In this week’s newsletter, we chat with B.C. biodiversity reporter Ainslie Cruickshank about British Columbia’s decades-long use of glyphosate, and how logging companies have used herbicides to kill off aspen. We’ve even got a map for that
Ainslie parsed through 2,000-plus pages of herbicide reports and a government database with a cartographer to produce this story about glyphosate use in British Columbia.
Illustration: Alex Boersma / The Narwhal
The dirt on a deciduous declineFor decades in B.C., logging companies have used herbicides to kill off aspen. Restoring deciduous forests could guard against wildfires.
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They act like sponges and can slow down wildfires — and for decades they’ve been weeded out of British Columbia’s forests thanks to herbicides like glyphosate.
I’m talking about the decline of your favourite deciduous tree, aspen. They’re important as we face bigger and more intense wildfires. But they’re at a bit of a disadvantage in B.C. — they’re not destined to be timber, so they’re not all that “desirable.”
“It’s why the province has spent decades killing aspen with herbicides like glyphosate,” The Narwhal’s B.C. biodiversity reporter, Ainslie Cruickshank, told me. “For a long time now, the government has required logging companies to prioritize conifers like pine and spruce — those that don’t could be risking fines.”
Ainslie wanted to know more about the use of glyphosate and the million hectares of B.C. forest where herbicides have been sprayed over the last several decades. Our readers can now easily access that information too, thanks to a gorgeous interactive map created with the help of Nikita Wallia, a spatial analyst and cartography specialist.
After paying a hefty fee on freedom of information requests — which was only possible because our readers stepped up to give what they could — Ainslie had the very fun task of parsing through more than 2,000 pages of herbicide reports that aren’t proactively released to the public. The reports showed what companies tell the province about their spraying plans, including what species they’re targeting.
The government told Ainslie herbicide use has declined significantly since 2018, and that it “works with foresters to grow trees without glyphosate.” But manually cutting down aspen also impacts the forest biodiversity.
“Their war on aspen, the war on deciduous trees, is directly linked to the greed of corporations and the government today,” James Steidle, founder of a group advocating an end to glyphosate spraying, told Ainslie.
The BC NDP pledged to phase out the use of glyphosate during the recent election campaign. But will the province also closely examine its broader policies that prioritize timber over diverse ecosystems, especially in the wake of devastating wildfires? Ainslie and the rest of our B.C. bureau will be keeping close watch — with the help of readers like you.
Alberta is facing a crisis when it comes to the public’s right to know. That crisis is moving in slow motion as the government tries to restrict freedom of information laws — access to documents, emails, you name it.
As Prairies reporter Drew Anderson writes, “Alberta is becoming a place where freedom is defined narrowly as freedom from — freedom from the rights of others, freedom from vaccines, freedom from regulation and, with proposed changes under Bill 34, freedom from factual information. It is a kind of freedom that pits individual rights against collective rights, inevitably eroding each.”
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Ainslie parsed through 2,000-plus pages of herbicide reports and a government database with a cartographer to produce this story about glyphosate use in British Columbia.
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