What If BC Has Got It Totally Wrong on Forest Management?

For nearly 80 years, British Columbians have been told that the province’s forests are managed for a multitude of values and that nature’s bounty will always be there.

Logging and replanting, governments have said, will produce forests that work for industry and provide environmental diversity and opportunities for recreation.

But people choosing to spend time in the province’s vast and expanding network of tree plantations say that’s not true.

Much of B.C.’s once richly diverse natural forests has disappeared under the “multiple use” regime advanced by the timber industry and overseen by the Ministry of Forests, which together for decades have propagated the idea that logging one valley after the next will have negligible impacts on plant and animal life and that there will always be plenty of room for loggers, recreationists, trappers, fishers and miners alike.

But as Richard Rajala, a historian and emeritus professor at the University of Victoria, has noted, the promises of multiple-use or sustained-yield forestry have not stood up to scrutiny almost from the moment that the concepts were first seriously advanced in the postwar years.

“Unrestrained clearcutting, justified in the confident terms of sustained yield and multiple-use forestry, generated sacrifices many deemed disproportionate to the benefits,” Rajala wrote in a 2014 paper.

In the paper detailing the pitfalls of multiple use over its first 25 years, Rajala noted how over and over again the interests of the logging companies always prevailed. Timber invariably trumped other values, including salmon, as logging companies “penetrated more deeply into coastal watersheds” and disregarded “the waters that supported both commercial and recreational pursuits,” Rajala wrote.

Defenders of salmon came to learn in the process that only those “reforms that did not challenge a mode of production geared to timber industry competitiveness on global markets” would fly with interests inside and outside of government.

Everything everywhere doesn’t work

Little has changed since. The result is a growing economic and ecological crisis, with B.C.’s once richly varied and abundant primary or natural forests now shredded.

The crisis is once again prompting people to advance an idea that has been advocated, but rejected, before: zoning the province’s lands into areas where resource industry developments can continue and zones where such developments cannot.

The difference now is that the stakes are much higher because, as detailed in a previous Tyee report, so little of the province’s natural heritage is left.

In two talks last year, one at the University of Northern British Columbia where he is an adjunct professor and another to the BC Wildlife Federation, wildlife ecologist Jeff Werner advocated for a three-zone system: one zone for fully protected forests that have never before been industrially logged; one where forests previously clear cut are restored and not logged again; and one where growing trees that will be used as forest products is the primary use.

“One thing we know is that we cannot do everything everywhere. We tried that for 50 years. It’s failed. Many of our activities are just not compatible,” Werner told his UNBC audience.

As an illustration, Werner shared an image of a big chunk of real estate in the province’s central Interior stretching from Fort Fraser in the west to Prince George in the east and encompassing everything to the south for about 150 kilometres.

A sea of plantations

Werner told both his audiences that about 70 per cent of the area’s original natural or primary forests were gone, mostly due to clearcut logging. Much the same scenario has played out throughout the central Interior of the province where Werner lives.

What remains is a vast expanse of tree plantations, many very young and largely, if not completely, unsuitable as habitat for wildlife species such as moose, whose numbers have dropped precipitously both inside and outside the study area.

Werner said that fully 90 per cent of what was logged is now tree plantations less than 40 years old, with 1,053 square kilometres of those plantations being dense, dark, biological deserts carpeted in planted trees 13 years old or younger. Just those infant or juvenile plantations in that one area of the province alone cover the equivalent of more than 147,000 standard-size international soccer pitches.

In another slide, Werner showed a sign posted at the side of a road by Canfor, B.C.’s largest forest company (a distinction that Canfor is rapidly losing as it shutters one B.C. sawmill after another and plows its investment dollars into the southeast United States).

The sign is typical of those found everywhere in the province where logging companies have cleared the original, previously undisturbed natural forests away.

The sign noted that Canfor logged the original primary forest in 1979 and 1980, then “treated” the area in 1986 (treatment likely being glyphosate spray to kill herbaceous plants prior to tree planters moving in) and then “reforested” or planted the land with crops of seedlings between 1986 and 1989.

Nutritious as a shag rug

Werner then shared a couple of slides of what that land now looked like. Very little of anything green grew beneath the planted trees. A carpet of rusty-orange pine needles covered the ground, a material as nutritious to moose as the synthetic fibres in a shag rug.

“One has to ask 40 years on, how long does a moose have to wait to eat? How many generations? Let’s think. We’ve had eight generations of moose waiting to eat something in here,” Werner said, adding that this patch of land might never provide forage for moose again before it was slated to be logged a second time.

As with much of a great swath of the central Interior of the province, logging rates soared in the area Werner focused his talk on in response to a buildup of mountain pine beetles that attacked and killed millions of lodgepole pine trees.

The Ministry of Forests responded by approving big and unsustainable increases to logging rates in response to those infestations, giving timber companies the green light to “salvage” tens of millions of additional trees, an effort that resulted in both dead pine trees and healthy living spruce trees being felled.

When that logging switched into overdrive in the early 2000s, Clark Binkley foresaw that there would be consequences.

In a 2007 interview at the height of the salvage logging, Binkley, a former dean at the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry, forewarned that there would be a devastating course correction once timber companies ran short of trees to cut down.

“The industry is doing as much salvage logging as it can so there’s a lot of supply on the market right now, but that is a relatively temporary phenomenon,” Binkley said.

“In maybe 10 to 15 years, supply is going to fall off fairly dramatically in British Columbia... by 20 to 30 million cubic metres of wood. Just to give that a kind of point of reference, New Zealand cuts about 20 to 25 million cubic metres annually.”

Binkley’s prediction of 10 to 15 years proved to be bang on. We are now squarely in the midst of a timber supply crisis, precisely because so little primary forests remain. Logging rates are roughly half of what they were when Binkley made his prediction.

Binkley, as Werner noted in his talks, also turned out to be a proponent of forest zoning, something that he said was necessary in British Columbia and that he publicly advocated nearly 30 years ago.

Policy failure

In 1997, long before the turbocharged salvage logging began, Binkley wrote that the “implicit assumption” in B.C. was that virtually every commercially desirable tree outside of parks would be logged and that this idea had proven disastrous.

“This policy has clearly failed either to satisfy legitimate demands from the environmental community or to produce the predictably high levels of timber harvest needed to sustain the forest products industry and industry-dependent communities,” Binkley wrote.

Binkley would go on to call for intensively managed tree plantations on a portion of B.C.’s lands and a dramatic increase in parkland in the province.

“Such a policy could lead to substantially higher, sustainable timber harvests as well as a system of parks that covers more than half the province,” Binkley wrote. “Implementing such a policy requires a change in forest management approach to zone the landscape and manage each zone intensively for a specific purpose.”

Binkley’s recommendations weren’t taken up by the provincial government, and were likely a casualty of the times.

Just five years earlier, the NDP government headed by then-premier Mike Harcourt had appointed provincial ombudsperson Stephen Owen to head the Commission on Resources and Environment, a process designed to bring an end to the so-called “war in the woods.”

A year earlier, that conflict reached its peak in the arrest of 800 people, 300 of them in a single day, blockading logging roads leading into the old-growth forests of Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was the largest sustained act of civil disobedience in Canadian history until being eclipsed by the arrests of nearly 1,200 men and women who blocked roads leading into the old-growth forests at Fairy Creek a few years ago.

The war in the woods in the 1990s would help lay the groundwork for a number of new parks in B.C., but at the cost of heightened animosity between forest industry unions, traditional supporters of the NDP, First Nations, environmental groups and others, with forest industry workers later burning Owen’s body in effigy in Williams Lake.

The provincial government soon lost its appetite for more parks, let alone taking on the more comprehensive reform of zoning that Binkley advocated.

Zoning becomes more urgent

Fast-forward nearly 30 years and Binkley’s call for zoning has taken on even greater urgency.

Binkley foresaw back in 1997 that the loss of primary forests and a commensurate growth in largely neglected tree plantations was a toxic brew that would harm the environment and the economy alike.

He believed that heavy investments in tending tree plantations here could set the province on a new course where both more wood fibre was produced and more forest was conserved.

Binkley understood that multiple use hadn’t delivered and wouldn’t deliver multiple values, something Werner concurs with. And he is not alone.

In 2020, the provincial government received a report it had commissioned from professional foresters Al Gorley and Garry Merkel. The report, which looked at the future of old-growth forests in the province, called for a “paradigm shift” in the way such landscapes were managed and advocated a “formalized three-zone forest management framework” for the province.

Gorley and Merkel went on to say that those zones should include protected forests where forests and ecosystems would be “largely left alone,” converted forests where logging had already taken place and would continue to take place and, third, what the authors called “consistent” forests where the goal was to manage them so that their ecosystems and biological diversity remained healthy.

The report did not specify exactly what management activities might occur in the protected and consistent zones, and was explicit in saying that zoning decisions would require a high level of consultation with First Nations.

From Binkley through to Gorley and Merkel, the calls for zoning suggest that the provincial government’s approach to managing the province’s forest resources has been a failure and is in need of a radical revamp.

Restoration’s great potential

“The age of multiple use is more or less dead,” Werner said in one of his talks. “It’s not dead because I say it is. It’s dead because we’ve been trying it for 50 years and it hasn’t worked.”

“We can’t do everything on the same piece of land. You can’t maximize two-by-four production and have owls. You can’t maximize fibre and expect to have functional food webs.”

Where Werner sees a huge challenge — one that may deliver great benefits over time but at considerable expense — is in the area of restoration, something his talks illustrated to dramatic effect.

Worldwide, Werner notes, the United Nations has declared this to be the decade of restoration, arguing that without global efforts to restore damaged ecosystems, poverty will rise, extinctions will accelerate and the impacts of climate change will be far worse.

The international Convention on Biological Diversity has also strongly advocated restoration efforts, stating that roughly one-third of degraded ecosystems should be being restored by 2030 and that a further third of ecosystems should be conserved outright by then as well.

In the last few years four parcels of forest land within the large logged-over area Werner focused his two talks on were restored.

The restoration projects each involved 14 square kilometres of tree plantations for a total of 5,600 hectares of land, which combined is an area roughly 14 Stanley Parks in size.

With approximately $1.5 million in funds provided by the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, which invests in wildlife restoration projects using money collected as surcharges on hunting and angling licences and the provincial government, the four areas were treated beginning four years ago with the express purpose of opening them up so that wildlife might once again use them. Partners in the restoration project included the Saik’uz First Nation, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and the Society for Ecosystem Restoration in Northern BC.

Using the tools of logging, from feller-buncher machines to chainsaws and even handsaws, dense and dark tree plantations stocked with as many as 10,000 and sometimes even more planted and naturally reseeded trees per hectare were thinned down so that 600 or fewer trees remained. This was a dramatic difference that turned the treated lands into what from the air looked more like woodland parks with clear spaces between trees for sunlight to reach the once heavily shaded ground, creating openings for light to encourage plant growth and space for animals to move about.

In other cases, small gaps were opened in the forest, ranging in size up to two hectares. In these new clearings, sunlight fell where previously it had not. The debris left over after cutting down the small, planted trees was then piled and left where it was so that scientists could study how it might become habitat for rodents and other small animals.

Over time, as those piles decompose, Werner says, they may eventually become soil hummocks that hold water. In the event of future wildfires they may alter fire behaviour by causing the advancing flames to “skip and jump,” thus leaving some areas of land lightly charred and other areas not at all.

In all cases, this work was done leaving buffers or ribbons of trees between the treated areas and adjacent logging roads so that deer, moose and other animals foraging or moving through them were not seen by two-legged and four-legged predators.

Lastly, money was used to cut down trees to block nearby logging roads so that nobody on ATVs could travel down them scaring away wildlife or carrying hunters closer to their prey. Machinery was also used to dig up and mound earth and debris along entire stretches of logging roads in the restoration areas so that the roads would naturally reseed with trees — a gold standard in road rehabilitation and deactivation.

Restored or destined for toilet paper?

Densely stocked tree plantations are “the British Columbia special,” Werner said. “And, as we all know, and there are thousands of papers corroborating this fact, there is very little biodiversity in these systems and the health and integrity tends to be about as low as you can get.”

The encouraging thing is that those efforts, which have happened almost completely outside the limelight, appear to already be delivering results.

Moose have been seen occupying ground in areas where the plantations were opened up with clearings, while deer appeared to favour sites where the trees had been thinned.

Over time — decades, to be precise — many things may come to pass in such clearings. Perhaps more hardwood trees like aspen will come back, trees that are critical habitat for birds that have plummeted in number across North America in the face of a deepening extinction crisis.

But will these important restoration sites make it that far? It’s a critical question, Werner told his audiences.

As of now, those restored lands are still part of the multi-use, timber-harvesting land base that resulted in them being clearcut logged in the first place.

“Could this be turned into toilet paper 10 years from now? There’s no protection for anything we’ve done. And ecological restoration is a long-term investment. The benefits are not really going to be borne for another 40 to 50 years,” Werner said. “Do we know that investment is going to last?”

A provincial government commitment to a three-zone system that gives the forest industry something to work with year in and year out, a system of protected primary forests where industrial activities are forbidden and a network of restored lands that would not be logged again is, in Werner’s opinion, the only thing that might bring thousands of species back from extirpation or extinction in the province while giving extractive industries an area of land to work in with some certainty.

To not make the leap to such a new regime is to stay the course with a system that has for decades delivered not multiple uses, but multiple and still far from over abuses.