Let Us Control Our Fates Say Timber Towns
'Community forests' vie with big firms for BC's wood profits.
Roadside wood waste grinding near Burns Lake.
Ask people in British Columbia's timber towns how to reverse their plummeting fortunes and a lot of them will say the solution begins at home -- with locals gaining control of how nearby forests are put to use.
Too much of B.C.'s most valuable resource is in the hands of a few corporations with faraway headquarters and no incentive to reinvest in a diversified economy for rural B.C. When those big firms pull the plug on a B.C. operation, local employees often are among the last to know. The province needs to get creative about helping small forest communities take more control of their fates.
That's the message this reporter heard often during a recent journey through Prince George and nearby communities hard hit by mill closures and pest devastation.
One of those towns is Burns Lake, which sits at the approximate geographic centre of the mountain pine beetle epidemic in B.C.
'Community forests' the future?
Burns Lake, population 2,000, is worth watching as an example of what a difference local management of forests can make, because it is surrounded by the largest "community forest" in the province.
At 85,000 hectares, the Burns Lake community forest has more than tripled in area since it was created in 1998. That was the year the province introduced its community forest pilot program.
The program, which has grown and changed over the past decade, grants area-based tenure to communities and First Nations, allowing them to harvest and manage forests for community economic and environmental benefit.
Alistair Schroff, general manager of the Burn Lake community forest, has spent the past few years trying to figure out the new forest economy.
Could turning salvaged beetle wood into biofuel be the best way forward? Or would it be more sustainable to find ways to add value to logs through milling and manufacturing?
Biofuel's iffy future
The hauling distances associated with getting wood waste out of the bush create expenses that are, so far, the big stumbling block to wood-fuelled bioenergy thriving in B.C. But Schroff says there's no choice but to experiment. "We don't know what the winning techniques are, but we know we have to do something...it's just trying to learn our way through it," he says.
Right now, a local contractor is at work in the Burns Lake forest just south of Decker Lake, grinding up roadside piles of timber. The resulting chips are trucked to a pellet plant 80 kilometres away in Houston.
"This will extend our ability to go in and recover value and get those stands back into production," says Schroff.
"But our internal calculations suggest in three to seven years we would have a significant drop in what we're doing here" as the beetle-killed wood diminishes.
"And, really," says Schroff, "our land can produce a lot higher value material rather than raw fuel."
Competing with the big firms
Some of the highest value products are lumber products like wood siding, panelling and moulding -- basically, "anything that is not a smoothly planed rectangle," says Russ Cameron, president of the Independent Lumber Remanufacturer's Association.
The association represents 82 small companies, anywhere from 10 to 100 employees, across the province. Five years ago, membership was 120 strong.
"Our guys have taken a beating," says Cameron, noting that 83 former members have since gone out of business.
Cameron says the group was averaging $2.5 billion in sales in 2003, which has decreased about 30 per cent. The two biggest problems, he says, are conditions of the softwood lumber agreement that penalize domestic remanufacturing, and the fact that most timber is tied to a few major license holders.
Cameron says the B.C. timber sales program -- essentially an open market for timber -- is good, but smaller manufacturers can rarely outbid large companies like Western Forest Products or Canfor.
"There's no way you can bid against them," he says. "We don't have the time, the money, the expertise, the desire...we just want some lumber."
Remanufactures primarily get lumber from private woodlot owners, says Cameron, but he sees potential for more partnerships with community forests as well.
"It's a big undertaking for municipalities to get into logging, but as they develop, in my view, there will be some good partnerships to come out of that."
Community forests 'not really on radar'
Jennifer Gunter, co-ordinator of the B.C. Community Forests Association, says community forests have increased in number over the past couple of years, since the provincial government doubled the total annual allowable cut for these types of tenures in 2003.
There are currently 43 in the province right now, operated by municipalities, First Nations and community organizations.
"Most people don't really know about community forests. We're not really on the radar much here in B.C.," says Gunter.
Gunter says the association is currently working on a guide to non-timber forest products such as plant pharmaceuticals, mushrooms, berries and eco-tourism.
"Because they're a form of forest tenure, they've had to be very focused on timber harvesting. But as time goes on, there's more and more interest in diversifying and trying to figure out ways to survive into the future, particularly the ones that are in mountain pine-beetle affected areas."
'Keeping the community alive'
The Cheslatta Carrier First Nation (CCN), located about 50 kilometres south of Burns Lake, also holds a community forest license that supports one mill jointly owned by the CCN, the non-Native community of Ootsa Lake and Carrier Lumber Ltd.
Last December, the CCN signed a memorandum of understanding with bioenergy developer Pristine Power, paving the way for Pristine to build a 10-megawatt gasification plant that will feed off this mill's residue as well as nearby logging wood waste.
Mike Robertson, senior policy advisor for the CCN, says council had been looking for an alternative use for its mill waste -- 80,000 tonnes of which is currently incinerated in a beehive burner -- for 15 years.
Their mill currently runs on diesel generators, and operating costs have increased by $1 million in the past six months alone, says Robertson.
"Keeping the community alive is what we're all about. If we can break even for 25 or 50 years, we're incredibly successful, and that's our goal."
If there's a lesson to be taken from such efforts to get the most out of wood waste, argue experts, it's that diversification is key. And in this new forest economy, smaller community operations are better positioned to pull it off.
But not without key changes at the government level, say some experts, who point out that the success or failure of smaller community operations to adapt to a changing economy still hinges greatly on provincial forestry policies and trade agreements.
Beyond the next few decades awaits a new set of challenges for B.C.'s forest communities. Richard Hebda, the curator of botany and earth history at the Royal B.C. Museum, says to expect more pests, more fires and fewer trees – changing the way the forest can be used as a resource.
"Community forests, with good scientific, scholarly advice, wide-open discussion and council participation, have a great opportunity," says Hebda.
"At a provincial scale, we need to change the way the tenure system enables new innovations to go forth. We have to take action now."
Related Tyee stories:
- Burn Trees to Light Homes?
Europe imports BC wood pellets to create 'bioenergy.' Here, it's not so easy. - Who Will Revive BC's Forests?
World relies on our 'lungs,' but replanting is lowest in 20 years. - BC's Crazy Timber Economics (series)
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demotto
13-05-2008
Perfect time
It is a perfect time to retool the way business is done. The perfect substitute to wood fibre is just waiting to be exploited. It provides so much more than just fibre.
HEMP for VICTORY
http://www.venusproject.com/ethics_in_action/Real_Reason_Hemp_Illegal.html
Skywalker
13-05-2008
Deja vu all over again.
BC Forestry is showing the same problems that the BC Fishing Industry has been showing for a decade. In Fishing it is decisions made by far away Ottawa. Decisions that are so often just part of the game of international politics. In Forestry it is because decisions are made by Victoria and a leader who uses trees as cards in a high stakes poker game. As long as he and his friends come out as winners, who cares about rural B.C.
Canis Latrans
13-05-2008
Then we've gotta watch...
Then we've just gotta watch, of course, that they don't then clear large swaths of forest land to grow hemp instead of trees. :-)
Other than that, I much agree with the sentiments and ideas expressed in this article. It is past the time forest dependent communities began to take control of their own forest lands and shut the global corps out, hopefully to diversify their use, including their recreational and simple aesthetic values.
But more than this, and subjecting the direction of forest land use to new concepts and forms of "democratic" worker and community control, there is a need as well for workers and communities, where mill and other production facilities are threatened with shutdowns and closures, to refuse this and their dismantling and sell-off. And if it proves necessary to occupy them in order secure this, put them under democratic worker and community control and management, and seek to create new "business models" outside of the overlong corporate ruling class dominated, controlled and prioritized model.
A new model, and the national and provincial legal and financial support framework to facilitate, supportively advise, nurture and grow it, and serve the public as opposed to global-centric corporate interest, needs to be debated in labour and progressive political circles NOW, and concrete steps taken to move the country, the working class and broader public in this direction-, and in the process save the country from the predations of the US Empire Loyalist agenda of the increasingly extreme neo-conservative right, often heard even here in Tyee.
This kind of a radically democratizing political AND economic social transformation vision for the country, in the end, up against the power of the global and national corporations betrayal of the nation and the people, is the only one seriously capable of saving the country from being absorbed and homogenized into such as NAFTA and the North Amerikan Union. Especially necessary as the US Empire shows all the early warning signs of having already passed its zenith point and to be sliding into serious global, political and economic decline. Why in the fuq would any sane, rational entity want to join up with Amerika at this degrading moment in its historical development. One could just as rationally recommitt the country to the British Crown and call for the rejoining of the dysfunctional and defunct British Empire. One being already dead and the other dying, if still dangerous in its death throes.
Continued next post...[b]
Canis Latrans
13-05-2008
then we've gotta watch 2...
From previous post...
The further development and enrichment of working class and community level democracy, and steps to revitalize the economic self-reliance of the country is the more appropriate direction towards which to turn, eschewing the sheep-like bleating of the corporatists and US Empire Loyalists here, rather than to further allow this slide into increased dependence on yet "another" Empire, it is increasingly obvious, is the more appropriate development direction.
Not that growing a little "hemp" isn't a good idea-, necessarily. :-)
A good article, Colleen.
demotto
13-05-2008
That is the illusion
In reality Canada is still under the Rule of the Monarch. If you read the legislation that is supposedly governing Canada everything is held in Right of Her Majesty. All of our so called Laws bind us to the Queen.
The forests are already laid to waste by the beetle. Hemp provides 4 times as much fibre per acre as wood so wouldn`t 3/4 of the forest be able to remain intact once it grows back to be able to still have a fibre base if hemp were used instead of wood.
Not to mention the protein source from the seed of hemp or the multitude of other products that can be made from it. The only way to break the chains of the corporate elite is to get out of their grip. The only way to do that is to not use their products which are mostly an oil based system. Until we wake up we are going to be nothing but slaves on plantation Earth.
Frank
13-05-2008
Community forests?
The word "community" causes people on the Right to choke. It reeks of horrible things like "sharing", "non profit" and socialism.
If people shared things like forests and used them in a sustainable way for the benefit of the community instead of raping the land at the behest of Howe Street and then moving to a new place, it would in all probability bring on the Apocalypse within weeks.