Though we must log, even FSC doesn't cut it.

The unavoidable fact is that we build our homes with wood, which is a more environmentally sound practice than using any other material. That would be even more environmentally sound if instead of trashing the lumber when we demolish an old building, we recycled it.

So I believe the only thing wrong with logging is that present practices are neither environmentally nor economically sustainable.

Because we've had wood from ancient forests which has been essentially free since they've cost us nothing to grow, we've been very dismissive of its true value and have more or less squandered it.

Even though our plantations are replacing volumes at a higher rate than expected, there is absolutely no way they can replace the VALUE of our Old Growth wood with that from short-rotation plantations. The sole exception to that is Interior Lodgepole Pine. If that wasn't so, then the Yanks would not so much resent our Old Growth lumber competing with the lumber from their fast-growth tree farms.

So, to be truly sustainable, the logging practices that Certification should be seeking through "Ecosystem Based Management" would be directed towards two primary goals:

1/ Maintaining biodiversity through a constant replication of the original Old Growth forest - avoiding the too-convenient alternative sham of set-asides.

2/ Allowing the regrowth sufficient time for the trees to produce the "mature wood" that is sought for by builders and remanufacturers. On the Coast and using today's methods of enhancing growth rates, that means a minimum rotation of 200 years. Are we too greedy to do even that much for coming generations?

The only positive I find with the GBR is that it slows down things a bit, so that perhaps a coming generation with a bit more sense than ours will be able to modify it.

More stunning investigative journalism

Maybe West Fraser Timber didn't return your calls because they had no idea what you were talking about. West Fraser operates in the interior, not the coast, and as such has no involvement in the Great Bear Rainforest process. Perhaps you should have tried Western Forest Products.

This is another proof that

This is another proof that costs can not be cut, only transferred on other sectors, the environment and the future.

The grossly overcapitalized forest industry is a prime example of cost transfers into job losses and environmental damage.

A couple of guys can make a good living with a small sawmill, small investment and about 50 truckloads of logs per year.

The overcapitalized mills use up to 400 loads for each worker. This is legalized crime and destruction.

We have a few woodlot holders here, including a friend next door, operating under the highest degree of environmental certification, acceptable anywhere on Earth, using their own mills and selling the odd loads. And the lumber they produce is not more expensive than in the lumber yards, because there are no middlemen.

The "Get big, or get out" racket is destroying not only the forest industry, but the whole world.

Get small and survive!

But then how can we export etc. ? We don't have to, only a small part. Economies built on exports will sooner or later collapse, as it is happening here and now and will hit China in a big and horrible way, sooner or later.

"Small is beautiful" Read the book.

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Sneaky way to log Old-Growth

Scientist wanted 2/3rds of Great Bear Rainforest Protected we only ended up with 1/3 and only a 20% reduction in logging with only 50% retention.Vancouver island 75% has been logged only 25% of the old forest are left 90% of the valley bottoms have been logged which have the oldest trees nothing is left and Campbell and Bell will log the rest. FSC is the best of a bad bunch of standards.The fact is we keep logging old-growth forest only 20% of the worlds old forest are left.It is time for to stop logging all old-growth forest.Just wait FSC will be popular with forest companies when they want the last stands of old-growth using FSC will suck the public into allowing the logging to continue.

Uhh....Brutus

Eurocan Pulp and Paper is a division of West Fraser and has been under their umbrella for many years. Their coastal operation is in Kitimat, on the Douglas Channel.

OK, ok, they have a pulp

OK, ok, they have a pulp mill. I stand corrected. But that doesn't change the fact that West Fraser was not part of the Joint Solutions Project.
http://www.coastforestconservationinitiative.com/about_us/the_participants.html

West Fraser is influential

Why shouldn't Tyee ask West Fraser for input. They are a big player in BC, Alberta and the south eastern US.

The pulp & paper mill in Kitimat is not producing lumber at this time, but West Fraser has operations in Terrace, Smithers, Houston, and Fraser Lake.

Chetwynd, Cariboo operations, Alberta facilities and those lovely pine plantations in the south eastern US all produce lumber.

Why pay for certification

Why pay for certification when the government already monitors forest practices in the tenures? The C and E (compliance and enforcment aka timber cops) have more people on the ground, payed for by tax payers, enforcing everything that these auditors look for. The companies end up paying twice for the same service, except they get a stamp at the end with the letters FSC on it. How many different certification schemes do we neeed?

Currently, and even with FSC, the companies pay thousands of dollars to have an auditor walk around the operation for 2 or 3 days and check over the current legislative practices the government already enforces. The auditor writes a report citing areas of improvement and any infringments. Essentially, C and E already do this, and are more stringent in their practices.

And for all of those people praising the whole EBM and great bear rainforest scheme, well it essentially promotes the poorest forest practices in the western world. Why are we allowing companies to high grade cedar and spruce stands, taking the trees with the highest genetic diversity and genetic worth and leaving the mutants and degenerates behind? Because apprarently micro organisms, gastropods, salamanders, and frogs are more important than the genetic health and diversity of the actual trees that make up the forest.

Suzuki and all the other enviros signed this agreement. Suzuki claims the be a genetisist. Well, I guess money got in the way of ethics.

One other note. Anyone

One other note.

Anyone looked at Tembec financial position? They have closed down their operations in the Kooteneys due to high costs. They cant even afford to hire their silviculture contractors to meet government requirements for reforestation.

Also, Canada is the only country in the world right now that seems to be embracing these certification schemes. Consumers have chosen, even without FSC that they will only pay for certified products if they are equal or lesser price than uncertified products. Pretty hard to compete when your paying for 4 different types of certification, a 15% import duty, and a high dollar right now.

Yeah, Doggone, I've heard that before, alright

You are right on, Doggone.

What Future Forester has written here is what the Professional Foresters were writing 35 years ago to avoid job blackmail by the companies they were working for, and by the industry in general.

And as for government, its objectives, regulations, and enforcement has ALWAYS favoured the industry majors, while anything proactive they've done has occured only when inaction would have cost them votes. We can lay the state that the industry is in squarely at the feet of government which has ignored the advice of its own in-house professionals and instead sucked up to the industy boardrooms.

The shambles the industry now finds itself in is not the result of too many regulations, but rather the result of some 30 + years - beginning with Bill Bennet - of progressive deregulation.

The paralells between the meltdown in the financial industry and the collapse of our forest industry cannot be ignored. Clearly, no industy can be trusted to self-regulate, and it is high time we realised that.

As for what Future Forester has learned at UBC or wherever, I doubt very much that what he has written was picked up there. Rather, he's been well prepped at home :-)

My guess is that he'd be far happier and in much less conflict if he went for a BA COMM instead.

I was talking to a forester

I was talking to a forester some years ago, who got his diploma in the States. Might have been Colorado ?

I asked him why he didn't go to UBC ? He said, because a UBC forestry professor advised him that if he'd wanted to learn good, ecologically friendly forest practices, he'll have to get them in the US, because all they taught at UBC was how to log "competitively".

I've checked this out with a couple of students at the time, and they confirmed it.

Things may have changed, but from what we can see all around us is nothing more than devastation.

Another thing nobody talks and writes about is that only a fraction of the seedlings they plant do survive, in spite of the glowing figures published, and the remainder are counted after 3 years, because after that many of those will die too and they don't want the public know all the failures.

We have areas around here that have been replanted 3 times, each accounted as new.

Ed Deak, Big Lake.

More Talk Than Action

Seems FSC is more talk than action. I don’t blame BC forest companies for keeping their distance – who knows when the process might be ‘hijacked’ again by the enviros as FSC’s Marcil puts it.

While the enviros were at each others’ throats, CSA and SFI were providing third-party certification to solid standards based on the triple bottom line. Far from ‘conspiring’ to keep FSC off the ground, they were delivering results when FSC could not. Now there appears to be a panic to fix something that isn't broken.

Again even FSC says the BC industry “… got so screwed over by the enviros that they walked away. It was a flawed process”. Who’s to say it wouldn’t happen again? As mother always said: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

G.F. Young

All Schemes Are a Hard Sell (unless you get help from the WWF)

If the premise of this article is that one firm, region or certification scheme is tougher than the others, then it can easily be disputed.

First, the disagreements that occured surrounding the BC FSC standard also took place months earlier in the Maritimes. Down east, it was necessary to bring in paid, outside arbitration.

Second, in 2008, the Canadian Forest Service (NRCan) was provided with confidential cost data from companies certified to all three schemes: CSA, FSC and SFI. Each firm was asked to break their certification costs into 4 (four) elements:

1) cost to prepare for the initial certification audit
2) cost of the initial certification audit
3) cost to prepare and maintain for the ongoing annual surveillance audit
4) cost of the ongoing annual surveillance audit

The range of both initial and ongoing costs of certification for the reporting firms was between $0.16m³ and $0.81m³. The highest costs were recorded by the firms with the smallest AAC - REGARDLESS OF WHAT CERTIFICATION SCHEME WAS CHOSEN.

This is (one) reason why forest companies aren't prepared to concede that one scheme is "better" than another. They cost the same.

This is also an important reason why Tembec chose the FSC. FSC certification was less expensive than CSA certification - in particular during the public consultation stage.

Another important reason can be found in the text of the January 25, 2001 memorandum of understanding between Tembec Inc. and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada: "Tembec and WWF agree to co-operate on harnessing market demand that supports both conservation and economic aims, using the increase in sales of Tembec’s FSC-certified products as a measure of success". In other words, the WWF agreed to help market Tembec products - a key factor in Europe where FSC national initiatives have been routinely led by the WWF.

Finally, I would once again ask the writer/editor to update his bookmarks. The correct link to the CSA's SFM standard is: http://www.csa.ca/cm?c=CSA_Content&childpagename=CSA%2FLayout&cid=1239125282297&p=1239124789907&pagename=CSA%2FRenderPage

G F Young

"Hijacking" of the certification process by enviros? Well, that's a stretch, Mr Young. Enviros are in no position to hijack anything, other than to cooperate with industry in watering down their own objectives in the search for compromises.

Case in point is the GBR, which is the FSC result of 10 years of in camera meetings, and which has created a huge rift in the enviro community, since it has further validated and empowered a few large organisations such as DSF to speak on our behalf without consulting with us.

As I'm sure you are well aware, the hijacking ocurred over 50 years ago, when WAC Bennet chose the lawn-mowering European Tree Farm model over an "Ecosystem Based Management" model as popularly proposed by people such as Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac.

I suspect you are one of those who participated in that acrimonious debate in UBC's School of Forestry those many years ago, and so if you are whom your name suggests, you are also among those who have laboured hard in the ensuing years to ensure that forest debate always assumed that the Tree Farm model is a given.

Although the Forest Industry sought and was given three Royal Comissions to sort out its various tenure problems, it completely ignored the suggestion made by Peter Pearse in his '67 Royal Commission that a similar investigation into Silvicultural practices be made. Calls from the public were not even acknowledged, either.

The "War in the Woods", beginning in the Seventies, has resulted in many changes in forest practices, and the idea of certification arose out of the Clayoquot dispute.

The fat was in the fire, however, when the NDP bequeathed the GBR to Campbell, who was flush with dreams of "results-based forestry" brought about by "adaptive management". And so what was the result of those 10 years of negotiations?

Well, they came up with a wonderfully inspiring new tool they call "Ecosystem Based Management", which I am sure impressed all those who'd never heard of the idea before. And the GBR? I'm reminded of the old saw... "A camel is a horse designed by a committee"

The problem remains as Peter Pearse saw it twenty-two years ago. We are dependant upon the Professional Foresters for information and advice, but that advice is no more dependable now than it was then, for they are beholden to economic interests which put maximum profitability ahead of sustainable economic and environmental stability.

What is still required, then, is a full-scale investigation into forest practices, so we can all start off with the same informtion set, and perhaps stop worrying so much over who's hijacking who.

Independent loggers in the discussion

Thanks for this. It's part of an important debate for BC communities, and the province as a whole. We are still hugely dependent on the forest industry for our quality of life.

However, there is a big piece missing from this discussion. I didn't see any mention of the people who actually work in the woods on the coast. These folks are primarily independent loggers represented by the Truck Loggers' Association (TLA). The TLA's new president, Thomas Olsen, operates Triumph Timber in the Great Bear Rainforest, working closely with First Nations in the area.

I interviewed Tom (and wrote the TLA "new president" profile for Truck Logger Magazine) this past winter. One of the most interesting people involved in the industry at the moment, from my perspective. If you can't find a copy of the Spring issue of the TLMag, you'll find a version of the article here:
http://hanspetermeyer.blogspot.com/2009/05/thomas-olsen-born-outside-box.html

cheers,
h.

Certification

About the same time as the start-up of the FSC-BC certification negotiations, I worked on a public committee with MacBlo out of Campbell River, to attempt to get a small amount of forest certified. I had the opportunity of assessing the CSA, ISO and FSC certification schemes. ISO and CSA were the two the company was interested in - there was too much uncertainty about the application of FSC in BC, and MacBlo did not see the point, economically, of using the FSC.

FSC certainly had the strictest environmental standards. At the time, ISO and CSA had standards that talked about the environmental performance of ANY company, regardless of industry. Generally missing was the understanding that forestry is an industry that has to pay attention to the preservation of the capacity of the environment to sustain itself.

FSC guidelines did, and do, talk about this. A pity that the debate during the BC negotiations became so polarized. We now have an FSC that is in the process of alienating a key stakeholder in the forest - environmental groups - and environmental groups have lost the opportunity of aiding FSC in keeping both its reputation within their community, and, for the people of BC, the potentially very positive market position that FSC certification could confer. A big loss for all. BC ought to be THE place for sustainable forestry practices; what a shame that it simply isn't. It is our failing as citizens of our province.

There has been a breakdown of trust in the Ministry of Forests’ ability to act in the role of protector of the long-term public interest: of the ability of the forest to continue to provide for us and our neighbours.

If the BC government had a public service that had the power to act in the long term public interest, to act as that third party between the goals of politicians and business, then we would not require the FSC. That the Ministry of Forests is mainly charged with keeping the stumpage fees flowing is a matter of opinion; that the public widely perceives it to be just that is a great pity. But as clear as money and logs.

I am afraid that the discussion reveals just how hooked to quick profit at any expense we truly are as Canadians. We are perfectly prepared, as a people, to allow all manner of destructive projects, if it means that we can keep our artificially high standard of living, our ridiculously high profits and rates of return.

The natural environment provides a return of between 3 and 10% per year - as a rough rule of thumb we can "take" about 5% without damage, and call that "sustainable." Note that this is of natural resources that are biological - plants, mainly. And the size of our "take" doesn't get any bigger just because we can make money from areas of the economy that have nothing to do with biology. In fact, the "take" gets smaller the more we try to ignore our dependence on biology.

Funny, that 5%. That's about all we can reasonably expect from the stock market…

Problem here seems that many

Problem here seems that many view current forest practices as purely economically driven. Using common political phrases such as "mowing down for profit" and "take all and leave nothing" truly demonstrates the ignorance for the actual science of trees, called Silviculture. Many in the enviro movement do not understand this science, nor do they care to even bother. Its a shame that the critics of forestry dont know enough about the tree biology, but they are willing to critisise foresters who actually specialise in this field.

One common comment I hear is that "clear cuts are bad." It is so far from the truth sometimes its riduculas. They can be very benifical for some species of trees and for certain mammals, insects, birds, and other types of vegitation.

Foresters attempt to mimic distrurbance regimes. Essentially, attempting to replicate natural processes. Of course, we are not perfect at it, nature is very random when it acts in terms of area, shape, and distribution.

I really suggest people try and understand forestry. Too much critisism from people who understand little about the profession.
I think that is the problem though, maby insead of reading "green times" maby you should get out and talk to the people who work in the forests, not the ones who sit in building in Vancouver drafting up another campaign of protests

KD Brown

I appreciated your post, KD Brown. I found nothing to quibble over or to expand upon.

EXCEPT :-) your 5% guesstimate, which put me to thinking and to trying out some Math, which only served to remind me of how deficient I am in employing that art, and why I hated it so much those many years ago.

My next step will be to approach my friendly foe, the local forester, for some guidance and some help with formulae.

I doubt I'll have a reply for you before this thread closes, but I'm sure the opportunity will arise soon enough.

Cheers