Here we go again with the MPB.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, the money boys will line up at the trough to get in on "fighting" the "War against CO2", and here's a good example of one installment of it.

It opened with talking heads in the last few days uttering dire warnings of the rapidly impending doom from beetle wood decay, soon followed by alarmist articles in the media such as Kimmet's above.

The next chapter in the present story will be the insistence that gov't pour millions into replanting, and this will be "good for business" by hiring planting crews with spinoffs for communities and management write-off for "Expenses" on the TFLs.

Beyond question someone's going to suggest 3Ps where the costs of planting will be paid for with grants of the lands in fee simple, something the forestcos have been arguing for for at least 30 years.

The Pine monocultures we inherited are all anthropogenic in origin, being created first by the cessation in the mid 1800s of the FN practice of regular lighting of ground fires which, with the eliminating of fuel build-up, prevented fires from becoming the highly destructive crowning fires we see today.

The second generator of the vast patches of Pine was the lighting of fires around the turn of the century by prospectors wanting bare ground to make prospecting easier. Yet another was in the Thirties when fires were also deliberately lit by people looking foe employment in fighting them. These cases resulted in the huge Interior Pine stands, since they are the first of the evergreen colonisers, particularly in dry country.

But the fact is that nature hates monocultures (putting all its eggs in one basket), with fire, pestilence, and disease being constant methods of control. Nor is there anything new about the susceptibility for infestation of monocultural forest plantations, since this first showed with the Spruce budworm in the Maritimes during the mid-70s, and is now controlled by pesticides.

Back in the late Seventies, when I first became active in forest critique, we argued long and loud against monocultural plantations, citing the Maritime example, but met with deaf ears. IMO, the failure of the environmental movement to understand and to militate against such obvious forest issues such as this and others is proof positive how completely it has been bought out. "Forest Certification" indeed !!

In his 1976 Royal Commission into the Forest Industry, Peter Pearse looked only into tenures, but noted that a similar investigation into Forest Practices (Silviculture) was warranted. That idea was studiously ignored by the Industry, as well as by the enviro hierarchy. Well, not entirely, I recall hearing Paul George several times demand such a Commission at various symposia - with no response.

Tomorrow I'll connect the Pine bettle with TFLs.

repeat ourselves?

We are of course hung up on the idea that forest is the only use of our land.

Hemp is a fast growing crop that can produce more effeciently that trees of whatever species; but that is a no-no!

Some new thinking would be a good idea, eh?

BC Forestry a Bygone Age

Who could have imagined that BC's Campbell government would oversee the end of forestry in BC. Had this occurred 10 years ago under the NDP, it would be front page news day in and day out in the Vancouver Sun. The scorn would heaped in every growing quantity upon the hapless NDP government for a boondoggle of monumental proportions. Indeed, there would be calls for an instant election which the business community would back. The media noise generated around the BC ferries issue would pale in comparison.

Fast forward to 2008. Seven years after taking power, the Campbell government has initiated a wholesale dismantling of BC's public infrastructure, handing over assets to private companies. And our forest industry is in shambles. Why? Private US companies have no interest in public policy. None. Zero. Zip. So granting free reign over our public lands to profit driven multinationals has produced pretty much exactly what one would expect. Pillaging of prime land, high grading old growth, and then a rapid departure. BC's once vibrant forest industry is now a a footnote to history.

And BC's major media? The silence is deafening. No mention of the disaster of Campbell's forestry policy. No mention of Ken Dobell's handling of foresty policy (remember the "Forest Czar" who was going to implement Rich Coleman's big plans?). Not a peep.

The collapse of BC's biggest and most venerable industry is simply breathtaking. As is the studied silence by policy makers and Canada's media monopoly.

Thank you Tyee for this coverage. I hope to read more in the future.

The lumber companies have

The lumber companies have been planning to move to Russia for 20 years. To "cut costs", of course, discounting the transferred costs by the destruction of our own rural communities and oil depletion and pollution caused by unnecessary transport.

The BC forest industry was making profits, while employing twice the number 30 years ago, doing well with all kinds of smaller mills, hundreds of contractors and a fraction of the present energy inputs. Now all gone and we have about 6 major corporations left, killing the economy with their insatiable demands.

What nobody mentions is that although so many millions of seedlings may be planted, a large percentage of them will die within 3 years.

Then they replant them and count it as "new" plantings. We have seen areas replanted 3 times before some trees survived. The silviculturists, our friends and neighbours, are counting the plantings, always before the 3 years are over, so they can report survival figures before most of the trees die.

We tried replanting some fir our own forest, but they all died. Most of them after 3 years.

Some of our neighbours have the highest environmental certificates for their woodlots, operating small 1-2 person mills and are doing well on fractional investments and energy/resource use, while the ,large mills with 60-70 wage years of investments per worker, and incredible resource demands and energy inputs, are closing down.

The solution for survival is restructuring into small, locally owned, labour intensive
forest and mill operations, before the energy and resource demands of automation kill all small towns. I believe, Sweden is leading the way on this ??

Then, of course, there's always the hope for the carpetbagger mafia for the "free movement" of labour with Mexicans in camps,
to be "more competitive on the global marketplace".

Ed Deak. Big Lake.

Invest Now

Very rich fellows are investing in forest companies right now. Fellows like Jimmy Pattison and Peter Kellogg. Very much contrary to the market smart alecks.

These fellows got rich by knowing how to buy low and sell high. More specifically, they got rich by knowing what to buy low.

While the outlook for BC's forest industry looks bleak, there are many new ways to take advantage of a TFL, and Canfor has a lot of them. Carbon credits are an obvious opportunity.

The measure of the value of the credits will be the difference between business as usual activity and any new activity that removes or sinks more carbon. Minimal silviculture activity today might have great tactical advantage in 2010.

What, once again, nobody

What, once again, nobody dares to talk about is the cold hard reality of the 50,000 lost jobs, representing around 25,000 hp of energy, have been replaced with hundreds of thousands, or a million hp. of other forms of energy to become "efficient", in the warped minds of economists and politicians.

Not to mention the huge monetary and resource costs of overcapitalization into those wasteful production systems, diverting benefits from humans to the artificial entities of corporate shares, the huge costs of forced urbanization and pollution/global warming.

Now we have this government induced hysteria of "cutting back" on electric power use in our homes, so the gains can be diverted to more wasted energy into the pockets of the carpetbagger mafia.

Has anybody heard of any propaganda directed at industry to cut back on energy waste to replace workers ? That would be "inefficient".....?

Ed Deak.

Picture this...

Picture Beautiful British Columbia:

The Salmon Fishing Industry:
Commercial and recreational fishers take the fish out of the ocean, exploiting up 90% of annual returns. Millions are made "harvesting" fish. When things get tough the govmint bails them out. Unemployed fisherfolk complain that they are "farmers", tending their flocks. In fact they are miners, drilling every last drop of life out of the ocean.

Stream restoration is done by community volunteer gropups who pay for the privilege of replacing structure taken out by logging, agriculture and urban development. Stream stewardship is considered the domain of the fringe weirdo environmentalists. Salmon stocks are extirpated, wholesale. Everyone points at the other guy.

The Logging Industry:
Logging companies change the landscape, scarring the province with clear-cuts and silting up the streams. Loggers make and five- and six-figure wages falling trees for decades. Union rules prevail and just try stopping the logging. You might end up dead.

Tree planting is done at arms length by small businesses, using student labour at 25 cents a tree or thereabouts. No union, no benefits, just eye-popping work under the most extreme conditions.

Reality Check:
The fishing industry is on its knees and the logging industry isn't any better.

Enter the Mountain pine beetle, a small insect that will wreak more damage than is imaginable, including uprecedented erosion, flooding, siltation and loss of soils across the entire province. Someone should erect a sign on the Trans-Canada at Hope, for west-bound traffic. It would read:"

"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
There Will Be Flooding Of Biblical Proportions in The Next 10 Years."

I say, "Y'all be real careful out there. Build Your Boat Now".

Inertia

...as in inert.

By the time the buck-passing has finished we'll have 600 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and we'll all be dead.

berries and mushrooms

I agree monoculture not a good option. Are any agrologists looking into the potential for berry growing like the First Nations did long ago. Maybe there is a treaty right to this. It might be a nice fit in some areas especially where there is potential for irrigation. Think large scale with growing demand and filling the supermarkets with low price berries - dried, frozen, fruit bars, syrups. Another options could be growing mushrooms in the pine stumps and logs.

MonoMinds

Well there we have it - monoculture is bad. Why plant Pine when that is what the Pine Beetles live on, and we already see the loss of pine seedlings?
Imagine having CEDAR trees here again!! I suppose that requires many more years, and perhaps special conditions, but wherever possible, some Cedar should be planted or encouraged. They don't burn, they don't get eaten, and they are the MOST valuable once they get big.

Mixed forest, with hemp to help condition the soils and provide cover, berries too, Cedars getting started, and some quick growing [Pine] trees - would that not be nice to see?

It is not as if clear cutting will be allowed for much longer, and selective logging of the fast growing trees will have to sustain the forestry industry. Add in some biomass gas and hemp to supplement the economics.

I am sure it can work.

Re Noah_Scape and several

Re Noah_Scape and several others:

I suggest you all read Pacific Spirit by Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, who eventually was pressured out of the organization because of his stance on forest practices.

The ecosystems in BC are very very diverse. Suggesting that we can grow cedar in the Northern Interior of the province is absurd. It simply will not grow - it never has. The centre of the mountain pine beetle outbreak has long been pine-spruce dominated, even before man-made reforestation.

Clearcuts in this area mimic natural disturbances that are very common here: fire. Fire was the main driver for forest regeneration long before commercial logging arrived. Fire does not selectively cut. In fact, some of the causes of the MPB epidemic are associated with fire prevention. Because we are so busy preventing fires from occuring, the cycle of disturbance in central interior forests that keeps these ecosystems healthy has been disrupted.

Suggesting that we plant a non-native species (cedar or some sort of biofuel crop) in an area where there do not occur naturally is well, stupid. It's turning our forests into farms. South America already made this mistake.

And one last thing; Gordon Campbell is an assho...not a very nice man. Several members of BC silviculture community had been planning a celebration for the 6 billionth hand-planted tree in BC this year, and Mr Campbell decide to completely co-opt this event and create his own, plastering photos og himself all over the ministry website. http://www.gov.bc.ca/for/. Lets remember that the 6 billion trees planted in Bc were done by treeplanters, contractors, and hard-working bushpeople, not 6th graders and politicians

jilenium00

It may well be "stupid", but the precedent has been set, and for hundreds (if not thousands) of years:
http://www.worldwithoutus.com/about_book.html
Having said that, planting such species as hemp, is beneficial to restoring damaged lands, as well as useful to we humans, who likely ARE NOT going to go away anytime soon.

If you want to rail against anything "unnatural", how about focusing on the entire lower mainland?

One of the best practices

One of the best practices would be the vast extension of the woodlot system.

In our local experience woodlots are the best managed forests, no clearcuts, but inspected and enforced selective logging, especially when combined with small sawmill operations.

There used to be a lot of cedars in the Likely area, sawmills specializing in cedars, even in Williams Lake, but they were all cut down and not replaced.

The difference between clearcuts and fires is that there are a lot of nourishing residues left behind fires, but none after clearcuts. Only bloody, terrible mess.

Clearcuts are a crime against humanity.

Years ago I was talking to a professional forester who told me that when he was planning to go to university, he accidentally befriended a UBC forestry professor, who told him in confidence that if he wants to learn good, environmentally friendly forest practices, he'll have to go down to the States, because all they teach at UBC was, and may still be, how to cut down and exploit forests for the benefit of big corporations.

I checked this out since then with several students and foresters and they all confirmed it.

Doctor Patrick Moore, as he liked to be called and titled himself, became another corporate mouthpiece and fish farmer. His letters and articles in the papers were ridiculous propaganda.

Ed Deak.

more beetles

In the late 40’s - early 50s, heated debates raged concerning Tree farming vs what we today call Environmentally Based Management in both the UBC and UNB Schools of Forestry until the mid-50s, when the Industrial model of Tree Farming – clearcut and replant with monocultures – won out, But even so, is not hard to empathise with the strictly economic viewpoint of the Industrialist, which is basically this :

One takes forested land which has trees which are uneven-aged, of awkward-to-handle size, diseased, corrupted with competing “trash trees”, shrubs and the like, cut it all down and replant the area with preferred species which one can genetically improve, and manipulate to grow faster. The hoped-for result is a forest of trees which utilizes all of the growing space, will grow faster, is easier to log and mill, is healthier, and ideal for planning future sales.

In theory, that plan looks enticing indeed. But it sidesteps two important facts which involve farming. The first is that we have developed our farming techniques and modified the genetic complement of our crop species, selecting only a few hundred over perhaps the last ten thousand years. IMO, it has required a huge amount of hubris and scientific ignorance to think we can grow a crop of wild trees like a crop of wheat with the first try. Our wild trees are NOT adapted to or suitable for monocultures like domesticated wheat.

The second fact arises because farm crops, by their nature, demand special treatment to replace the elements their wild forebears enjoyed, but even in isolation still require. Freedom from competition might be great, but in a wild forest there are many co-existent species which contribute to tree growth and health, such as mycorrhizal associations between species, or such as insect-eating birds which require “trash” species for their existence. The lack of controls other than frost has resulted in the Mountain Pine beetle outbreak, and this will soon be seen with the Spruce budworm.

Protection from enemies does not come free in plantations.. Back East, (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick) they are still completely committed to tree farming and to resorting to pesticides in the event of a major Spruce budworm out break. In NB particularly, with its coniferous, Bt sprayed, near-monocultural plantations, there are little if any natural controls, so they will be forced to use pesticides – forest fibre ueber alles. For an excellent read, here’s Politics, science and the spruce budworm in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3683/is_200207/ai_n9135730/pg_1

In the final analysis, it is far less expensive, and far more scientifically sound, to manage a forest in its natural state, and not as a tree farm. That, of course, means a longer rotation, which ill suits the greed of the loggers.

But all is not lost. Tomorrow I’ll write something about “Non-timber forest produts”.

Fuc**n' Beetles

It seems like tough luck that the folks of today have inherited a very serious symptom of the past. Some critical decisions about pine beetle management in the 80's seems to have wreaked major havoc now - but then hindsight is 20/20.

As far as the interior forests go, the best we can hope for is that the beetles eat themselves out of house and home and eventually die off. If the silviculture industry can improve the science here, maybe the replacement program can provide something not so palatable for the beetles, yet still provide the necessary economic capabilities for interior forest workers.

Bitching and whining about past management practices and what caused things to go into cluster-fuck mode is hardly productive and we should be focusing on real solutions from a Multiple Accounts perspective, realizing that there are serious social, economic, technical and environmental objectives that need to be fulfilled over the short and long term.

Converting the beetle-kill wood to energy solves some problems over the short term by keeping forest workers employed and short-circuiting the GHG effect by producing CO2 instead of methane, but a long-term solution still requires better science before a practical decision can be made regarding what exactly should be implemented. In the mean time it is extremely disappointing when political interference blocks the process of making the correct decision for managing this valuable resource.

Fargin'beetles

First of all, UnCivilizedEngineer, not knowing what the past mistakes were is a sure recipe for making them again, and where we are today is the clear result of not recognising this. My fear is they'll be made again, if past experience holds true.

I tried to point out that the problem arises with the "tree farm" concept. Since you appear to have missed that, I guess I worded it poorly.

If it will make you feel better, I'd support the TFL concept if they'd manage their forest lands as a fully functioning wild ecosystem.

To date, we have heard nothing from the talking heads about acknowledging that the beetle problem is one of monocultures besides the lack of frost. In fact, I heard one of them report that the Industry is ramping up its PL nurseries. Are these guys capable of learning?

They also maintain that energy production from the beetle wood is uneconomic, as is the production of methanol. It appears that these must be tied to lumber production facilities.

When this wood decays, it generates CO2, not methane.

And we cannot recover the CO2 except by planting more trees. The question then becomes "Which trees and in what manner"

And I am in full agreement with the idea of "Multiple Acounts". But that is an idea which has been foreign to the TFL holders - in case you hadn't noticed.

My next post will enumerate some accounts they've ignored, and I hope you enjoy it.

Uncivilized Engineer

All the way to the Quebec border (and beyond)? That's what's being predicted.....

Non Timber Forest Products

When one ventures to peek into the hidden closets where the hard info re Non Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) has been carefully tucked away, it is very easy to give up looking. But there is no end to official acknowledgements that such exist, and reams of prose detailing gov’t and industry’s careful custodianship of them, but little hard fact. The reason for this is not hard to ascertain – neither industry nor gov’t will welcome other competitors for the “use” of timber bearing forests.

If one is to start looking at NTFPs, the first is the forest itself, something the term strives to avoid. Most people familiar with tourism will know that a commonly asked question is “Where can I see your big trees?” Yet few communities set aside nearby natural groves of trees, and even fewer promote the building of trails into forested areas. So, while our gov’t provides virtually nothing for the building of trails, the US gov’t strives to do so, and even tailors some easily accessible wild areas for outdoor recreation.

The second major class of NTFPs are the edible mushrooms, notably the Pine mushroom, the chanterelle, the Morel, the Boletus and a number of minor ones. Annual harvest figures are not available, since the pickers and exporters are loathe to cooperate with gov’t for tax/regulation reasons, but the contribution to local communities is in the millions.

A group of mushrooms with tremendous potential are the nutriceuticals, such as the turkey-tail mushroom, which are very popular – and expensive - in Asia as health foods and health cures. Some of these are suited for growing out of stumps in clearcuts.

One site, http://www.focs.ca/reports/cgeo2_6.html , states this : “Recent research suggests that commercial salal on cedar-hemlock sites can be worth up to ~$2,500 ha.”. Over a minimum 50 yr rotation, that’s $125,000, and that’s much more than a Ha of 50 yr old Coastal timber !.

Then there’s a whole variety of wildcrafting products such as mosses and wild ferns, which singly don’t add up to much, but cumulatively do. Their harvest is in the realm of those who harvest a variety of products, and who have knowledge enough not to exploit.

Some posters mention berry harvesting, another NTFP for which there are no commercial figures, but which for a few people figure large commercially, and for a great many more, recreationally. I would never have thought 40 yrs ago I’d be buying commercial Saskatoon and Blueberry jams from Saskatchewan, but I am and enjoying them. We could be doing the same.

For too long we’ve thought our forests were good only for producing trees, and that the only real jobs resulting from them were logging jobs. It is long past time we started to look for and recognise other opportunities, since I’ve only scratched the surface here.