Here is a “Did you Know?” clip on Shaw TV this week featuring the AFA's Ken Wu talking about BC's old-growth forests, their importance, and their continued endangerment on Vancouver Island by industrial logging:
Be sure to check out AFA photographer TJ Watt's photo of a sitka spruce forest near Nitinat Lake in the latest issue of Scientific American magazine! The article speaks with Dr. Sally Aitken of the UBC Faculty of Forestry on her work to help trees adapt to a rapidly changing climate. Sally has also helped with the recent revival of the BC Big Tree Registry as well!
At the end of a logging road, past expanses of clear-cut land, is the entrance to one of the largest contiguous tracts of old-growth rainforest on Vancouver Island.
The Central Walbran Valley near Port Renfrew is not protected parkland, but has incalculable ecological value, environmentalists say.
“You come to this area of pristine old growth and everything changes. Your mood changes. It’s — how do I put it — it gives you a feeling of well-being,” said environmentalist Saul Arbess.
“An undisturbed ancient forest like that is extraordinary.”
Arbess is one of many environmentalists mobilizing to protect a portion of the valley around Castle Grove known as “The Bite” for its bite-shaped exclusion from neighbouring Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park. The ancient western red cedars, sitka spruce and hemlock forests are home to species such as the threatened marbled murrelet.
Tonight at 7 p.m., environmentalists plan to gather at the Fernwood Community Centre to discuss next steps in their campaign to stop Surrey-based Teal-Jones Group from carrying out plans to log eight cutblocks in the 486-hectare area.
It’s a familiar battle for Arbess, with a familiar foe in the forestry industry. In the early 1990s, Arbess took part in a lengthy blockade of logging trucks in the Walbran Valley, as part of an ongoing “war in the woods” that included the massive Clayoquot Sound protests in 1993.
The conflict ended with Teal Jones surrendering 7,035 hectares of its licence to form Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park. But multiple flare-ups since then suggest negotiators didn’t quite get it right.
“We live with the mistakes of history, there’s no question about it,” Arbess said.
For representatives from Teal Jones, which employs more than 1,000 people, enough compromises have been made already.
Chief financial officer Hanif Karmally said the company has 59,884 hectares within its tree-farm licence, but almost 30 per cent is protected from harvest because of ecological considerations such as wildlife habitats or riparian areas.
Seventy-four per cent of the remaining timber-harvest land base is immature, leaving 11,080 hectares available to harvest.
“When the Carmanah-Walbran park was created, there was a conscious decision to allow old-growth logging outside of the park boundaries and Teal wishes to pursue this,” Karmally said.
“Further reductions would be extremely detrimental to Teal’s logging and sawmilling operations.”
Teal Jones had applied to begin logging one of its eight cutblocks on July 13, but all harvesting is on hold for the fire season, Karmally said.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations said the province is evaluating Teal Jones’s application.
But Teal Jones is within its legal rights to log the area, another spokesman said, with a province-approved forest-stewardship plan in place.
Torrance Coste, Vancouver Island campaigner for the Wilderness Committee environmental group, said second-growth forests can’t be considered adequate replacements for old-growth ones.
“If a tree is 1,200 or 1,400 years old, then the ecosystem around it has developed for that long, too. You can’t just replicate that when you log and replant,” he said.
Old-growth forests also serve as an important carbon sink for mitigating the effects of climate change, Coste said.
Peter Cressey, a member of Friends of Carmanah/Walbran, said he believes the best strategy for protecting the forest is bringing people to see it. Although he participated in blockades during the war in the woods, he doesn’t believe that will be necessary this time.
“Back in the ’90s, it was a small group of people labelled as treehuggers. Now it’s become more mainstream,” he said.
The Friends are creating a “witness trail” for people to take a 1.5-hour hike into the woods.
“We like the idea that you have to witness something before making a decision.”
Ken Wu of the Ancient Forest Alliance spoke with Aaron McArthur on BC1 about the threat of logging of old growth forests on Southern Vancouver Island.
[Video not currently available.]
Environmental advocates are calling on the province to extend the protected areas in southern Vancouver Island to two ancient forest sites threatened by logging.
The Surrey-based Teal-Jones Group has been moving forward to log and build roads into the central Walbran forest and the Edinburgh Mountain forest, which in turn will sell the pulp, paper and solid wood products from the trees.
Teal-Jones has so far applied for one of eight cutblocks in the area, and if the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations approves it, the company can begin work as early as July 13, according to TJ Watt, Ancient Forest Alliance campaigner.
“We’re simply looking at the government, asking them to ensure the ecological values, basically protecting the forest in the central Walbran,” he said. “Hopefully it doesn’t get to the protest point.
“Hopefully it doesn’t get anywhere to the extent it was in the ’90s, with the civil disobedience.”
The two forests are a few kilometres away from the West Coast Trail and Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and located on Crown land.
That’s why the alliance, along with other groups such as the Wilderness Committee, are trying to pressure the government into expanding the protected forests to cover the threatened area, according to Watt.
“It’s one of the finest forests in Canada, if not the Earth,” he said. “If there’s any place that it makes sense, the borders already exist for the protected area already — that seems like a no brainer for including this within the protected area,” she said.
In an email from the ministry, approval times generally take 30 to 40 days and Teal- Jones is within its legal rights to log in the area environmental activists are concerned about.
“They have a government-approved forest stewardship plan in place,” the email states. “As part of the approval process, the company needed to show how public comments were incorporated in the plan.”
On Vancouver Island, only 46% of Crown forest is old growth — more than 860,000 hectares — and it’s estimated around 520,000 hectares will never be harvested, according to the province.
What will happen with the other 300,000 was not explained.
Read more: https://vancouver.24hrs.ca/2015/07/09/add-ancient-forests-to-protected-lands-activists
Maclean’s magazine has featured the Ancient Forest Alliance’s video on climbing “Big Lonely Doug”, discovered in 2014 by AFA campaigners to be the 2nd largest Douglas-fir tree in Canada – but standing alone since 2012 when Teal-Jones clearcut all the ancient trees around Big Lonely Doug. Our video is one of the 148 videos of Canada’s most incredible people, places and experiences, to celebrate Canada’s 148th birthday.
In 1991, Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC2) campaigner, Torrance Coste, was a three-year-old growing up in Lake Cowichan. Barrelling through his community at the time were logging truck loads of old-growth logs coming out of the Walbran Valley and buses of protestors coming in. “I even remember the hand-painted signs: ‘No raw log exports’ which I could just about read.” Coste adds, “Though I didn’t have a clue what they meant then, I do now.”
On one of the buses of protestors was Ken Wu, a 17-year-old first-year biology student at UBC, fresh from the prairies and new to activism. Ken was dropped into a grove of old-growth western red cedar and spruce and, according to Wu, “I lost my ecovirginity.” He returned to UBC and organized his first rally to save the old growth of Walbran. One hundred people turned up and he has continued organizing ever since, first as a campaigner for WC2 and then under his own banner of the Ancient Forest Alliance.
After years of protest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the BC government bowed to public pressure and created Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park by purchasing back Tree Farm Licences from MacMillan Bloedel for $83.75 million. But not all the valley’s forests were saved.
Now the Walbran is poised once again to become ground zero for the latest “war in the woods”—civil disobedience in the form of peaceful blockades of logging. Environmentalists are condemning the plans of Teal Jones Group—a logging company that has held Tree Farm Licence 46 since 2004—to log in the Central Walbran Ancient Forest. The eight cutblocks proposed are in the controversial “bite” out of Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park—literally a big chunk of very high value western red cedar groves left outside the park when the boundary was drawn. The cutblocks are near hiking trails that lead to massive old trees, including the 1000-year-old Castle Giant, more than five metres across at its base. The BC government has approved Teal Jones’ Forest Stewardship Plan, although it has yet to receive plans or issue permits for the cutting.
Coste believes that if it hadn’t been for early campaigners, nothing of the Carmanah/Walbran forests would have been saved for his generation. So he asked himself what his generation is going to save for the next. “We are going to revive the war in the woods. Every time there has been a presence, changes are made. There is a willingness to make the Walbran this year’s Burnaby Mountain. Of course,” he adds, “we would prefer to see this resolved by government action rather than blocking roads.”
The Sierra Club of BC is also wading in, brandishing facts and figures. In 2004, the Sierra Club produced a map of what was left of productive old growth temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. A decade ago, 90 percent of the valley bottom forests, where the biggest trees were, had already gone. Not surprisingly, things have only become worse in the last decade. It is a finite resource. Jens Wieting, forest campaigner for Sierra Club, who has also been on this file for most of his professional career, says his frustration comes in a variety of forms. Although new conservation-oriented economic tools exist in BC, such as those being implemented in the Great Bear Rainforest which allow for 70 percent protection of the landscape, no such effort at conservation is happening on Vancouver Island. “Ten percent protection of these temperate rainforests, which have the highest sequestration rates of carbon in the world, is not enough,” notes Wieting.
The old Vancouver Island Land Use Plan, which was never properly implemented, hasn’t been updated for two decades. After being eaten away by industry, bit by bit, only 10 percent of the entire land base has been set aside in a fragmented collection of parks, Old Growth Management Areas, Wildlife Habitat Areas, and Wildlife Tree Patches. The latter, referred to as WTPs, are a specific designation protecting “a group of trees that are identified in an operational plan to provide present or future wildlife habitat.” Retention requirements in any cutblock are regulated at 10 percent. Typically these WTPs are less than two hectares wide and are frequently subjected to blowdown, yet WTPs are about the only tool being used by Teal Jones. These old designations have resulted in a patchy landscape that doesn’t serve wildlife or forest health.
The relationship between preserving carbon sinks and mitigating climate change is the other big factor missing in current government policy on Vancouver Island. A report released last year by the Sierra Club—Carbon at Risk: BC’s Unprotected Old-growth Rainforest—called for the elimination of old-growth logging on Vancouver Island. It showed that one year of logging old-growth rainforest in southwest BC was responsible for releasing approximately three million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As Wieting pointed out, “We blew BC’s entire carbon savings for a year because the BC government doesn’t have a plan to protect the rare old-growth forests of Vancouver Island and the South Coast.”
This year appears to be no exception. So long as we continue to log at the same pace on Vancouver Island, we nullify any progress on reducing provincial carbon emissions.
INSPIRED BY HIS LOVE of the ancient forest near his hometown, Torrance Coste represents the next generation of activists: well versed in biodiversity, carbon science, economic analysis, and endangered species legislation.
Many endangered species inhabit these forests, including Northern Goshawk laingi subspecies, Marbled Murrelet, Western Screech Owl kennicottii subspecies—all of which Coste says he discussed with Teal Jones representatives over the last nine months. “I guess I was naïve. I thought that they were listening to us when we asked them to at least stay out of the bite, which is only 486 hectares or 0.5 percent of their total 99,130-hectare TFL.”
Teal Jones did a “surprise” clearcut in this “bite” in 2013, an act which put ENGOs on high alert and running to company offices to discuss the situation. “When we recently got the plans for the eight cutblocks in the bite and found orange flagging tape near the famous Castle Grove, after all our conversations, we knew there was no sense in talking anymore,” Coste says. (Focus requested an interview with Teal Jones officials, but the company didn’t respond. The company website notes it complies with a Canadian Standard Association Sustainable Forest Management certification, a low bar over which the company can easily step and then claim it complies with existing government rules and policy.)
Neither Coste nor Wu were old enough to be involved in the extensive negotiations and planning in the ’90s that resulted in British Columbia leading the world by being the first to sign the landmark 1992 Earth Summit Conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change and Desertification. The 1991 Walbran protests led to the setting up of the Wilderness Advisory Committee, the Old Growth Strategy, the Protected Areas Strategy, the Clayoquot decisions, and the Commission on Resources and Environment, which in turn led to the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan (VILUP) in 1994.
Few young activists today can believe BC was once a world leader in forest ecology, biodiversity, climate change, and best practices for public consultation. What they see now is a bare-bones lip-service approach, the result of a gutted Forest and Range Practices Act. “Professional reliance”—whereby forestry companies have been given much of the responsibility for oversight previously conducted by government officials—and pseudo consultation have become the operating principles by which Crown forests are managed.
Masters student Sabrina Schwartz at the University of Alberta reviewed the 20-year-old VILUP in 2014 regarding its “ability to cope with past, current and future demands of its stakeholders.” She concluded: “The VILUP was a necessary government tool, to solve the intense conflicts of the ‘War in the Woods’ and to clarify the general land use management on Vancouver Island; it was, however, not able to establish a province-wide sustainability guideline, which would have left an organized, focused and fair land use and resource management on Vancouver Island.”
In less diplomatic words, the disorganized, scattered and uneven policy of the BC government is laying the province wide open to a future “war in the woods.” The BC government responded to Focus’ questions with the statement that Teal Jones is within its legal rights to log in the area. It failed to respond to questions about the role of forests in its climate action plan.
Coste is quickly finding out “you have to get out there and protest to get them to listen. Grass roots pressure has worked in the past. It is going to work again.” Coste’s sights are on the Walbran—his home patch. For Wu, “these cutblocks are the cherries on the cake, we still have to address the cake. We need a new land use plan for Vancouver Island.” For Wieting, that is a plan that is province-wide and integrates biodiversity, diversification of economic opportunities, and climate change.
(In late June, shortly after Focus went to press with this story, Teal Jones submitted an application to the Province to log one of the eight cutblocks.)
Here is a Global TV piece on proposed logging in the Central Walbran Valley by Teal-Jones, a Surrey-based company threatening endangered old-growth forests in several areas:
https://globalnews.ca/news/2042889/protests-will-follow-any-old-growth-logging-group/
Environmentalists condemned TimberWest's cutting of old growth trees in the Great Bear Rainforest, one of the largest remaining temperate rainforests in the world.
Spanning 64,000 square kilometres along British Columbia’s Central and North Pacific Coast, the Great Bear Rainforest is the home to a rich ecosystem of whales, eagles, and the rare “spirit bear” — a white bear found nowhere else on the planet and revered by the Kitasoo, Heiltsuk and Gitxaala First Nations.
“We already have a serious deficit of old growth forests in B.C., and it's very concerning that TimberWest has increased logging in the last five years,” said Sierra Club BC forest and climate campaigner Jens Wieting. The company logged 248,188 cubic metres of timber within the Great Bear Rainforest in 2009, and 778,580 in 2011.
Although TimberWest states that it is logging well within the agreed limits, forest conservationists argue the company has been targeting a vulnerable part of the rainforest at a time when sensitive negotiations to protect old growth forest are underway.
“TimberWest targeted the most endangered ecosystems while the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations have been underway,” said ForestEthics Solutions BC Forest Campaigns Director Valerie Langer.
Langer, who was on the forefront of campaigns that forced companies to limit logging in the northern rainforest, said the logging has been detrimental to the negotiations.
“It means TimberWest undermined proposed Restoration Zones that form part of the ecosystem-based management (EBM) proposal currently near completion,” she said.
The Great Bear Rainforest is at the centre of 19 years of negotiations between the province, First Nations, environmentalists and industry. If finalized, 70 per cent of old growth trees in the area will be protected—which is the threshold scientists say is necessary for the rich ecosystem to remain intact.
TimberWest chief forester and sustainability VP Domenico Iannidinardo defended the company's logging activities, saying it was committed to preserving the old growth trees in the Great Bear Rainforest.
“We've been a participant in the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations since 1996,” he said. “We've met all the requirements of sustainable harvest levels and we'll continue to do so.”
Iannidiarno said if the Great Bear Rainforest agreement is finalized, the company will have to reduce its harvest levels. He said the company was prepared to “evolve” with the times, and that it was a significant employer in remote areas of northern B.C., providing jobs to First Nations as well.
Wieting said conservation of the Great Bear Rainforest — home to grizzly bears, salmon, wolves, and birds such as the marbled murrulet and eagle — is critically important. He said if the agreement to protect 70 per cent of old growth forest in the Great Bear Rainforest is finalized, it will be an example of conservation for the rest of the world.
“This is what the world is desperately looking for — solutions that allow economic activity without undermining the environment. We're getting very close.”
He said for the agreement to be truly successful, the B.C. government will need to implement a monitoring system to ensure that logging agreements are not violated.
“There have been millions of cubic metres of over cutting in B.C. forests. The government gives companies a massive amount of flexibility with very little oversight. We will need more checks and balances to ensure the trees are protected.”
It was exactly 2 years ago today that I published a blog on Sonora Island – the southernmost end of the Great Bear Rainforest, within the traditional territories of Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast Salish peoples. In that blog I described the struggle the local community and environmental organizations have had to improve the logging practices of TimberWest Forest Corporation – especially their curious methods of identifying old-growth forests on the ground. I wrote that this was of particular concern as this is a region where less than 5% of many forest ecosystems remains in old growth conditions, and where the majority of ecosystems are globally endangered.
Since that original blogpost there has been good news and bad news.
First the good news: TimberWest agreed to a temporary harvest moratorium on six contentious forest blocks that I described previously in that blog, while it undertook to redefine old-growth and develop reserve designs to set aside rare old growth ecosystems. It worked closely with the local community and that is great. Peachy.
Now the bad news. That temporary moratorium on the six contentious blocks is just that temporary. And, it only constitutes a mere 0.2% of the total area of TimberWest’s tenure (in its Tree Farm License 47).
And now the really bad news. Recent analysis shows that as we move towards implementing stricter logging regulations in 2015, TimberWest has dramatically accelerated its rate of logging in the southern Great Bear Rainforest part of its tree farm license over the past five years. They have logged over one million cubic metres more (the equivalent of a million telephone poles) than they have been allocated as an average Annual Allowable Cut in the five year period (from 2010 to 2014). The company has logged more than 4,400 hectares of rainforest in this area since 2009, 11 times the area of Vancouver’s Stanley Park. This is particularly concerning given that TimberWest does not currently have a plan to reserve and restore these endangered ecosystems and the species that depend on them. Indeed, in the past 5 years, more than 50% of TimberWest’s logging has occurred in areas that were identified five years ago as priorities for landscape reserves. Not only is this not consistent with the spirit and intent of Ecosystem-Based Management (and is also contrary to what their senior executive team committed to us in a 2011 letter), but also goes against the wishes and aspirations of the region’s First Nations (the leadership of these Nations have been in dialogue with TimberWest on their rate of logging and how it precludes other activities and visions for their territories, but that has gotten them nowhere).
It is for this reason, that Greenpeace along with ForestEthics Solutions and Sierra Club BC have once again gone public with our concerns (read our Press Release here). We gave TimberWest the benefit of the doubt over the past two years to get things back on track through ongoing negotiation and engagement, only to be shocked and dismayed with our finding that their logging has accelerated considerably in the region while they have been talking with us.
To emphasize our concern, yesterday we deployed our ship Esperanza to send TimberWest a strong message that their recent practices of logging as if ‘there is no tomorrow’ is entirely unacceptable given the groundbreaking and solution-oriented system of Ecosystem-Based Management that we all have worked tirelessly over the last two decades to implement. Our ship was at Sonora Island where TimberWest operates when we dropped our banner. We had a delegation of representatives from various coastal First Nations. Their drumming and singing added to the poignancy and increased my determination to be part of the collaborative effort to succeed in protecting and restoring the area to the towering old growth forests that once blanketed this region of the Great Bear Rainforest.
And so this I promise you, reader: it will not take another two years of talking and logging before you hear from me again on TimberWest. Stay tuned…
[Greenpeace blog no longer available]
