Private Forests: One Town’s Clearcut Dilemma

If you stand outside the Waverley Hotel on Cumberland’s main street and turn 360 degrees, every stick of vegetation you can see in the hills around town is privately owned. It’s an unusual situation in a province where 96 per cent of forestland is held in public trust by the crown. Unfortunately these days this timber is falling faster than the winter rain and it’s the reason citizens in the surly little Vancouver Island town decided a few years ago that the only way to save it was to buy it. So far they have met with mixed success in their efforts.

Understanding the battle between citizens and private land loggers on the east coast of the island requires looking back to the year 1884 when Prime Minister John A. Macdonald convinced coal magnate Robert Dunsmuir to build the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway. It was a long overdue attempt to meet one of the conditions laid out by British Columbia when it joined confederation in 1871 – that is, the federal government would have to complete the promised extension of the transcontinental railway on Vancouver Island before the westernmost colony would sign on. To sweeten the deal, Ottawa lined Dunsmuir’s pockets with $750,000 cash and 2.1 million acres of land on the Island along with all mineral rights. It was a land deal that would shape the future of Vancouver Island.

Right from its rough and tumble early days Cumberland was a settlement built on resource extraction, its shifting fortunes forever tied to the whims of absentee landlords. After securing mineral rights in the late 1800s, Dunsmuir proceeded to mine a fortune from the land around town, fueling a boom that lasted well into the following century. Today most of the island coalmines are long shut, the last one around Cumberland closing in the 1950s. The Dunsmuir family’s impressive land empire has been dismantled, its Vancouver Island land holdings parceled up, sold and re-sold to the point where today a myriad of private land loggers share in the bounty.

‘Quality of life’ forest

Now logging not mining shapes the destiny of Cumberland. However, as residents have quickly learned, logging profits don’t necessarily translate into smiles and goodwill within the community next door that has to live with the results of clearcut logging long after the CEO’s bonus and the shareholder’s dividend has been paid.

For years loggers have been polishing their elbows in the Waverley Hotel pub. Today they share barstools with young professionals, musicians and artists that have moved here for the small town heritage ambiance as well as others in search of affordable housing. Once firmly rooted in working class, resource industry values, Cumberland’s character has slowly changed. The surrounding forest is no longer viewed as an inexhaustible resource but rather as something to be preserved, part of that nebulous, difficult to quantify attribute called “character” and “quality of life.”

Ironically the historic coal-mining town that touts itself as the “village in the forest” is in danger of becoming known as the village in the clearcut. The dull drone of skidders and feller bunchers is replacing the call of ravens.

Former UBC dean manages firm

Hancock Timber Resource Group, the forest management arm of the huge Boston-based firm Hancock Insurance, owns thousands of hectares of land next to Cumberland. It’s just a small portion of the company’s land empire, an archipelago that takes in parts of Canada, the U.S. and Australia and New Zealand and tops 1.2 million hectares. HTRG’s managing director, Clark Binkley, is well known among B.C. forestry circles. In his former life as dean of the UBC Faculty of Forestry Binkley was a vociferous advocate of privatizing B.C.’s forests, arguing that it would make for a more globally competitive forest sector.  These days the folks in Cumberland might object to this thesis.

Four years ago the first of two efforts by locals to claw back some of the private land around their town began. Hancock was poised to fire up the chainsaws on the south side of Cumberland, a lush tract of second growth hemlock, fir and cedar that was popular among hikers, mountain bikers, mushrooms pickers and naturalists. Citizens decided to do something about it, formed the Cumberland Community Forest Society and started discussions with Hancock about the possibility of buying the forest and preserving it as a park. Four years later, through donations and pledges, the society is close to inking a deal with the company to purchase 100 hectares of forest to the tune of around $1 million. It’s a strong fundraising effort for a village of 2500 but in the overall fate of the surrounding forest it’s like a finger in the dam – locals still had the feeling that the town was under siege.

Two years ago Hancock announced plans to start logging forest on the opposite side of town. Another bunch of citizens decided that if Cumberland was to remain the “village in the forest” more of it needed to be kept intact. Instead of competing with the fundraising efforts of their neighbours working on the “Cumberland forest,” they decided to do something different – search for investors who would be interested in putting money into a 600-hectare forest (roughly the size of your average crown woodlot.)

However the forest wouldn’t be a park. - it would be managed as a sustainable woodlot and the logging proceeds, after local foresters, fallers and machine operators were paid, would pay down the debt. It had an almost utopian ring to it, a forest managed in a progressive fashion that would demonstrate an alternative to the status quo clearcut logging the community had become accustomed to. They gave the project a name and did what citizens of small towns do well - formed another organization, calling it the Whytes Bay Forest Society before announcing their intentions to Hancock. Members of the society were a cross-section of Cumberland – a schoolteacher, herbalist and resource management consultant to name a few.

‘No other models’

From the outset, Hancock was clear about its own financial needs – meet its price tag of at least $3.8 million and it’s theirs.

Woodlots on crown land are aplenty but when the group went searching for an example of a group of citizens that had financed the purchase of private land through sustainable harvesting, it came up short.

“There were no other models out there of a group who had bought private land and serviced the debt through sustainable logging,” says Amanda Howe, one of the residents who was involved in the initiative early.

Before courting investors the group needed a timber survey that could be used to project forest revenues as well as proceeds from other non-timber products such as salal, used in flower arranging, and wild mushrooms. This would form the foundation of a business plan and it had to be sustainable – meaning the forest would have to remain a forest forever.

Plans can be tinkered to meet objectives – in this case sustainable logging - but when the numbers are distilled and analyzed cold hard reality sets in. Wisely the Whytes Bay Forest Society decided to be conservative in its projections of future forest revenues.

As soon as the idealistic citizens crunched the numbers, they realized what they were up against. Meeting Hancock’s asking price and servicing the debt meant they would have to remove every stick of timber and turn into the moonscape they had set out to prevent . So much for the sustainable woodlot concept.

Clearcut it so save it?

“We were faced with a decision – buy it, clearcut it and then at least we’d have it for future generations. But we’d have had to destroy the very values we were trying to preserve just so that we could buy it,” Howe explains. “If you do that it’s just status quo – you’re playing their game.”   Angela Smailes, another Whytes Bay society member, says the group was excited about the possibility of doing something different in forestry, to manage a resource in a way that would respect ecology while benefiting the local community.

“If we privatize the forest we can’t log it sustainably. That’s what it’s shown,” Smailes says.

Privatizing forest may, as HTRG’s Binkley once told a gathering of the B.C. Private Landowners’ Association, make for a more “ world competitive forest sector.”  Smailes, on the other hand, sees it differently.

“That’s why globalization sucks, it doesn’t do anything for small communities,” she says.

Hancock’s bottom line

Still it’s hard to fault Hancock. The company plays in a global economy with rules that can run roughshod over neighbourhood issues about logging. To its credit Hancock has proven patient and willing to work with the community, but ultimately is responsible to far-flung pension plan holders not to the dreams of locals.

“We have a long track record of having an open-door policy. We will always listen to proposals and weigh them against our internal objectives and client objectives,” says John Davis, HRTG’s Pacific-Northwest Manager

He points to the fact that HRTG held off on logging the so-called “Cumberland forest” for several years to enable citizens to launch a fundraising campaign. As for the other chunk of land, dubbed the Whytes Bay Forest by locals, Davis is unapologetic, saying that the company simply isn’t in the business of giving and away.

“The bottom line is we have a legal obligation to achieve market value for the sale of assets that we own. It’s a fact that we have to deal with. We can’t give things away,” he says.

Cumberland may be getting a chunk of forest as a gift thanks to the efforts of the Cumberland Community Forest Society, but dreams of a sustainable community logging operation have been derailed by simple economics. And as the clearcuts get closer to town, the relationship between places like Cumberland and private land loggers will continue to be an uneasy one.

Vancouver Island journalist Andrew Findlay is a regular contributor to The Tyee whose pieces have appeared in the Vancouver Sun and many other publications.