying – turning brown at the top, which indicated they were dying, until they were all brown and dead. I was told that the bark beetle could not penetrate healthy trees that produced enough sap to repel them. When there was a drought for several years, the least drought-resistant types of trees were the first to go, not being able to produce enough sap to repel the beetles. The trees on my small property were all ponderosa pine and healthy, as this type of pine is more drought resistant and could still produce enough sap to repel the bark beetle during the drought.

You can’t do much now for the dying trees in BC's interior, but perhaps replanting with ponderosa pine or other drought-resistant trees is part of the answer.

Charmaine from San Francisco (originally from Vancouver)

There’s no doubt that forest practices have provided the fuel necessary to keep the infestations we are witnessing alive and expanding, but it goes far deeper than monoculture forest mismanagement.

It is true that they have done an excellent job of destroying forest diversity, increasing water pollution, destroying and depopulating salmonid and wildlife habitat, and setting the stage for large-scale catastrophic events. However, much of the pine forests now under siege have never suffered through the humiliation of forest mismanagement, and making a blanket statement of a direct correlation between MPB distribution and forest monoculture practices is a stretch. In fact, it would be easier to make a direct connection to the auto industry or changes in the distribution and abundance of human populations. To pretend that MPB infestations wouldn’t have occurred if forestry practices were sensitive to species diversity is naive. It’s not that simple.

Mountain pine beetle distribution is bounded by the – 40 isotherm. If the position of the isotherm changes (predation and disease notwithstanding) so does the distribution of MPB infestation. MPB larvae can withstand several days of –40 and they actually produce antifreeze in the blood for added protection at the coldest time of the year. If the cold temps arrive early, i.e. before they have had a chance to build resistance to cold, mortality is increased and outbreaks are reduced. Today we are no longer witnessing the early cold snaps that limit MPB distribution and abundance.

Another prime limiting factor (when MPB was limited to localized outbreaks, and equally as significant as –40 temp) is fire. The public’s love affair with Smokey the Bear is pure forestry brainwash.

while I don't visit or post here very often for a variety of reasons...this well -written article caught my eye.....but it is old news...amply descriptive of the 'problem' ...but now what?

Indeed BC forest policy has been entirely captured by the multinationals ...whom the union elite support ...as it is only the multinationals thru contract negotiations that provide fat paycheques to the dwindling numbers of workers that work in the mills...and also fatter union contributions too....
.
...the solution, or at least part of it, as I and others have very often mentioned...is economic democracy ...and forest practices which sustain both forest ecology and the economy of small town BC......that has not been happening either under the BC Liberals...or for that matter the BC NDP when they had the turn at governing. Both major parties in this province are very much pro-neo-liberal, pro-capitalistic development.....economic democracy is not in the cards...and neither is sustainable 'smart' forest practices.

...

Only in the Tyee would a good news story -- i.e. more investment in a distressed area -- be regarded as a problem that needed to be fixed.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on this site, are other lefties who decry that government doesn't spend enough money on their pet social/worthy priority.

Taxes generated by investment drive the economy and the social programs they support. This is good news for the Cariboo and a shot in the arm that they need.

Yes, Mountain Pine Beetles are endemic throughout the area that you reference KWD.

No reasonable person is suggesting elimination of the various bark borers in their natural range. Very large stands of similarly distressed trees are the essential cause of the so-called "epidemic" pine beetle infestation.

Pre-contact forests in this region were extremely complex patchwork mosaic forests of tree species and age-class diversity. It seems an important part of the ecological function of all bark borers to maintain and restore such species and age-class complexity and diversity in forests. When we create monocultures we are in effect engaging the beetles to restore complexity.

Pine Beetles are attracted to highly stressed trees and ordinarily they are repelled by healthy trees or trees that are well situated for their particular genetic characteristics. In this way, Pine Beetles are a significant cause of selection pressure particularly on trees that are extending beyond their nitches and core eco-association zones. Stressed trees attract pine beetles and concentrations of pine beetles attract even more pine beetles.

Idiotic knee-jerk fire suppression for the last 70 years has encouraged many trees species to opportunistically advance well beyond their core ecological nitches and associations. This temporary advance of species beyond their naturally occurring sustainable nitches has resulted in these vanguard trees living in stem densities and in challenging habitat that is inherently stressful which results in combined semiochemical and pheromone attraction of pine beetles by the entire tree cohort and all at the same time.

When pine beetles are attracted in this fashion it results in processes similar to when a number of bees sting an interloper. Do you remember the africanized killer bees? There is a cascading semiochemical attraction in response to the interloper threat which results in a broad alert and intense swarming attack of bees. Epidemic level beetle infestations are characterized by similar types of swarming behaviour in response to the opportunity created by ecologically distressed and beetle distressed trees.

please continue below

continued from above (apologies for the long winded comment) touchwood MM\\

As you are aware, our approach to logging is presumed to mimic natural disturbance processes. Conventional forestry suggests that clear-cutting is an ecological analogue of typical lightening caused fire. But our current forestry approach does not result in the complex type of forest dominated by frequent irregular low temperature fire. Our large clearcuts result in forests that are intended for uniform cyclic re-entry on 60 to 90 year rotations where the whole tree cohort is uniformly maxed-out and in distress. By the time these forests reach MAI they are beginning to respond to excessive canopy and root / nutrient competition. Foresters desire this stressed condition because it results in a high biomass of tall taper free long fibre timber. These forests are essentially over-stocked with almost no age, species or genetic diversity. This eventually results in a high level of stress and impending mortality which is naturally attractive to or encouraging of the massing attack strategy of epidemic levels of pine beetle infestation.

Another cause of the pine beetle problem is the use of metharsonate or MSMA to distress trees and make them incredibly toxic with Methyl Arsenic and derivative breakdown products. Stressed trees attract diverse concentrations of bugs and the concentrations of bugs attract predators. Arsenical levels inadequate to kill various bugs which function to reduce and decompose dying and dead trees are accumulated and concentrated through very complex biological processes and transformed to highly toxic levels in the gut of avian and bat bug predators. The widespread use of MSMA to distress trees, and attract and posion bugs has resulted in the toxification of birds and bats our most effective predators of massing beetles and other species. These predators are or were at one time an important regulating response to the massing attack strategy of epidemic level pine beetle infestation.

My point is that pine beetles are endemic and very necessary to natural forest ecological function. Forest practices involving fire suppression, MSMA poison trees, large scale clear-cutting and even age monoculture have created the perfect storm environment for mountain pine bark beetles. This situation has been achieved by professional foresters working on public land with the approval of our government. The public hysteria about pine beetles is being exacerbated by industrial interests operating through the media to rationalize and justify public subsidies, forest high-grading and accelerated forest liquidation. What should we do? We should let the pine beetles carry out their function of restoring and maintaining resilience and complexity in our forests. But there is vastly more money to be made arranging a fog of war against the bugs in which the most rapacious corporations can profitably deprive our children of an intact forest legacy.

Michael Major\\
Victoria BC

Ya, it's the lack of the cold snap that's allowing the beetles to survive the winters and thus continue some approximation of exponential growth year over year. The main thing that reduces cold snaps is the high cloud layer caused by jet contrails. Generic global warming is the second thing.

Touchwood
Unlike rich coleman sounds like you actually know what you're talking about. Very informative.
I always figured the bc liberals, their giant forest corporation puppet-masters and complicit media-whores were selling us a bill of goods on this issue. The whole mandate of gordo et al is too allow a full-scale rape of BC resorces by multi-national corporations who funded said liberals election campaigns in the first place. If you don't beleive me just look at who is on the campaign contributor list from 2001 and 2005. (while it's still in the public domain that is)
Add a few juicy board of director appointments post public service and you have the recipe for the betrayal of both the people and natural heritage of our province by a bunch of reptile brain myopic mercenaries.

Touchwood, as you have clearly noted, MPB life cycles are fairly well understood, and most would agree that global corporate forestry practices (not exclusive to BC, and as Peter Dimitrov says, not limited to a particular political ideology) are ultimately catastrophic. However, I think it’s obvious we’ve gone past the point of salvaging complex ecodiversity. It has become economically unacceptable.

The economics of initiating a mass public awakening and effecting macro changes in corporate and political thinking, that would place complex ecodiversity on the agenda, dictates otherwise. Corporate and political objections aside, those living in rural BC that are dependant on forestry, won’t tolerate changes in forestry practices that lead to diversity or Dimitrov’s economic democracy. Anyone suggesting that industry forgo profits in favour of the environment will be run out of town. Corporate media whores will see to it.

Dimitrov has acknowledged this, and I think you acknowledge this when you say, “We should let the pine beetles carry out their function of restoring and maintaining resilience and complexity in our forests. But there is vastly more money to be made arranging a fog of war against the bugs in which the most rapacious corporations can profitably deprive our children of an intact forest legacy.”

What we “should” do will never happen so long as democracy is based on ‘one dollar, one vote’. At this stage the MPB outbreak will carry on to collapse (as always) regardless of what is ecologically best for forest or industry. As climate change becomes more profound, attempts at intervention will do little more than add the belief, that we can sustain both forest ecology and the economy, to the ever-growing list of human follies.

It is not true that rural people wouldn't stand for environmentally friendly forest practices. Most are brainwashed, of course and want to protect their livelihoods, but correct practices would give people more jobs and better earnings.

Have you ever seen a feller buncher at work? Plus the grapple skidders behind them? It is disgusting spectacle of overcapitalized technology at work, designed and financed to take jobs and earnings away from human beings. The same for the automated mills.

Around here we have several woodlot holders, which means Crown lands given out to individuals, but still under government control, one of them next door to us, who have received the highest level of environmentally friendly logging certification and whose logs are acceptable anywhere on Earth under the strictest laws.

This could easily be spread out all over the province, creating jobs and healthy communities.

Of course, the corporate mafia, their paid off economists and some union leaders would scream their heads off, but so what? Let them go to hell and sell fridges. Should be able to make roaring profits.

I repeat: "Human labour doesn't cost anything to and economy." The corporations and capital investment are not the "economy" only the exploiters of it. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Jesterjogger, your analysis of the proponents is correct, but that situation predates todays gang of Reform/Chameleons by over fifty years.

When I was a young man cruising timber in the very early years of the 50s, the concept of "ecosystem-based" management was well understood, having first been advanced by John Muir at the turn of the century, prompted by his experience with the rapine of the East Coast forests.

In 1949 Aldo Leopold's book Sand County Almanac was posthumously published and found wide acceptance among the public, esp in Schools of Forestry, such as at UBC. At the same time the Corporations were pushing "sustained yield" in the form of Tree "Farming", the European model which extolled the virtues of monocultural plantations of desirable trees to replace the "ecological slums" of the wild forests - they being chock full of trash trees, uneven-aged and diseased commercial species which had to compete with nutrient-gobbling, space-robbing brush.

Thus, the arguments among forestry undergrads was hot and heavy. There was also a recognition among the anti tree farming students that fast-grown 2nd growth was a vastly inferior product to the lumber/pulp value recovery from OG trees. (the "value vs volume" argument)

The Eupoean model won out - since it is based upon "liquidation forestry" wherein the economically valuable OG is ALL cut first, pumping enormous wealth into the economy, as we saw in the still-recent "glory days" of logging.

And so we see, fifty-four years after the first TFL was granted, the same old half-truths being propagandised through such things as the unsustainable "variable retention" harvesting, the same rate-of-cut (AAC) in what is left of the euphemistically-labelled "working forest" and the drying-up of jobs, which is merely being brought on faster by the MPB.

This will continue to its logical conclusion - where only the remnant logging force required to machine-harvest the 2nd growth is left, along with a very few high-volume, low-labour "spaghetti-mills" downcoast necessary for manufacturing this low-value "2nd tranche" of upcoming logs.

We've been wired into this syndrome by our short-sighted and, unfortunately, understandable, need for jobs - always "right now".

And of course the NDP would do a much better job with the pine-beetle problem. It is estimated that they could have solved it for about $70-100k if they had allowed Carrier to go ahead as planned before Mr. Potatohead and Glennochio stymied the plan. What a bunch of bloody fools!!!!

A late summer holiday to the Rockies and the Kootenays and the Southern Cariboo region was an eye-opener. The mountain pine beetle will be an unprecedented disaster for this province. Climate change may be part of it, but poor policies and government inaction over the last dozen years has to shoulder a large part of the blame.

Not a hope. The die was cast long before - at least one hundred years before - when miners set fire to the forests to clear the ground for mineral exploration, and later during the Hungry Thirties when people set fires for employment fighting them.

This created huge areas of Pine monocultures just waiting for the mild winters. There are reasons why Nature abhors monocultures, and you're withessing one of them today.

Go back and read Mike Major's posts. They're the best on forest ecosystem management I've seen (from a Canadian)in a long time.

You're the fool, nemesis, and you consistently show it every time you offer an uninformed opinion, which is almost always.

Re NDP forest policy, a dramatic change in its vision changed when the "greens" in that party challenged the unionists led by the IWA in the convention just prior to the 1991 elections. Without the greens onside, it is arguable whether Harcourt could have won the election.

Thus, the IWA was more or less muzzled during Harcourt's term of office, and we saw the Forest Practices Code brought in. The idea was that the FPC was to be a "work in progress", but when Clark took over, the IWA and its good buddies in COFI once again determined NDP forest practices policy, and the FPC died from neglect.

To be sure, Clark did bring in some parks, but the crucial and far larger issue has always been sustainable logging, in which COFI is not in the least interested. The preservation issue remains just as a means for a buyoff of First Nations and quasi-environmentalists, as in the present "Great Bear Rainforest" controversy.

Incidentally, I side with neither group, since no satisfactory solution is possible because of long-standing forest practices policies, in particular those of Campbell's "Results Based Forestry". Yep, you can be sure there's gonna be "results" all right.

Nothing uninformed about my last post Scylla. Check the facts before spouting your blather.

I knew one fellow who unsuccessfully ran for the Harcourt NDP in Vancouver. He claimed that Harcourt *hated* environmentalists and that a “greenlist” established after that election to ensure that patronage appointments and the like did not go to NDPers who openly identified themselves a ‘green’.

The facts have already been well stated, nenesis.

The MPB is endemic in ALL Lodgepole pine forests, and becomes epidemic only when favourable conditions allow, such as now.

If you don't understand the terminology, look it up. The concepts are not hard to understand - or do you want to??

I recently talked to the ex-mayor of Quesnel who told me that the big lumber companies used to come regularly asking for tax breaks. His response was "95% of your taxes are either from the federal or provincial governments. Ask them for a break."

In times past, the stock answer to the query "Why are you always crying the blues when you're making record profits?", was, "We need these to get though the bad times."