In 1938 Merv Wilkinson bought a patch of land on Vancouver Island with intentions to farm. But when his professor at UBC got wind of the plan, he suggested Wilkinson try out new type of sustainable forestry that might be better suited to the forested landscape.

What began then as an experiment is now a decades-long example of the success of ecoforestry, a sustainable method of tree harvest designed to preserve the long-term ecological integrity of a place.

Wilkinson’s plot of land, named Wildwood, is now managed by the Ecoforestry Institute Society, a charitable society that carries on Wilkinson’s legacy by demonstrating how timber harvest, ecotourism and conservation efforts can coexist.

“Ecoforestry manages human behaviours in such a way that ecological integrity in a forest setting is maintained intact, over time and through space,” Barry Gates, co-chair of the Ecoforestry Institute Society, told The Narwhal.

“The key there is we manage human behaviours. The forest can manage itself.”

Wilkinson’s work in sustainable forestry earned him  Order of Canada and an Order of British Columbia awards.

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When coloured logging tape appeared in a beloved forest on Stoney Hill in the district of North Cowichan on Vancouver Island in the fall of 2018, local residents naturally started asking questions.

Who owns this land? Who wants to log it? How are they going to log it? What will happen to the wood? Why hasn’t the community been consulted?

Residents were stunned to discover that in fact they own these lands. Or at least, the Municipality of North Cowichan owns these lands.

“People suddenly realized these mountains that everyone thought were owned by private industry were actually owned by the public,” says Icel Dobell, a fifth-generation resident of North Cowichan.

“No one knew this. I’m talking about people who have lived here all their lives — 70 years, 80 years — had no idea,” Dobell says.

‘A unique situation in British Columbia’

“In North Cowichan, that’s a unique situation in British Columbia,” says veteran Vancouver Island forester Ray Travers. “It is public land because it is owned by the municipality, but they own it [outright].”

This differs from most other community forests in B.C., which are either managed under provincial forest licences or are on lands purchased from private owners.

Totaling 5,000 hectares on six mountains (Mount Tzouhalem, Mount Richards, Mount Prevost, Maple Mountain, Mount Sicker and Stoney Hill) North Cowichan’s Municipal Forest Reserve is one of the largest municipally owned forests in North America, encompassing 25 per cent of the North Cowichan land base.

“[The North Cowichan municipal forest] came into the control of the municipality in the 1930s,” Travers says. “When the people who’d owned the land didn’t pay their property taxes, it reverted to the municipality.”

These lands were originally part of the E&N Land Grant, a federal land deal from the 1870s in which approximately 769,000 hectares of land on southeastern Vancouver Island were expropriated from Indigenous peoples and given to the E&N Railway Company to pay for the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway.

The Municipality of North Cowichan is part of the traditional territories of the Cowichan, Halalt, Penelakut and Lyakson First Nations. Upwards of 85 per cent of the Indigenous lands on southeastern Vancouver Island are now private, much of it owned by logging companies such as Island Timberlands and TimberWest.

Hikers enjoy a trail on Maple Mountain in North Cowichan. Maple Mountain is part of the North Cowichan municipal forest. Photo: Chris Istace

A threatened ecosystem

North Cowichan is part of the coastal Douglas-fir biogeoclimatic zone, one of British Columbia’s 18 ecological zones.

“It is one of Canada’s most threatened ecosystems,” says forest ecologist Andy MacKinnon. “It has less than one per cent original forest remaining, high percentages of urban and agricultural land, a relatively low percentage of protected areas and B.C.’s highest percentage of private land, by far.”

He adds: “Not surprisingly, the coastal Douglas-fir zone has B.C.’s highest number of threatened and endangered species and ecosystems.”

While the North Cowichan municipal forest would have all been logged at some point in the past 80 years, according to North Cowichan resident Dobell, these forests are uncommon on this part of the island.

“This is so rare,” Dobell says. “A forest that is 60 or 70 years old that was not replanted in a timber-lot sort of way. Back then, they didn’t log like they do now. They left the enormous arbutus and maple, they left the alder, they left trees that weren’t perfect, like big fir. So people who come into this area that haven’t been here before are shocked by the complexity.”

Icel Dobell, a fifth-generation resident of North Cowichan, was surprised to discover the municipality owns 5,000 hectares of local forests. Photo: Jacqueline Ronson / The Discourse

Citizens unite

The only thing more shocking to North Cowichan residents than the revelation that the municipality owns these forestlands was the realization that they were being considered for logging.

“I found out about the ribbons on Stoney Hill in September,” Dobell said. “And if I’m honest, at first I didn’t want to hear it.”

But one day she was struck by inspiration. Dobell felt compelled to write a story about the plight of the municipal forests. This writing became the basis of a video that she directed and narrated and which was produced by Arrowsmith Media.

“That was what triggered people, was the first article and the film,” Dobell says.

Word began to spread and pretty soon an informal community group formed. Another resident, Rob Fullerton, started a website and they came up with the name “Where Do We Stand?”

They started a petition calling for a pause to any further logging in the municipal forest until a public consultation can be done to reassess the values and priorities of the forest. That petition has generated more than 1,400 comments and signatures to date in support of a pause to the logging.

“We’re not a charity, we’re not a non-profit, we’re just a community,” Fullerton said. “It’s just been a three-month blitz to try and get a pause.”

‘I’ve never seen the chambers that full’

The public backlash in North Cowichan reached a crescendo on December 19 at a meeting of the newly elected mayor and council, with estimates of 200 to 400 people trying to get into the council chambers on a Wednesday afternoon.

“I’ve never seen the chambers that full,” said Mayor Al Siebring. “This issue is generating some considerable interest and that’s fair enough. An engaged community is always a good community, as far as I’m concerned.”

Travers is pleased to see this level of engagement happening. “I would say that [Dobell] struck a responsive chord. When you can get 200 people out to talk about forestry in any community, that’s a major accomplishment in my view.”

The video recording of the event reveals people packed shoulder to shoulder, wrapped all the way around the chamber. One by one, community members step up to the microphone to express their opinions about the municipal forest. Speakers can be broken down into two groups: the ‘pausers’ and the ‘anti-pausers.’ The pausers outnumbered the anti-pausers at least five to one.

Those arguing for a pause emphasized the need  for community consultations. They talked about how forest use is changing, ecotourism is on the rise, climate change is upon us, forests provide valuable ecological services and that there are alternative forestry models to look to, such as Wildwood near Nanaimo.

Those arguing against a pause said there was no need to stop logging. They praised all the good the municipal forest has done for the community, such as land purchases, fire-fighting, educational opportunities and scholarships, as well as the sustainable practices that have been in place since the 1980s.

The community walked away from that meeting without any clear answers, other than a resolution from council not to move forward with any logging or road-building on Stoney Hill until they’ve had time to study the matter further.

A cutblock in the North Cowichan municipal forest. Photo: Arrowsmith Media

A literal windfall

The night after the December 19 meeting, southern Vancouver Island suffered one of the most destructive windstorms in its recorded history. With gusts exceeding 100 kilometers per hour, large swaths of trees were blown down in the North Cowichan municipal forest.

Concerned residents see this literal windfall as an opportunity to cover some of the lost revenue that would result from a pause in logging operations.

Another council meeting is scheduled for February 15 to vote on a budget scenario for 2019. This means deciding whether to log or not to log. If council decides not to log at all, this could blow a $600,000 hole in the budget.

Harvesting the windfall would soften the fiscal blow somewhat and help fund a pause to logging, while public consultations are allowed to take place.

‘Our municipal forest has been severely maligned’

Mayor Siebring has been on council since 2008 and he does not mince words when defending the reputation of the North Cowichan municipal forest.

“Our municipal forest operation has been severely maligned and misrepresented by those who want to stop logging,” Siebring says. “They’re taking out full-page ads, articles in local media, where they talk about, ‘The municipality wants to clear-cut the six mountaintops.’ ”

Siebring takes particular exception to the term “clear-cut.”

“What do you think of when you hear ‘clear-cut?’” Siebring asks. “You think of the worst forestry practices that existed in the ’50s and ’60s. We don’t clear-cut. Since we set up this paradigm in the ’70s, we have never clear-cut.”

Technically speaking, the type of logging that is done in the North Cowichan municipal forest is “clear-cutting with reserves,” meaning loggers do leave a few trees behind. It is clear-cutting, but cutblocks are much smaller than the average in B.C.

The allowable annual cut in the municipal forest is 20,000 cubic metres per year. This translates to a maximum of two per cent of the land base, or 100 hectares, available to log each year, with the forest recycling itself every 50 years. In reality, this has only averaged out to about 44 hectares logged per year.

Cutblocks are replanted and logs are sold to a variety of local sawmills, as well as TimberWest’s log sort yard, where an unknown percentage of the logs go overseas.

North Cowichan operates as a “market logger,” which means the actual harvest levels fluctuate based on wood prices. When prices are up, they try to log the maximum. When prices are down, they leave the trees in the ground.

According to a municipal forest report, in four of the last five years, with wood prices historically high, net revenues from the forest have been just over $1 million a year.

Of that, 20 per cent goes into general revenues to keep taxes down, 40 per cent stays in the reserve fund to fight wildfires and operate in lean years and 40 per cent goes into a forest legacy fund, which funds community projects such as local museums and scholarships.

“Bottom line is I do believe we have done very well by that forest, not just financially but we’ve done a good job of sustainability,” Siebring says. “At the same time, I want the world to know that I am open to improving that.”

‘We stopped being as transparent as we should have been’

In 1981, the municipality established a forest advisory committee to advise North Cowichan’s forestry department staff. Today, the committee is made up of four registered professional foresters and one council member.

With the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the global economy in 2008, wood prices fell very low, so the municipal forest was doing very little logging, other than a few telephone poles for BC Hydro.

Siebring, who had just been elected to council for the first time in 2008, recalls that it was getting a little ridiculous that every time they wanted to cut down a few telephone poles it had to go before council. So council delegated authority to the forestry department and the advisory committee to look after the forestry business.

“That, I think, is fundamentally where we went wrong,” Siebring says. “We stopped being as transparent as we should have been about the way we were logging and the cutblocks we’re logging. For the last 10 years, council hasn’t seen those cutblocks and those logging contracts.”

Icel Dobell says there needs to be a restructuring of the advisory committee.

“Our forest has been run as if it was a private logging company, rather than a community forest,” she says.

A hiker enjoys a fern gully on the yellow trail on Maple Mountain in North Cowichan. Photo: Chris Istace

‘Communities are waking up’

While the particulars of North Cowichan’s situation are no doubt unique, they are not alone in their calls for greater transparency, more community consultation, an examination of alternative forestry methods and the need to reassess the true value of the forests in our own backyards.

“Most of southeastern Vancouver Island was first logged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” says forest ecologist Mackinnon. “The last logging was lost to cultural memory. And so it came as a surprise to many when the trees became large enough and the logging began again.”

Coastal residents of Port Renfrew, Cumberland and Cortes Island, as well as elsewhere in B.C. like Ymir and Grand Forks, are taking a greater interest in the impacts of logging on watersheds, eco-tourism and communities’ ability to weather the uncertainties of climate change.

“Communities are waking up all over Vancouver Island and indeed the province,” Dobell says. “They’ve been surrounded by forests that have been maturing for 60 years and the public assumed that they were forever. Now communities are madly trying to pull together and raise funds, millions of dollars in some cases, to purchase the forests around them.”

The Cumberland Community Forest has done just that. When residents realized that logging companies owned the forests surrounding their community, they began fundraising to purchase them in order to prevent them from being logged. They have raised millions of dollars to date and purchased well over 100 hectares of forestland, with more on their radar.

North Cowichan is in a unique position in that they don’t have to purchase the forests around them — they already own them.

“This conversation is just emerging in our community but we feel it is taking off,” Dobell says. “The more people are learning, the more we realize we don’t know anything about what the alternatives are.”

Mayor Siebring says he is open to a reassessment of what the municipality has been doing.

“I’m hoping that we can come up with a compromise that says, we’re going to do minimal active logging this year, we will keep a bit of a revenue stream going by pulling out the trees that got knocked down in the wind, and give ourselves a year’s breathing room to step back and say, ‘Are we doing the best that we can?’ ”

The agenda for the upcoming council meeting on February 15 indicates changes are indeed coming to the forest advisory committee, with several new people being added to the group, including members of the Cowichan Tribes, Halalt and Lyakson First Nations.

A decision will be made on Friday about whether slated logging will continue in 2019, or whether a pause will happen to allow for community consultations.

*Correction made at 11 a.m. on Feb. 19, 2019: The article originally stated the E&N land grants totalled 300,000 hectares, but they actually totalled 769,000 hectares.

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When 12,000 people showed up on the remote coast of Vancouver Island in the summer of 1993 for the Clayoquot Sound blockades, history was in the making.

It was one of the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in Canadian history, with almost 1,000 people arrested in what would become known as the War in the Woods. The arrests of youth and elders were seen on television screens and in newspapers around the world.

“We needed to put Clayoquot Sound on the map,” recalls Valerie Langer, who was a young literacy teacher at the time. Langer, who had travelled to Vancouver Island on a tree-planting contract, would become one of the core organizers of the Clayoquot Sound blockades and helped found the group that later became ForestEthics, now Stand.earth.

“Nobody could pronounce the word Clayoquot, let alone knew that it was an area of temperate rainforest. Nobody knew there were rainforests in Canada, rainforests were a tropical thing.”

The Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations — who had stewarded the natural abundance of Clayoquot Sound since at least the last ice age — were opposed to the industrial-scale forestry being practiced and the complete lack of consultation around land-use planning in their territories.

Langer set about strategizing with her allies in the Friends of Clayoquot Sound on how to support the Nuu-chah-nulth efforts to protect these intact old-growth watersheds from logging by timber giant Macmillan-Bloedel.

“We wanted to gain power with the company,” Langer says. “Rather than standing literally in the wilderness shouting about how wrong they were, we were going to go where their customers were.”

Within the next two years, Macmillan-Bloedel had lost at least $200 million in pulp, paper and wood contracts, Langer says.

This forced the company and the government to the table.

In 1993 protesters blocked an access road, preventing MacMillan Bloedel from continuing its Clayoquot Sound logging operations. Police arrived to read a court injunction, demanding the road be cleared. The order was summarily ignored by protesters. Photos: Ademoor

Macmillan-Bloedel gradually extricated itself from Clayoquot Sound and turned over control of the tree farm licence to the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations.

It was a big victory. And after sweeping changes to B.C. forest policy that came in its wake, a lot of people thought this issue had been dealt with. But 25 years later, B.C. forests are in crisis.

The province is currently facing a crash in harvest volumes, the closure of mills and widespread layoffs, not to mention the continued loss of old-growth forests.

Old-growth forests on the brink

Longtime environmental activist and Order of Canada recipient Vicky Husband talks about Vancouver Island’s ancient temperate rainforests with deep reverence and great sadness.

“You know, I’ve travelled the whole world,” she says. “We have some of the rarest forests on Earth — and we’re throwing them away.”

Husband has been fighting for ancient forests on the West Coast for more than 40 years. She has been on the front lines of the epic fights for Clayoquot Sound, Gwaii Haanas and many other historic wins for the ancient forest movement.

“We got some really important watersheds, with great battles,” she recalls. “But it was just not nearly enough.”

On Vancouver Island, the most productive old-growth forests in the valley-bottoms, those most cherished by environmentalists for their ecological, carbon and cultural values — and prized by the timber industry for their timber value — have reached crisis levels.

A clearcut on Vancouver Island, B.C., shows Big Lonely Doug exposed, centre left. Big Lonely Doug is the second-largest douglas fir in Canada. Photo: TJ Watt

According to Sierra Club BC, Vancouver Island has lost 30 per cent of its original forests over the past 25 years, leaving less than seven per cent of the island’s most productive and endangered old growth. On average, nearly 9,000 hectares of old growth were logged annually from 2011 to 2015. And old-growth logging is speeding up. In 2016, that annual amount jumped to nearly 11,000 hectares, the equivalent of 26 Stanley Parks.

Critics, policy analysts and environmentalists all agree that to understand the escalating loss of old growth, as well as the overall decline of forest health and industry employment, one must look back to how B.C.’s public forests became virtually privatized.

An aerial view of Flores Island in Clayoquot Sound. Photo: TJ Watt

The privatization of B.C.’s forests

After the Clayoquot Sound protests, the NDP government of the day set aside dozens of intact valleys and set about reforming forestry across the province. It introduced the Forest Practices Code in 1994, which had more stringent forestry regulations than ever before, and created the Forest Practices Board, an independent oversight body with real teeth for those who broke the law.

But in 2003, the BC Liberals came to power with a sizable majority, ushering in the dark years for B.C.’s forests. As environmental groups turned their focus to other issues, such as climate change, the Liberal government set about deregulating the forest industry.

Ken Wu of the Ancient Forest Alliance — who was 19 during the summer of 1993 and has not stopped fighting for old-growth forests since — says that while the ’90s saw significant progress in forestry, “under the BC Liberals it became a full-scale attempt at rollback.”

In 2004, the Forest Practices Code was replaced with a watered down Forest and Range Practices Act; the Forest Practices Board, the independent watchdog for the industry, was de-fanged; and industry oversight was outsourced from the public service to professionals paid by industry (a system known as “professional reliance,” which is currently under review).

Herb Hammond, a forest ecologist and veteran eco-forester from the Slocan Valley, sees it this way: “Professional reliance, coupled with getting rid of the forest service and legislated standards for forestry, simply privatized the forest.”

One of the most significant changes to forest legislation under the Liberals was the removal of appurtenancy — the longstanding requirement that to log public timber, companies had to operate local mills.

According to Arnie Bercov of the Public and Private Workers Union (formerly the Pulp and Paper Workers Union), which represents mill-workers and value-added producers, the elimination of appurtenancy, “was a complete betrayal of our social contract.”

Corporate consolidation of public forests

Deregulation was compounded by the vast majority of timber licences being consolidated into the hands of very few companies, which freely traded tenures to create regional monopolies.

The result is that the majority of public timber goes to large, centralized mega-mills cranking out cheap commodity lumber, while independent wood producers struggle to access the right logs for their mills.

According to the Interior Lumber Manufacturers Association, “Independents and specialty manufacturers will have increasing difficulties accessing enough of the right logs to remain competitive, so these sectors will continue to shrink.”  

From 2000 to 2016, 26 sawmills shut their doors in the Interior. On the coast, 18 mills closed up shop — a combined loss of 44 sawmills across the province.

The export of unprocessed logs from the coast also doubled under the BC Liberals, from less than 3 million cubic metres in 2001 to more than 6 million cubic metres in 2016. At the same time, employment in the forest industry declined by 32,000 jobs.

Old-growth cedar logs. Photo: TJ Watt

Truck Loggers Association executive director David Elstone refutes that there is any causal link between plummeting employment and skyrocketing log exports, attributing the loss of forestry jobs to “technological innovation” and “constant erosion of the working forest.”

By “constant erosion of the working forest,” Elstone is referring to areas that have been taken off the menu for timber companies to log, due to environmental protections, beetles or wildfire.

The technological innovations Elstone is talking about are technologies such as LIDAR, a surveying method which allows industry to plan operations and assess timber supply with far less boots on the ground. He is also talking about feller-bunchers, nightmarish machines that have made it possible for two people to take down an entire forest in a matter of days.

But even Elstone — who generally defends the status quo of volume-based industrial forestry — agrees with the idea that the forest industry has become overly consolidated: “We feel there is too much of the timber tenure in too few hands,” he says.

Mountain pine beetle and the interior timber supply crisis

The ancient forests of the coast are not the only forests that environmentalists and foresters are concerned about. B.C.’s interior forests have been ravaged by catastrophic beetle outbreaks, wildfires and unsustainable “salvage” operations by industry.

Now interior B.C. is facing a midterm timber supply crisis and a sharp reduction in Annual Allowable Cut. This may not come as a surprise as the mountain pine beetle wiped out more than 50 per cent of the merchantable pine forests across the province.

But according to ecologist and eco-forester Hammond, the pine beetle was far from being a natural disaster. “We created that problem,” he says.

First, we created global warming, “which removed the biggest control factor for the mountain pine beetle — cold winters,” Hammond says.

Second, we were so successful in suppressing forest fires that we stockpiled vast stands of mature pine, thus creating a buffet for beetles.

Third, we logged old-growth forests. Old growth scattered about the Interior once provided habitat for birds and other predators of the beetle, helping to regulate populations. With most of those forests now gone, beetles face less predation.

And fourth, “clear-cutting large areas dried out the landscape, stressed the ecosystems, and set forests up for successful attacks by the mountain pine beetle,” Hammond says.

But it didn’t stop there. With so much standing dead wood and a limited time frame in which to cash it in, the B.C. government increased the Annual Allowable Cut to vastly unsustainable levels and allowed the industry to recover what value they could from the dead pine.

“What the timber industry saw here,” Hammond says, “was a short-term gold mine to salvage pine.” He explains that if a stand contained 30 per cent pine, they were able to log the entire stand — including high value non-pine species — at a deep discount.

The result was years of over-harvesting, way beyond any notion of a sustainable yield, under the guise of a so-called salvage operation for dead pine, in which vast quantities of perfectly healthy non-pine were also being logged out of the landscape.

Potential for a breakthrough in old growth protection

Despite this bleak picture, there is actually some hope amongst environmentalists and some more ecologically minded foresters about the moment in which we now find ourselves, with the NDP once again in power.

While Wu was disappointed by the NDP’s approval of the Site C dam, he remains hopeful: “This is the first social democratic government supported by Greens in North American history, so right now we have the greatest potential for a breakthrough in the protection of old growth.”

While the NDP have thus far continued with the status quo forest policies of the previous government, their platform states: “In partnership with First Nations and communities, we will modernize land-use planning to effectively and sustainably manage B.C.’s ecosystems, rivers, lakes, watersheds, forests and old growth, while accounting for cumulative effects. We will take an evidence-based scientific approach and use the ecosystem-based management of the Great Bear Rainforest as a model.”

Premier John Horgan also dropped a few hints in his throne speech and in the following press scrum that changes are coming to B.C. forest policy.

B.C. Premier John Horgan visits Structurlam, in Penticton B.C. Photo: B.C. Government via Flickr

“The government will revitalize the forest industry’s social contract with British Columbians,” Horgan said. He also promised to, “make sure that every log that is taken from a public forest, the benefit is maximized to the people in the community.”

When pressed by the Vancouver Sun on whether he was proposing further restrictions on log exports and bringing back appurtenancy (that old requirement to log public timber near the area where it was harvested), Horgan confirmed that he was.

Bercov of the Public and Private Workers Union is encouraged by the prospect of reinstating appurtenancy, but is not satisfied with words.

“We expect action,” he says. “They campaigned on bringing forestry back to the communities and the only way they’re going to do that is through appurtenancy.”

‘The real problem is corporate control of public forests’

But Hammond says that appurtenancy does not get to the heart of the matter: “If you just add appurtenancy to the existing tenure system, you’re not dealing with the real problem. The real problem is corporate control of public forests.”

Bercov agrees that banning log exports or reinstating appurtenancy will not save the industry.

“The solution, quite honestly, is we have to build more mills,” Bercov says. “And the only way we are going to attract investment is to work with First Nations.”

Becov continues, “I would like to see every single log that’s cut here manufactured here, not because it’s mandated, but because we create the conditions. We create opportunities for First Nations to control their own destiny.”

“And that means real co-management, shared jurisdiction and decision-making authority,” Hammond says. “Then I think we will see some really good Indigenous models.”

Coastal temperate rainforest. Photo: TJ Watt

The Great Bear Rainforest agreements

When Langer looks back on the Clayoquot Sound campaign, she sees it this way: “It wasn’t an event. It was a process, in which First Nations increasingly gained decision-making authority over what was going to happen to the forests in their territories.”

If we pull on the thread from Clayoquot Sound to today it leads directly to the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements, a set of science-based rules for logging in the central and north coast forests established in 2016 and negotiated over a decade.

Langer was at the table for those tense and often fraught negotiations, which she describes as, “probably the most comprehensive forestry and human well-being framework that exists in the world. It has the most stringent commercial forestry laws in North America.”

The agreement protected 85 per cent of the Great Bear Rainforest from any kind of resource extraction, placed strict ecosystem-based forestry regulations on the logging that happens in the remaining 15 per cent and put First Nations into a co-management role with the B.C. government.

It also provided financing for First Nations to be able to seed economic development initiatives, such as clean energy projects, tourism and other alternatives to old-growth logging.

While some more strident environmentalists see the Great Bear agreement as less than ideal, with problematic loopholes, proponents argue that more intact forest was protected under this agreement than in any other environmental deal in history — and was done in a way that put First Nations in a leadership role.

While organizations like the Truck Loggers Association may decry the agreement as the “further erosion of the working forest,” the rest of B.C. does not come close to meeting the rigorous standards of ecosystem-based management set out in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Decolonizing forestry in B.C.

“I’m just going to say it: we have a colonial mentality in this province,” Adam Olsen, Green MLA from Saanich North and the Islands, told DeSmog Canada on the phone. Olsen,  a member of the Tsartlip First Nation, said, “It’s the same as it was 200 years ago.”

“We need to start being informed by my Saanich elders,” Olsen said. “So ecosystem-based management for me is about understanding what our place is in all this.”

Hammond has studied ecosystem-based conservation planning for decades and has worked with communities and First Nations across B.C. on managing their local forestlands.

For him, the current model of industrial logging that prioritizes timber value above all else is backwards.

“Protecting and restoring ecological integrity of forests needs to be the focus of forestry, not timber extraction,” Hammond says. “In the absence of that, we are only contributing to our own demise.”

Klanawa Valley on Vancouver Island. Photo: TJ Watt

This means prioritizing ecosystem services such as hydrology, biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Timber harvesting can still happen under this model, but in a much smaller and more strategic way than it is today.

Indigenous-led, ecosystem-based approaches to conservation planning are gaining ground across the province, which leads us right back to Clayoquot Sound.

The Ahousaht First Nation — one of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations in Clayoquot Sound — recently revealed its new land-use vision, in which 80 per cent of the old-growth in Ahousaht territory will be off limits to logging, while tourism, fishing, selective forestry, ecology and cultural use will be prioritized on the remaining land-base.

Most importantly, the Ahousaht have asserted their right to manage all aspects of their unceded lands, waters, resources and economy for the benefit of their people and ecosystems. And the other nations in Clayoquot Sound are not far behind in their own land-use planning processes.

“The forest industry is not just about cutting trees anymore,” Bercov says. “It’s about climate change, it’s about First Nations rights and title, it’s about ecosystems.”

“That means a significant portion of the forest land base that might have commercially valuable timber on will not be logged,” Hammond says. “It’s going to be for water, for biodiversity.”

“We have to start doing more with less,” Bercov says. “We have to start getting maximum value out of the trees that we cut. We’re not doing that.”

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Despite widespread condemnation from conservation groups and scientists, the B.C. government is set to continue shooting wolves from helicopters in an attempt to save endangered mountain caribou herds from local extinction in the South Selkirk, South Peace and North Columbia herd areas.

The wolf cull is happening in conjunction with other measures to try and stem the decline of mountain caribou herds, including maternity penning projects and restricting snowmobiles in some critical habitat.

“The wolf cull, maternity pens, it’s all part of the talk-and-log process that’s going on,” says Craig Pettitt of the Valhalla Wilderness Society. “We know damn well that the caribou need habitat and, as we talk, they are logging their habitat.”

Pettitt lives in the Slocan Valley and has worked on caribou issues since the early 1970s. He can see the logging from his window.

While government scientists say the wolf cull is necessary, many independent scientists are skeptical this strategy will have any meaningful long-term effect on the recovery of the mountain caribou, without significant measures to restore and protect their habitat.

ICYMI: How Canada Is Driving Its Endangered Species to the Brink of Extinction

According to the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development “wolves are the leading cause of mortality” amongst caribou in the South Peace region, attributing 37 per cent of adult caribou deaths to wolves.

“Habitat loss, due to industrial development and recreational activities, has also adversely affected the number of caribou,” the ministry acknowledges. This includes oil and gas, mining and forestry.

When old-growth forests are clear-cut, nutrient-rich habitat is depleted and the early growth that comes back attracts deer and moose. This brings more wolves, which prey upon the caribou as by-catch. Roads and transmission lines also limit the area in which caribou can hide and provide easy access for wolves to travel and hunt, making them more successful predators.

“As a result, we’re decimating their food source, we’re fragmenting their habitat and we’re facilitating access for wolves,” Pettitt says. “So to start targeting wolves without dealing with the other side of the equation is a talk-and-log process.”

Habitat protections a ‘sham’

So has the B.C. government set aside enough suitable habitat for caribou? Certainly the government is placing some land off limits to certain types of activity, from coal mining to oil and gas development to snowmobiling.

But if you ask Virginia Thompson – who represented the Revelstoke-Shuswap planning district during the 2007 Mountain Caribou Recovery Implementation Planning (MCRIP) process – the province isn’t doing nearly enough.

“It is a sham that they did any habitat recovery in this planning area,” she said.

Thompson recalls scientists recommended to the province in 2007 that about 34,000 additional hectares of caribou habitat needed to be set aside from logging in her unit. The province agreed to set aside 10,000 hectares. And even this minimal amount was eventually whittled down by amendments and loopholes for the forest industry to continue business as usual.

“This [wolf cull] is a drastic, over-the-top bloodbath,” Thompson says. “And they haven’t even done the minimal amount of habitat control that they promised to do in the last recovery plan.”

“We know damn well that the caribou need habitat and, as we talk, they are logging their habitat.” https://t.co/YVTyet6upO

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 19, 2018

Too little, too late

While some of the larger herds, such as the Columbia North herd, may still have time to recover, given significant measures are taken to restore their habitat, it may be too late for some herds.

“We’re now in the position where we’ve waited too long,” says Hannah Barron, conservation director at Wolf Awareness. “So now it seems that we’re trying to stem the decline [of caribou] rather than recover the species. It is kind of a last ditch attempt to make it look like they’re doing something, all the while habitat destruction continues.”

The government says predator to prey ratios need to be controlled to allow caribou herds to stop declining. To illustrate this point, the ministry highlights the South Peace region, where the caribou population in wolf control zones has increased from 166 to 192, an increase of 16 per cent since the wolf cull began. In contrast, in the South Peace areas where no wolf control has happened, adult mortality remains high and calf recruitment is low.

However, in the South Selkirk region, government scientists say in their 2017 wolf management report the program “is not demonstrating success in terms of increased caribou numbers.”

Sara Dubois from the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC questions when the government will draw the line.

“Even if you remove wolves, there are other predators, there are cougars. Do you go in and remove all the cougars next? Where do you stop?” she asked.

Even the ministry’s own scientists acknowledge that wolf recovery from year to year has been so persistent that, “a very extensive effort will be required every year to continue to keep the wolf population low.”

World-leading authority on wolves Paul Paquet writes in his essay, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Wolf As Scapegoat: “Quite simply, people are the ultimate cause of caribou endangerment through the ongoing degradation imposed by our resource industries on caribou habitat… Yet, governments habitually favour the destruction of wolves over any consequential protection, enhancement or restoration of caribou habitat.”

Industry at the wheel

Some evidence as to what is driving this agenda can be gleaned from a single line in the review of last year’s wolf management plan, which reads: “Continued successful implementation of wolf control is seen as an essential step by industrial sectors, since significant habitat has already been set aside to help recover caribou.”

The ministry states that it has, “worked extensively with companies and sector organizations to advance caribou management and recovery.”

But Pettitt sees this statement as an admission that industry is influencing government policy. “That quote is by the industrial sectors. They’re driving the government. They’re saying, look, we’re not giving up any more habitat. You go out there and kill wolves.”

Last year, nearly 100 wolves were killed in the South Peace and South Selkirk areas combined. While ministry staff say it is difficult to predict how many wolves will be culled this year, their stated intention is, “to remove all wolves found in the treatment areas.”

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In 2012, I took a fateful trip to Cortes Island — a northern gulf island three ferry rides away from Vancouver — to document the Cortes community’s fight to fend off an impending logging operation by coastal timber giant Island Timberlands.

Community members took us deep into the woods privately owned by Island Timberlands and showed us the hidden pockets of old-growth that the company was targeting. I was struck by how passionate and knowledgeable these Cortes residents were about the land, sharing a trove of fascinating information about the fungal networks underlying our footsteps and their relationships with the giant trees that were scattered throughout this complex and ancient ecosystem.

They explained why cutting down this forest and replacing it with young trees was not adequate to protect the values they held dear. A young forest simply could not filter the drinking water, or sustain the wildlife, or generate the tourism interest that they required to continue living on this tiny island. And furthermore, they felt there was something sacred here that simply should not be tampered with.

Heartwood: A West Coast Forestry Documentree [NEW TRAILER] from Ramshackle Pictures on Vimeo. Fund this work on Indiegogo.

I also discovered that while these people were opposed to the clear-cutting of these ancient forests, most of them were not entirely opposed to logging — they simply had a different vision for how it should be done. A group on Cortes had been engaged for 20 years in efforts to obtain a Community Forest in partnership with the Klahoose First Nation. If granted, this would give Cortes the chance to manage nearly all of its public forestlands in a model of its choosing. What follows are some of the ideas for how Cortes intended to do things differently.

Firstly, the forest industry had been on a race to the bottom for years, harvesting smaller and smaller trees at younger and younger ages, sometimes as young as 50 years. But Cortes had a vision for extending growing rotations to 200 years, allowing trees to grow to a greater size, quality and value, increasing the ratio of clear heartwood at the centre of the trees — the wood that carpenters cherish.

This would allow mosses and lichens to return, providing nitrogen for the trees and food for the deer, which would in turn become prey for larger predators such as wolves and cougars. In other words — cultivating a healthy ecosystem.

When it comes time to harvest again, rather than taking out all the trees using feller-bunchers and burning the so-called waste wood on the hillsides — as is the current practice in the industry — Cortes would employ hand-fallers to selectively harvest middle-aged trees, leaving the youngest trees to continue growing and the oldest trees to continue providing wildlife habitat and seed for new trees.

According to Ben Parfitt of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, as of 2008, “17.5 million cubic meters of usable wood has been left behind at logging operations in BC, an amount that would fill a line of logging trucks lined bumper to bumper on the Trans Canada Highway from Vancouver to Halifax and almost all the way back again.” That is a staggering amount of wood being left to rot or burn — and a substantial amount of carbon being released into our atmosphere.

Finally, rather than exporting the wood overseas, Cortes wanted to create a local value-added industry, with local millers and manufacturers making finished wood products out of the raw materials before the timber left the island.

Raw log exports have accelerated dramatically on the coast in recent years. B.C. has seen a 1,200 per cent increase in unprocessed wood leaving our shores in the past decade, with the vast majority of those logs coming from the coast, where there are more private lands and fewer restrictions on log exports. Meanwhile, over half of coastal mills have closed shop in the past 20 years. By processing that wood here in B.C., we could keep more people employed while harvesting less timber.

It was this vision for a forest industry that works for the people as well as for the forests that sparked my interest in making a documentary. Films about people trying to stop logging had already been done. But a film about people trying to practice truly sustainable forestry was something that I had never seen before.

#Cortes Island: A Different Vision for #Forestry in British Columbia https://t.co/iz93GAZ7OH #bcpoli #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) September 6, 2016

Throughout the course of making this film, the Cortes Island vision of starting a Community Forest has come to fruition. In October 2013, the B.C. government granted Klahoose and the Cortes Forestry Co-Op a Community Forestry Agreement, granting them the ability to manage most of the Crown forestlands on Cortes for the long-term benefit of their community.

They have hired a forest manager, surveyed much of the land-base, and have begun selectively harvesting several areas on Cortes. In a spirit of transparency rarely seen in B.C.’s forest sector, the Cortes Community Forest Partnership has allowed me to film their operations on the ground for my documentary. They have been eager to show the world the caliber of forestry that is being done on Cortes.

And it has been fascinating getting to witness the level of thought that goes into selecting which trees will remain, which will be cut, and how those trees will be taken down so as not to damage the ones that are being left behind. It is a level of care and skill that I had never witnessed before in any industrial clear-cuts.

That is not to say there aren’t challenges. Finding local fallers has been difficult, so off-island fallers have had to be brought in. Eco-forestry is expensive, so the margins are thin, adding pressure to harvest more than the community may be comfortable with at first. Furthermore, people haven’t had time to invest in milling equipment or woodshops, so some logs are leaving the island unprocessed. And there is pressure from the B.C. government, whose Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) dictates the minimum amount of timber that must be harvested each year.

So by no means is Cortes some utopia. There is a whole range of dilemmas and disagreements on the island about how much timber should be logged, where it should be done, how it should be done, who should log it, who should mill it, and how much timber — if any — should be leaving the island unprocessed.

But this is all a work in progress. The hope is that as the Community Forest puts some money in the bank, it will be able to assist the community in building up its value-added industries. And after just its second harvest, they were able to sell more wood on-island than the first time around. So things are moving in the right direction. But in order to stay on track, Cortes must not lose the trust they worked so hard to build. This means keeping the lines of communication open — and really listening to input from the community. It is, after all, a community forest.

In the past four years that I’ve spent documenting forestry issues on the coast, I have come to realize that whatever solutions we concoct must take into account the First Nations whose unceded territories dominate these lands; the thousands of forestry workers that depend on these forests for employment; and the coastal communities that depend on these forests for other uses such as clean water, tourism and recreation. The only solutions that will be truly sustainable are the ones that don’t try to compromise between our multiple forest values, but that bring them all up together as a synergistic whole.

My Heartwood series is about moving to a place where the various forest users in B.C. no longer have to be in conflict with one another. It is about moving beyond the paradigm where timber value is the sole metric for the value of a forest. It is about coming up with a holistic value system that takes into account all the intangible and unquantifiable services that forests provide our communities.

And yes, it is also about getting to a place where communities can sustainably grow and harvest timber for generations to come. These are not new ideas. The solutions have been floating around for decades. It’s just that finally — at least on Cortes Island ­— some of them are finally starting to be implemented. It’s time for the rest of the province to catch up and start moving in the same direction.

Daniel J. Pierce is a Victoria-based documentary filmmaker. He is almost finished production on a documentary series entitled Heartwood: A West Coast Forestry Documentree. He is in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the post-production of this series. 

Image: TJ Watt of the Ancient Forest Alliance.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.