BC's Vanishing Timber Worker
A Trees and Us podcast with Wade Fisher, 'the best person on trees in Williams Lake.'
Wade Fisher: Sawed off future?
Trees and Us
- Trees and Us
- Why Humans and Nature Collide
- Why Rocket Science Is Easier than Forestry
- Tree Love and Murder
- Building Treeless Houses
- BC's Vanishing Timber Worker
- BC's Eco-Activist 'Rock Star'
- Green Is The New Black
- A Certified Forest Saviour
- Beyond 'Molly's Reach'
- Simpson Chops Coleman
- Velcrow Ripper's 'Fierce Light'
- Reviving Forest Protests in BC
- Leiren-Young and His 'Green Chain'
- Betty Krawczyk, Proud Fanatic
- How Adbusters Grew on Trees
- He Sees Our Hot Future
- 'Wild Foresting'
- Ken Wu Wants to Save 'the Avatar Grove'
- Patrick Moore, Proud Heretic
Wade Fisher started cutting trees over thirty years ago. He left the woods for the mill, the mill for the union hall and the union hall for meeting rooms with politicians and planners.
His father worked in the forest industry and so does his son, but he's clearly worried there won't be much work for future generations.
When I was in Williams Lake, B.C. a few months ago, I asked friends there to name the best person to talk to about trees. They said I had to meet Wade.
Wade had just been lured out of retirement to represent forest workers on the Cariboo Chilcotin Beetle Action Coalition and to chair the CCBAC's forest worker strategy sector. By the time we talked Wade had withdrawn from the group and he explained that while this may have been the right issue for him, it was the wrong time and place for him to take it on. He'd previously participated in the Cariboo Chilcotin land use planning process and co-chaired the Cariboo Chilcotin Economic Action Forum.
Wade and I met in my friend's living room for a free ranging conversation. Click the Listen to this! link to hear Wade about talk about vanishing trees, vanishing lifestyles and how the provincial government's policies could have an even more devastating impact on workers than the beetles.
Or listen and subscribe to Tyee podcasts on iTunes.
Related Tyee stories:
- Tree Love and Murder
A Trees and Us podcast with George Bowering. - Why Rocket Science Is Easier than Forestry
A 'Trees and Us' Tyee podcast with Jean-Pierre Kiekens. - Why Humans and Nature Collide
A 'Trees and Us' Tyee podcast with John Vaillant. - Trees and Us
Our new podcast series asks: what does the forest mean to you? First up, Severn Cullis-Suzuki.
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Fiat lux
4 years ago
I know Wade very well on a
I know Wade very well on a very friendly basis.
The main problem of the forest industry is disgusting overcapitalization for automation and clearcutting to try to fill the insatiable demands of "investors", often "wealth creating foreign investors".
Logging can be done, at low costs in environmentally friendly ways. We have several woodlot loggers in this area, including next to our land, who have the highest environmental classification for their operations and can make a good living without huge investments and automation.
I know sawmills, where 2 people can make a good living with 50 loads of logs a year, as opposed to the automated corporate mills, where it takes hundreds of loads to employ one.
Then comes the now secretly negotiated SPP, that's supposed to include the free movement of labour, which means that BC mine and forest workers can kiss their jobs and communities goodbye, because they'll be replaced with imported labour living in camps.
Just wait a few years and watch what the corporate lords of the universe are planning for Canada with their fully owned Reform Party governments under various names, using the slogan : "Canadian workers priced themselves out of their jobs.".... while home and land prices are in the skies and supermarkets are rising theirs every day.
Ed Deak, Big Lake.
RickW
4 years ago
But Ed.....!
Resources are to be pillaged, not preserved..............
Profits are preferred to professions!
Canis Latrans
4 years ago
As the land is clear cut
Amerika has but 4% of its forested land left as originally covered it at first contact-, in little more then 200 years. Now we are cutting down ours to supply them as well as others who have done similar. The Russians and Brazilians, along with other parts of the world are doing likewise. It is all unsustainable much longer, and is a recipe for disaster, along with other resource depletions going on (clean water).
Our population numbers and economic system as drives it and the rape of the land is, frankly, a doomsday model.
If we cannot soon come up with a new economic/social model and the means to "cull" and "curtail" our own numbers and our exploitation of the planets natural systems, as Clubofrome has said elsewhere here-, like the periodic collapse of the snowshoe hare, lemmings and other species when they have outgrown their sustenance area, given current growth trends, we humans will sooner or later be shrugged off by nature by similar "natural culling" means. (Antiquated moral and apocalyptic/end of time notions by many "religions" are similarly a part of the problem mix, preventing timely recognition and action.)
As the oceans are over-fished and fishes disappear, the fisherman too disappears-, likewise the forests and forest workers. And once they go, how far behind this famine and extinction express can at least great numbers of the rest of us be?
The culling and reduction of our numbers and exploitive demands will occur, with or without our conscious awareness of what is going on, and our destructive role in it. (It is already going on in Africa and other parts of the world-, which is why there are more refugees in motion about the world right now, than there has ever been before in human history.) And war, as competition for increasingly scarce resources is a product and exacerbator influence in this emerging reality as well. (It's what actually, behind the bullshite facade of concern for democracy, drives the US Empire and its "coalition of the bribed" throughout Eastern and Balkan Europe and the Middle East.)
Our, people's consciousness gets raised to a whole new level of awareness and preparedness to act here, in this time, or this "end of times" story really gets played out for very large numbers of the planets peoples. Even then, we may be already too late.
And I am not optimistic. (Though I am unlikely to be here for it, due to a quite other "natural" process :-), others of you are likely to not be so fortunate.)
RickW
4 years ago
James Lovelock says.......
........the world would be "comfortable" with 1/2 billion people or so. Appears we are heading that way, whether we like it or not.........
Canis Latrans
4 years ago
1/2 billion...
Sounds somewhere right to me, bro. Though what we really need from somewhere, the Suzuki Foundation or whatever, is a serious study of this issue-, the sustainable human carrying capacity of the planet, truly conservatively estimated-, allowing for major "margins of error". (Too much "green" ass-kissing of corporate capitalism still going on.)
And then we need an appropriate human response. Then maybe we can take seriously this self-proclaimed "human" intelligence-, of which there is too little real evidence to here. (Just a whole bunch of "Mooooo, Moooo" herd following.)
RickW
4 years ago
corporate ass-kissing
I think we just can't keep our hands off the stuff..........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_Growth
Canis Latrans
4 years ago
Thanks..;.
Thanks for this Wiki link, Rick.
I have "some" familiarity with "some" of this material, but until fairly recent years have not had the understanding of "environmental issues" that I should have, and folks are going to need very soon here, in all likelihood. (Coming from the old "Red flag" state power left, which generally failed to see the importance of the environment per se.)
Hence, I am late in life having to play catchup with a lot of this material-, even though I have for a very long time of course, observed first hand what has been happening to the natural order all around us.. (Though I do have a brother-in-law (of sorts) who has been rubbing my nose in it for years, trying to smarten me up to the issue. :-)