The picture at the top of the

The picture at the top of the page is an excellent illustration of the capitalist/conservative/fascist agenda for "economic efficiency".

As always, in thousands of years of history, as long as a ruling sector can control energy over their environment and subject, everything is directed by "God's Will", until the system collapses, as it happened time after time in history.

Yet, our priesthoods, now including so called "economists", have never learned, as long as they can publish statistics of wellbeing with their phony "growth" and GDP figures.

The nazis were also winning WW2 on May 4, 1945 on the radio and whatever papers were still left, but then something happened overnight......

Now the whole world is in the same situation.

Ed Deak

Well it has hit the fan, big

Well it has hit the fan, big time. What a mess - of course most of us in the environmental movement have all been aware of the problems for many years, but thanks to the auditor general, the news is now out there for everyone - radio, likely TV and these mainstream media stories - plus this excellent coverage in the Tyee. Notice how the fiberals are still trying to say everything is ok - they have it all under control - what a laugh! After all, they have cut the forest service done to a skeleton crew, and cut the requirement to report what the NSR is in the annual report, which no longer has any useful information. B.C.'s forests and forest ministry has been ravaged - by the beetles, by corporate-led politicians and by irresponsible, greedy forest companies. The NDP, if they hopefully get elected, will have these massive forestry problems to try and fix, besides all the other problems. What a shame to see a publicly owned resource mismanaged to this point. And it is not just old pine forests that have been ravaged by the beetles, many young pine plantations have been killed as well. In the eighties, the feds helped chip in for FRDA to re-plant the clearcuts that industry left. Where is the money going to come from to plant many of these areas now (although some areas will recover naturally) Should the priority fighter jets and prisons and a site C dam for the gas industry - or money for restoring our forests (and of course a host of other more important things)?
Too bad the decision is not up to the public, but is made by politicians in bed with the one percent corporations!

BC ought to be the "Republic of Doyle"

Imagine if we had a politician who actually told the truth! That would be one hell of a concept. Auditor-generals are non-partisan and their job is to assess government programs as accurately as they can. Every time an auditor-general's report is issued that is unfavourable to the government in power, the politicians in that party try to commit character assassination on the author.

These reports should trigger an election. They cut to the very heart of effective governance and this report shows how soddy the Liberal's workmanship is.

We can rest ssured that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The NDP government of Glen Clark was no better, unfortunately.

I do believe thast if politicians were held to account for their decisions, by offering those who failed a rope to hang themselves for example, they might buck up and start working, instead of wanking.

Joseph Stalin would know how to treat these misbegotten oafs. But I am just kidding around. Planting trees is good, healthy work. We have hundreds of thousands of young people who are unemployed. Why can't we put two and two together? Duh?

To deliberately engineer the loss of 30,000 jobs......

.....is reason enough to recall this government.

Well said!

Something I can agree on. Though it's NOT just the current government and has been going on since the 1980s, if not longer.

This is tree MINING, not tree farming. Sometimes it seems the objective is merely to guarantee every outfit in the business a steady supply of trees without consideration of any other factor. Slash and burn.

They are "harvesting" now 40 or 50-year-old trees and, because the supply of old-growth or near-old-growth timber is long gone, they have to cut more and more to maaintaain themselves in the business. Small companies, big companies: makes no difference. All have an insatiable demand for wood, any wood, and in increasing quantities.

I have no objection to the forest industry per se. It initiates our wealth as hewers of wood and drawers of water. It is British Columbia's lifelblood in terms of the generation of REAL economic wealth.

There's a second, economic, problem. Here in Port Alberni there are the wealthy few and the struggling many.

Who is well-off? The comparatively few extremely overpaid workers in this industry - together of course with government employees of all stripes and the retirees from these two groups. The rest struggle, indebted and mortgaged, at service jobs or marginally-successful small businesses. Or unemployment.

Spread this wealth around, if you must destroy the forests! How about reucing the annual allowable cut by 50%, or splitting it up among three times as many very small-scale outfits? Many things could be done...

The problem is typical ,

The problem is typical , wrecking the whole world....gross overcapitalization, where the mills now need 4-500 loads of logs per worker per year to pay back the "investors" for the $80. million invested per worker, to make the stockmarkets happy.

This is called "growth", GDP and "efficiency"

Luckily I can still buy whatever lumber I need from local, 1 or 2 men mills, who need only 50 loads per worker per year to make a good living.

Ed Deak.

Missleading photo

This is a recent clearcut, likely months old so even if it was replanted you wouldn't see the small trees. Go back three years from now and see if it is replanted. Reminds me of the stories about the Bowrun clearcut being seen from space but we never hear them now as the new trees are growing ncely. AS for the pine beetle. It is the supporters of the Tyee and the enviros that prevented the logging of Tweedsmuir park which would have stopped the spread of the beetle. Our best hope for the forest industry was global warming so the trees would grow back faster but now we are cooling off again.

stop exporting jobs along

stop exporting jobs along with our logs.

You don't have to look that far to see ..

...what the forest industry has done to the forests of BC. I know pictures from Google Earth are out of date, but essentially they show the true state of our forests at any one point of time. The industry has done a reasonably good job of hiding the truth from people who drive along the main highway, but move away from those roads, and you will see the true situation of our forests. This has been going on since MacBlo days a 100 years ago, and is continuing to this day. Replanting, as mentioned earlier by Ed, is a hit and miss job in most cases. Growers of replant trees (and we have a lot of them here in the Okanagan) are also to blame for the poor quality of the trees they send as far as Burns Lake -- and I know the guy that kept them in cold storage there. The solution, in my opinion, is to rehire some eithical foresters, on the basis of perhaps one forester for every 100 square kilometers of forest. A diligent forester would have his salary more than paid for by the first growth trees he saves and by making sure that forest companies replant trees in their cuts. IMO

next steps?

This mismanagement is incredibly tragic considering what trees are and how they support all life. This outcome, sadly, has been predicted for the last 20 years ever since the CORE process unless tenure and management structures were changed.
Ok, so enough blaming and ranting, what am I/you ie. the public -going to do about it? Write letters to the MoF and gov't. - yes; get the media rabid about this- yes; but what else? Lets put our thinking caps on and try using this site to come up with some new, progressive solutions. Maybe the Tyee can help with an email think-tank site?

old news

the current crop of pundits your self included. seem to me to be extrmely lazy or possibly micromanaged to the point of inanity. forestry in b.c. died a generation ago. to rehash its demise is pointless.if you want to inform and entertain the public why not stay current and go after the current crop of banksters and polluters [a word you don't hear much anymore]. maybe an article naming the various pols and describing how they looted public assets to generate family fortunes the current crop of soc-libs would be a good starting point

Here is just another reason

Here is just another reason to have a general strike in this Province.

DEATH OF OUR BC FOREST INDUSTRY

AMAZING A LAST SUMMER A TREE PLANTER ADVISED HE WAS NOT WORKING AS MUCH.

I GUESS THIS ARTICLE BY TYEE TELLS US WHY. GOOD WORK ANDREW.

COME ON BC GOV AND FOREST MINISTRY GET BACK ON TRACK NOW.

LIB. GOV DO YOU HAVE THE RIGHT LEADERSHIP???

OR STEP ASIDE AND LET OTHERS DO IT FOR YOU.

IT IS REALLY THAT SIMPLE.

VALUE ADDED IS A NO BRAINER.

BUT YET OUR LEADERS CAN NOT SEE VALUE ADDED ANYTHING BECAUSE THEY ARE FOCUSING ON GETTING RE-ELECTED INSTEAD OF DOING THE JOB AT HAND WE DESERVE AND EXPECT.

LOOKS LIKE IT IS TIME FOR THE NDP TO STEP MORE UP TO THE PLATE AS THIS PROV. GOV HAS NO INTENTION OF DELIVERING TO THE PEOPLE OF BC PRIOR TO 2013.

HEY PROV. LIBS PROVE US WRONG IF YOU CAN.

An Economic Disaster in the Making

The BC Liberals seem to have lots of money for unnecessary luxury items such as a new roof on BC Place Stadium or the Vancouver Convention Center. But when it comes to the essential items that will keep the province's economy strong into the future, such as reforestation projects, they claim the cupboard is bare.

The reason that the Liberals aren't planting trees is because most people don't notice when that doesn't occur, and environmental groups are still too busy patting the Liberals on the back for the carbon tax to criticize them over planting trees.

There is also a big question to be answered here as to whether the province's professional foresters are ensuring that forest management is being carried out in the public interest, and not just in the interest of their employers. As I pointed out in a previous posting, foresters employed by forest companies have an ethical obligation under their Code of Ethics to maintain the public interest in the work that they do. Is that really happening? That would seem questionable, given the auditor general's report.

A very sad situation that we will pay for in spades in the future.

The stupid political pendulum

Each new political government has it's way with BC's resources. And it seems that the political pendulum swings further every time. In the last 20 years there has been the over-governing/micro-managing of the Forest Practises Code then came the Gordo Giveaway Code. Now, with the help of the Mountain Pine Beetle, Fir Bark Beetle, Balsam Bark Beetle and root fungus, the policy of allowing the coyotes to manage the chicken coop and the economy in the dumper, we have nothing left.
Tell you what, (and this goes for BOTH political ideologies, Bring back the BC Forest Service. Let the professionals run things. Stop the "political decision-making", stop the give-aways(for ANY reason).

Google the words "Timber Famine, USA 1900"

There was a timber famine in the USA in the 1900's. This from: http://www.ou.edu/class/econ3003/book/area1c39.html

"Yes, there once was a time when this nation quaked in fear at the prospect of an imminent timber famine. It was bad. How bad, you ask? Bad enough that pastors asked their congregations to avoid the use of evergreen trees to celebrate the Christmas holidays.1 Yes, it was very bad. Gloom and doom filled the newspapers. America was using up its precious natural resources. The country was running out of trees and "commercial disaster was inevitable." The most reputable experts of the time agreed. The leading political leaders of the time agreed. Something had to be done. And indeed, something was done. Quick now--were you able to figure out what year these articles were published? Here's a hint. It was because of this great outcry for action that the federal government created the National Forestry Service.

You see, the prevailing wisdom of the time was that lumber firms were good at things like cutting down existing stocks of trees. But they couldn't be counted on for doing things like growing new trees. And that was a problem. Because as the newspaper excerpts make clear, at the rate trees were being cut down, there would soon be few left. And so, with great dispatch, the United States created the National Forestry Service to place vast tracts of land under the control of the federal government. The idea was that under the federal government's careful stewardship, this land could be guarded against wanton lumbering. And in this fashion, the country would be assured that there would be sufficient lumber for their children's children.

Have you figured it out yet? All the excerpts are taken from articles that appeared in the prestigious New York Times.2 The President was Theodore Roosevelt. And the years were 1900 to 1908."

See, Canadians may be drawers of water and hewers of wood, but for how long? When we can't even plant enough trees to fill our own sawmills, we are a bunch of jerk-offs. We don't even know our own history.

The Liberal government should have invested in forestry, not in the 17-day Winter Olympics. [ADVOCATING VIOLENCE, VAGUELY OR NOT, IS NOT ALLOWED IN THIS FORUM. COMMENT DELETED. -MODERATOR.]

money does grow on trees for the 1%

google: "brookfield assets" "island timberlands"....and read any of the links that can be found there.

What is being termed "forestry" by our present government is really just a series of fronts for big business. One masks the other for the benefit of investors who likely wouldn't know the difference between a fir, a cedar or a pine tree....or care or bother to know. They're just a bunch of suits who contract out and out-source the logging to provide the best profit margin for themselves.

It's about making money for 'the few' again - who have somewhoooo gained 'special' access to the ministry of lands and resources.

I agree with jimmmmy above when he proposes the following:

"maybe an article naming the various pols and describing how they looted public assets to generate family fortunes the current crop of soc-libs would be a good starting point"

solution isn't more herbicide spraying

I don't mean to be a contrarian but the report appears to be taking us in the wrong direction. Consider the auditor general applauding forest companies for doing a better job restocking forests than government. We need to take a closer look at what that means.

South of Prince George, where I grew up, and which is heavily logged, Canfor religiously plants and then herbicide sprays their blocks. Over the past three years they have sprayed or brushed 30% or all land they planted. All good according to the Auditor General. But what we are left with is huge spreads of conifer monocultures with little diversity. The aspen stands that were a natural feature of this landscape have all but disappeared, being systematically replaced with chemical-assisted silviculture prescriptions. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Aspen resist wildfires, reduce insect infestation rates, cycle nutrients conifers can't access, are cradles of biodiversity hosting more species of vertebrates and invertebrates, and are the critical nesting tree for insect eating insects. They have a very important role to play and yet wherever they are present we consider this a "management problem" that need to be resolved via greater silviculture investments, i.e. more spraying.

The AG report did get it right that there is too much logging. But the mistake is assuming we can somehow plant our way out of it. NSR forests are simply forests growing the way nature intended. They will become mature conifer stands, as we found them, and will probably become so with less risk of catastrophic destruction that will more likely afflict monocultures.

The underlying assumption of this whole debate is that man can manage nature better than nature can. Those aspen are there for a reason and our assiduous elimination of them likely has side effects we are only starting to appreciate. We need to start moving in the direction of Quebec's forest "management" model where more natural diversity is encouraged, greater age spread across stands is planned, and where no herbicides are used.

The free for all wholesale

The free for all wholesale pillaging of this province by the BC Liberals is criminal and persons need to do jail time.

If we ignore BC Rail, BC Hydro, salmon farms, Forestry!!!, toxic pipelines shipping out raw resources... then we have no sovereignty - we are simply another banana republic where a handful of people make a paltry sum selling out the rest of us.

oops, insect eating birds

oops, insect eating birds

Merely a symptom of Overcut, Overshoot, Oversimplification

"Forestry" in BC is mostly all about carbon and nitrogen mining. We are repeating the cut-n-run mistakes of our ancestors, but there are now no new continents to go expropriate. We have to face the music now.

While profitable in the short term, clearcutting is a bankrupt silvic ideology in our fragile northern ecosystems. NSR is often worst on marginal terrain that never should have been clearcut in the first place, where regeneration is extremely problematic once the soil's structure, nutrient capital and biodiversity has been severely degraded. Long rotation Shelterwood Systems should be universally applied to most of the interior, to enhance the structural and fire resilience and increase diversity of tree species as climate change rolls on.

Where's the wisdom in clearcutting beetle-infested pine monocultures and replacing them with more pine monocultures? Those who fail to learn from history are committing future generations to repeat it.

BC Forests

The Tyee's about 10 years too late in printing this story. Gordon Campbell's government was always more interested in developing real estate than in protecting the forest industry. It's been obvious that the BC Liberals have been getting out of the forest industry for more than a decade -- forest industry de-regulation has also meant more deaths and injury of forestry workers. If their injuries and deaths had been reported like those of the police, the public might have been outraged.
Most of the public now live in cities and don't care about rural communities or the forest industry.

just to clarify:

...you have to google the names:

"brookfield assets" "island timberlands"

in conjunction with each other, not separately.

Old age

The reason that the pine beetle was able to devestate such a large area is because the trees were basically dying of old age. A lodge pole pine lives about 100 years then fire or bugs kill it. We have stopped the fires but the only way to stop the bugs is to log it before they get to it. From the comments and article it is clear that Tyee readers would rather leave the trees to the bugs. As far as monoculture. That is natures way in a lot of interior pine forests. The faster growing pine chokes out most other species except aspen with dies out after 20 or 30 years and then can't reestablish due to the pine canopy.
Replanting is good and needed but for most of the existing interior forests it is mostly a case of log it or loose it.

Sad future for our children

Mining of trees has been going on for many years now. Clear cutting is evident - but only from an airplane when you travel trhough BC. people in cities have no clue.

http://forestsofhope.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/must-protect-our-forests/

Forests are an economic must. What happens when they are gone?
Previous civilizations became extinct because they mismanaged their resources. Our children and their children - the entire future generations future is at risk!

Who cares? NOBODY!

I don't see riots to call on the government to protect our resources and our environment. People riot when overpaid hockeyplayers lose the Stanley Cup.

That tells me where Canadians' priorities are.

Talk, talk and talk and no action. I wonder when it is going to ENOUGH?

Ronin2010 -- ten years late?

Thanks for the comment Ronin2010. Just know that when you say The Tyee is "ten years late" reporting this story...

1) We weren't in existence ten years ago... and
2) We've run quite a few stories on this topic over the years, including this one:

http://thetyee.ca/News/2008/04/28/ReviveForest/

a little devil's advocacy.

really, holding the government responsible for acts of nature seems to be taking it a little far... legislation requiring all harvested areas to be replanted, yes, but "damaged by wildfire, diseases or pests such as mountain pine beetle" ... really? i mean, it would be nice, sure. but the government is a human organisation, with limits. it is not omnipotent, and can't solve every problem just because we can identify it.
i'm a treeplanter, for more than a decade, my parents were treeplanters, i love the work, and believe me, i want to feel like my future is secure... but i really think it's naive, and a little dumb, to expect the government to wave their magic wand and fix everything. if you want to see change, or improve a circumstance, put your energy into finding solutions, rather that criticising other people for not finding solutions fast enough to suit you.
i don't mean to be inflammatory, or offend, just my opinion.

subliminal

It is the government's responsibility to manage resources, whether those resources are lost because of fire or because of overharvesting.

If you are a tree planter you know that 40% less tree is being planted back. In other words every year there are less and less contracts for tree planters.

Companies who harvest these trees are not obligated to plant back what they took out.

Whose job is that to manage it?

Get your head out of the sand and think!

Governemnt is elected to manage the resources and the economy of a province or a country. Mismanagement is what we see in Greece and all the other countries that has a corrupt and indifferent government.
I don't see a lot of problem in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium. Could it be because they are managing their resources therefor their economy? Duh!

Not so fast, subliminal!

The problem here, subliminal, is that the government has enjoyed the benefits of these trees being harvested in the form of stumpage payments and income and corporate taxes from the companies and workers that harvested the trees. As this is Crown land, the province has an obligation to make sure that these areas are re-forested. Whether they do it directly themselves or legislate that the companies do it after harvesting, it still needs to be done.

Not only is that important to ensure that there are not large areas of not satisfactorily restocked stands, but it is important to ensure that there is a steady stream of mature timber becoming available 80 or 100 years down the road. You know, what we call a sustainable timber supply.

And planting is only the first link in the chain. There are a number of other silvicultural practices that are not being carried out today because of government decisions.

All that will add up to much less timber available for harvesting in the future.

Woodworker

Old age? Are you a city dwelller reading bogus news from CTV and Global?

Get your head out of the sand and shake it a bit because your thinking is out whack!

It is not old age. There are areas that have been affected but those trees apparently don't produce good lumber. So they don't worth much on the market. Are you sure we are cutting the old and sick trees only? I don't think so.
Pine beetle is also here because global warming have shifted our climate and teh winter isn't as cold as it used to be to kill these bugs. read a bit more on the issue before you open your mouth.

Old trees logged, like hell.

Old trees logged, like hell. We can hardly see logging trucks with any decent sized trees any more, except from the woodlots, where the cutting is strictly controlled.

Some of the logging trucks on our roads are loaded with logs that are hardly big enough to get a 2x4 out of them . The rest goes into chips, which now also seems to be a big business.

The pine bugs didn't just go after the jackpine , but also the big real pines. Luckily, we only had a few large ones, but they all went. Yet, here we have a fairly large jackpine under our dining room window, by our lake, that had some beetle damages. We thought we're going to lose it, but it recovered.

If the last -40C we had in 1995, hadn't killed the tent caterpillar eggs, there wouldn't be any aspens left in BC either.

Ed Deak.

Story needed on alleged theft/fraud re stumpage and scaling

A court case came out recently which I am surprised has not received more attention. Maybe the Tyee could look into it. It relates to possible theft/non-payment of stumpage.

The BC Government, to their credit, has been in a court fight with a coastal forest company which has been alleged to be fraudulently misrepresenting the amount of wood being logged. The specific allegation is:

"It is alleged Lemare was the owner and operator of scale sites at which all timber harvested from the several tenures described in the notice of civil claim was scaled, and that the defendants fraudulently altered data received from licensed scalers, or that each of the defendants knew that the other defendants had fraudulently altered the data; were under a duty to disclose their knowledge to the Province, and failed to do so “for the purposes of assisting [Lemare] to deceive [the Province]”."

The courts have most recently ordered the province to give back records to the alleged fraudsters, likely to be destroyed. The logging company has big time legal representation.

The group at the centre of the scandal, Lemare logging, apparently currently has a reality TV about their logging operations.

The fact that this company has been alleged to have being fraudelently misrepresenting the amount of wood being logged is yet another example that we, the people who own the forests, should be aware of. I am unaware of any media reporting of this story.

The most recent court decision can be accessed here:

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/12/01/2012BCSC0193.htm

When did BC sustainably manage its forests?

Certainly never in the 43 years i've lived here. If we denounce Alberta as a petro-state we must accept that BC is lumber baron-state. every government be it Social Credit, NDP or Liberal has been under the financial influence of the timber barons and the forestry unions. Remember that the largest mass arrest of protestors was in Clayquot Sound when the NDP was under pressure from its IWA backers.

None of this though speaks to question of what are sustainable forestry practices. Certainly some practices are more or less destructive but none of them, including replanting even in the best cases, is really a sustainable method. Replanted clearcuts are really an attempt to turn a diverse forest into a monocultured farm.

A natural forest, like the one europeans found here when they arrived, is mixed and successive. One type of species preceeds the next giving its unique type of self as food for the species it coexists with and to those that replace it. Every forest at every stage in its evolution is the habitat for millions of lifeforms from tiny bacteria to giant evergreens. A forest is sustainable, an herbicide managed monoculture, no matter how well intended, is not.

Like Edward Abbey said decades go,"In clear cutting you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls 'weed trees', and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. Then you dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed away humas, inject the seedlings with growth forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellents and raise a uniform crop of trees all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height [not maturity; that would take too long] you send in a fleet of tree harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, and fertilize all over again. Round and round and round again, faster and faster and tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole".

Human species is unsustainable

Facism should rightly be called Corporatism.(Benito Mussolini)
Government has lost it's power to the Corporate entity that knows ONLY profit.
Continued, the final analysis indicates only failure of our species.
Time isn't on our side.

I think the BC logging companies are killing themselves

Yes Lynn:
Googling Brookfield Asset Management IS interesting. $150 billion in assets indeed!

The commercial nurseries plant 1.8 million plugstock seeds, and they have 10% overage, it therefore follows that there are about 180,000 seedlings left over at the end of the planting season, EVERY YEAR. So why not just plant the overage? Would that be so bad?

We should be tripling the replanting rate to compensate for the Mountain pine beetle damage.

I remember the Gude Olde Dayes when the province had $400 million per year to spend on watershed restoration projects. I personally applied for, and was awarded $1.8 million of FRBC money to spearhead stream habitat surveys on Vancouver Island.

Alas, I was "retasked" before I could follow through with the work, and a Ph.D. was appointed to fill my position. Stream assessment came to a sudden end after only the first two years of a five-year plan and fisheries biologists never did get the benefit of the FRBC money.

Whether you look at the BC government from the inside or the outside, it is equally corrupt and inept.

Not surprised

We've asked a bunch of wolves to take care of the flock. We shouldn't be surprised at the outcome.

The only people who should be

The only people who should be surprised, and have been through history, are those who still believe that wealth can be "created".

How in hell could anybody be so stupid to believe this nonsense, when we have a million years of history, showing, how it has always been and will be "taken", because we can't "create" anything.

Ed Deak.

I disagree Ed. Wealth is not like e=mc2

Wealth can be created, and it is, every day. You just can't cut trees that aren't there is all. Otherwise, forestry is an excellent example of a renewable resource and planting trees today means you create wealth in 80-100 years. There is actually about 20% more forest in the USA today than 100 years ago. New England is largely a new forest today. 100 years ago it was farmland.

All the indicators are, however, pointing towards a world-wide timber shortage in the near future and we are not going to be able to avoid it.

Clear-cutting is killing BC forests and the logging companies are lying to themselves. They are living in the distant past and have not tried anything new for 50 years.

Having recently retired from

Having recently retired from the BC Forest Service after a 37 year career, I can vouch for the fact that the current regime of the Liberal government does not give a whit about BC's forests. Their only concern is to export logs on a short term gain basis, and to try to fool the Americans into believing that our forest industry is on a subsidy free basis, which is patently false. The BC Timber Sales program is fraught with deception, and the competitive nature of the program is a lie. Also, recently where I worked, they now want to leave a good portion of logged areas to come back "naturally" ( ie no planting), to save a few bucks. Naturally restocked areas are normally patchy, and of species that are of lower quality and quantity, which will create silvicultural "slums" for future generations. But, I guess, they will be green in color.

Sorry Gran, but what you're

Sorry Gran, but what you're saying is not creation, but the conversion of resources into other forms and cash for some.
The trees are not created, but are growing by conversion and so on down the line until they become pollution.

We all use the word "creation", I do it myself some times, but not in every language. As an artist, or tradesman, I may say that I'm creating a painting, or artwork, or furniture, or machinery, but in effect I'm only converting resources into other forms.

The same applies to every human activity.

This is not e=mc2, but the first law of thermodynamics.

And the sooner we realize and admit this, the better the world will be, by admitting that "wealth creation" only legalized theft from others, the environment and future generations.

What is wrong with this fact ?

By the way, a professor friend asked me to write something on this for his PhD class and it should be debated this month sometime.

I've bee writing on this for 27 years , it has been used in PhD dissertations, on many worldwide economic forums and remains unbroken, because it is a physical fact.

Ed Deak

Ed: you forget population growth

In 1800 there were about 1 billion people.
In 1949 there were about 3 billion.
Today there are 7 billion.

That alone "creates wealth" because many of us work and create products. It is not a zero asum game. If the human population were static or decreasing and our access to resources decline, I might agree with you.

Otherwise, we the 99% in North America and Europe, are far "richer" today than at any time in the past.

I am not talking just about GPD or economics, but in the resources that are available to us that make our lives genuinely richer.

You can't measure the wealth of contributing to the Tyee, for example. I don't think David Beers is one of the 1% but he provides a very interesting service.

Using something in a Ph.D. dissertation does not impress me. I have written a few theses myself and I see no connection.

Sand is just sand until it becomes a fibre-optic cable.

Gran... Wealth is the

Gran... Wealth is the temporary control of energy, which, of course, includes resources.

If we could "create" wealth, we wouldn't have crime, wars, poverty, etc.

People today only control , use and waste more resources because of improved technology, larger machinery etc. for extraction and the deregulated money powers of the banks licencing it.

Money is a licence for energy control, issued by a special interest class for its own benefit.

This couldn't have happened, when banks were permitted to loan out some $20. for every $1. on deposit, but we didn't have the pollution, the resource waste and the various cancer etc. epidemics in little kids, caused by chemicals in our food, air, water and whole continents buried under garbage.

I can't see any improvement in the lives of the overall population from the 60s, when people had well paid full time jobs, one breadwinner per family was enough, anybody could buy and own a home, the soup kitchens fed a few hundred on skid row, there were no foodbanks, etc.

What we have now ? Kids "texting", people running around with phones stuck into their ears and so on. We had Christmas dinner at our partners. The 3 teenagers were playing video games and texting at the dinner table. When I was in business, I was happy to get into my car, or van, and get the hell away from phones.

I'm not dreaming the "good old days", as I have seen enough of them in the depression, war and postwar years, but can't see any improvement, or that people would really are better off with today's "wealth". More gimmicks , more waste, but that's about all.

Ed Deak.

Natural Restocking is OK

"Naturally restocked areas are normally patchy, and of species that are of lower quality and quantity, which will create silvicultural "slums" for future generations. But, I guess, they will be green in color."

Actually in the northern central interior, research studies show naturally restocked areas have higher biomass of wood fiber of all tree species than sprayed forests. Check out www.stopthespraybc.com. While we may consider aspen and birch "lower quality" trees they actually make good lumber that is dimensionally stable that finds many uses in the furniture industry. Birch is a great wood and makes excellent plywood and lumber. Unfortunately, with the exception of OSB panel, much of the aspen and birch lumber in this province is imported. Go ask at Windsor Plywood or Dicks where their aspen and birch comes from.

As for quality of coniferous stands, managed forests fail in many respects. Douglas Fir, a much diminished species across its northern range, does not plant well and does not survive on exposed cutblocks. It needs cover. In particular it needs Paper Birch, with which it shares a symbiotic relationship. "Managed" forests that try to short circuit the natural process of succession and eliminate these species with toxic herbicides usually create the conditions that are not conducive to the survival of Douglas Fir, probably one of the highest quality trees you could grow. So to say that naturally regenerated forests are of lower and lesser quality and quantity is probably only true if you limit your analysis to the production of pine, a species with a questionable future in any case.

That a naturally regenerated forest is undesirable is driven by the same mistaken assumption that we can make forests better than nature can. If this presumptuous claim is correct, what was wrong with the forests we found here? They regenerated naturally. The problem is we log too much to allow natural regeneration to keep up. So our greed is the problem, not nature's logic.

Agreed, Steidle

In 2001, I was in Ocean Falls. There was a notice in the Post Office about a huge spot spraying operation in the Central Coast. The logging companies were all spraying glycoside on every non-fibre-proudcing plant on the forests.

The theory was that all these other plants competed with the fibre-producing trees and they had to be killed. The objective for the logging companies was to have nothing growing in the forests that didn't produce fibre for them. You might think I am kidding, but sadly, I am not.

I am involved in a conservation effort in Nanaimo myself. My group has been cutting Scotch broom on a critical habitat site that supports 15 rare plants. We have spent the last seven years cutting broom just to allow native flowers to germinate. One of those flowers was nominated as the city of Nanaimo's floral emblem, following a petition-signing campaign.

The property owner has just banned us from cutting broom this year, while they ponder the implications of conservation, in the light of increased demands for access to their property and pressure from Environment Canada to protect it.

The point is that the logging comapny lumps the local conservation group with the ATV drivers who are chewing up the meadows and has told us to "take a year off" from cutting broom. They are so stupid, they don't even know who their friends are. One guy with an MBA, and another with 30 years of experience in managing the forest, just pissed off their best friends.

There are a lot of foresters who think they have 30 years of experience, when what they really have is one year of experience repeated 30 times over. In other words, they are numbnuts, deadwood and they think they are being clever when they are actually shooting themselves in the foot.

They don't even believe that forests are ecological communities, and they think clear-cutting is the only way to make money.

Who was watching this unfold?

The Chief Forester has just resigned and as a practising licensed Forester he should have reported the BC government to the auditor general, the Forest Practises Board and the ABCFP. But with no reliable data he actually had no idea what was going on. In other words, when the debate over carbon intensive Alberta Tar Sands oil and BC's pipeline took place, he wouldn't be pipeing up to say that a climate/timber crisis is upon us so forget the carbon gravy train. This is no coincedence. Ingorance was the silent sound of politics getting the job done for a higher goal. Pesky Foresters.

jsteidle

http://www.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/potd/2010/03/mycorrhizal_networks.php

Too bad the prevailing notion is of soil simply being some kind of "holding medium".

"planting trees today means you create wealth in 80-100 years"

Assuming the trees are going to grow into a healthy forest, a very questionable assumption given much of the evidence, including the disastrous pine plantation in the Matthew Valley near Barkerville and many other failed or failing plantations around the province.

Not one of the 47 posts here acknowledges the very real and growing economic value of understory species including edible and medicinal plants and those used in crafts, as florals, etc. etc. etc. The problem with the economics of "timber only" mentality is that it assumes without any proof that
A: Trees planted today will in fact grow into a harvestable forest. Granville's statement above is well meaning but states as a fact what is, in fact, merely a theory - a theory which is contradicted by the reality of the poor health of many existing plantations, and by the reality of climate change which noone can safely predict over such a time frame.
B: The assumption that there is nothing in the forest with economic value other than trees.
In fact, there are dozens if not hundreds of "understory' species already being marketed, some at very high values - and many of these are available not once every 100 - 150 years, but every year!
In recent years, Saskatoon berries became an issue in the European Economic Community. there was considerable pressure brought to bear to restrict the importation of Saskatoons into Europe, based on the idea that they were not recognized as an edible product. this caused a lot of anger among the First Nations which are the main exporters from Canada, who have been eating Saskatoons for thousands of years, and saw this as one more example of condescending colonialist attitudes.

Of course, the real reason for the restrictions was that the Saskatoons were moving into European markets for fruit in significant enough quantities to alarm European fruit producers - which shows there is a potential for international markets to be found for some of our non timber forest resources!

Here in the Central Interior we have some of the sweetest, juiciest Saskatoons anywhere - I have eaten them all over BC and never tasted better, which I theorize is a result of our climate including the right balance of sun and rainfall. I have tried the commercial variety from Saskatchewan, (sold in Costco, proving there is a strong domestic market as well) and found them to be comparatively tasteless.

On our 18 acres of naturally regenerating, mixed age, mixed species forest (which has regrown after a huge fire which ran from around Soda Creek north before jumping the Quesnel River and carrying on some distance further before burning out after several years) I have identified at least 30 edible or medicinal species, and that is the tip of the iceberg when you look around BC.

continued

These species represent largely untapped economic opportunities which have been almost completely ignored by so called Professional Foresters, who learn virtually nothing about them in their university training other than how they "interfere" with the growth of trees. As stated eloquently by jsteidle, many of these species are in fact necessary, for many reasons, to the growth of healthy trees, but my focus here is the economic values.

Here are some numbers to consider:

$10 invested at 4% today will produce approximately $507 after 100 years.

So, money spent planting trees today will have to result in PROFITS (not gross revenue) of almost 50 times the original investment. This considers money spent on planting and replanting, but doesn't factor in the chemical treatments and other expenses incurred along the way, not to mention that there is no certainty that there will be a harvestable forest after 100 years, meaning investing in this way is a big gamble.

Profits derived from renewable non timber resources and invested today would grow to about 50 times the original amount in 100 years, and still allow a tree harvest at the end of the natural cycle! Even if that cycle takes a few years longer, you don't need to be an economist to see the logic here!

Whereas trees can be harvested but once every 100 years, non timber resources are in many cases perennial, and so can produce revenues every year from the time the original trees were removed until a new harvest is possible.

Even where species grow in succession, there will almost certainly be revenue potential on a continual basis, as the focus shifts according to the natural order - starting with the mushrooms, fireweed and berries which are available within a year or two of harvesting the trees.

It makes no difference whether trees have been harvested or destroyed by fire - as anyone who has walked over clearcuts or recent burns can tell you, nature always moves fast to fill a vacuum, and an open mind will see the economic potential immediately.

and on and on - please forgive me for being long winded

Unfortunately, as shown by even the most well intentioned contributors to the Tyee, most still can't see the forest for the trees, and continue to parrot the conventional "green" wisdom that tree planting is solely beneficial and should be practiced universally.

I blame some of the "Big Green" honchos for part of this mistaken ideology; I've spoken with the likes of Paul George, Colleen McRory, and many others over the years and found them to be virtually deaf to these ideas - both because they are not "sexy" enough for the mass markets and because to some extent they allow for the possibility that a clearcut does not represent the total "devastation" they like to protest.

Many "environmentalists" condemn the very idea of making an economic argument for better practices, believing they are operating on a much higher "moral" plane and bear no responsibility to come up with real alternatives - though they like the rest of us have depended on resource extraction to provide their own livings, either directly or indirectly through taxation!

Just one more reason to plant lots of trees

You would think that with the Liberals in Victoria claiming to be so vitally concerned about the environment to the point that they implement a carbon tax, that they would take any opportunity to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Young forests, and not old-growth forests, remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. Because young forests grow at a higher rate (ever hear of the Sigmoidal growth curve?) than older forests do, these young forests remove much more carbon from the atmosphere.

The problem with old-growth forests and carbon sequestration is that they have already seen their best carbon fixing days. The carbon has already been fixed into the wood. It is the young forests that are most efficient at sequestering carbon. If the Liberals were truly concerned about carbon levels in the atmosphere, they would be ensuring that there were as many trees as possible going into the ground.

plant sequoias

Yeh, I'll rant on this subject again. Its too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Climate change is inevitable. There is an opportunity to replant our forests with some sort of sequoia species.
Imagine a wood thats difficult to burn
doesnt rot easily
that is light weight and easy to move
thats what redwood trees can provide. Heck they were here, abundantly 100s of thousands of years ago. You can use them as fire blocks to other species, they also grow real fast. Why this hasnt caught on in BC I'm not sure but many countries are experimenting with them. New Zealand has naturalized them. I understand the Queen Charlottes have a few redwood trees.

Other folks have great ideas as to sustainable building materials, such as bamboo, hemp and many more. All are valid and should be explored as well.

Other posts about this being old news are correct. The crisis in the forest industry has already been felt by small rural communities. People have lost their livelihoods, homes, self-worth and small towns have gone broke or disappeared. So we need an article on: How do we rebuild a rural economy now? Where I live, we need help, lots of help would be great but Im not expecting that(not from this Government). If the BC government would ackowledge the issues that rural communities deal with, that would be a start. The forest industry was the main employer just over 10 years ago, but its gone and never coming back. There are folks that beleive the 'good old days' may return. Sorry it isnt going to happen. The good timber is long gone and efficient technological methods of harvesting have made most of the old jobs redundant.

More entrepreneurship...

is required from individuals and groups in rural communities. Most people are locked into the "jobs" paradigm in which mostly large corporations provide the employment with the individuals just putting in their shifts and going home to forget about work.
Developing new businesses without enormous capital resources requires creativity and enterprise, which we have been brainwashed into thinking are rare characteristics - it has been easier to just hire on to the mill, the mine, or the logging company and not have to deal with planning, paperwork, and the rest of the activities required to develop opportunity into employment.

When I look out my window I see miles of forest full of resources to which I and anyone else has access under the Cariboo Chilcotin Land Use plan, resources which in Europe or Asia would be exploited to create sustainable economies. Here, if people don't have some "big daddy" to work for, all too many of us sit around and whine while opportunities literally wither on the vine.

How often do we hear someone say "I haven't worked in 2 years or whatever? I have been technically unemployed since 1977 and have never yet been out of work - at 60, I can only wish at times that I had less work to do!

Anyone in rural BC who thinks there are no opportunities just isn't spending enough time looking into what is out there and how it can be turned into a good living - those who are doing so are finding new ways every day, rather than sniveling because the big companies have taken what they wanted and left town! What the heck did they think was going to happen? These issues have been around for most of my lifetime and only those with their eyes closed haven't seen the present crisis coming!