News Coverage

Link to Globe and Mail online article

A small grove of timber in the Fraser Valley used as a night roost by flocks of eagles has long been a secret known only to a few people in British Columbia.

But now an environmental group, the Ancient Forest Alliance, and a landowner who has property adjacent to the roosting trees are working together to publicize the area, in the hopes of saving it from logging.

“I would say between 25 and 50 hectares has to be protected – which is not a huge amount to save what is a natural wonder of the world,” said Stephen Ben-Oliel, who first learned of the eagle roost when he bought land at Echo Lake 17 years ago.

In the late fall, thousands of eagles gather along the nearby Harrison and Chehalis rivers to feast on spawning salmon, a major ecotourism draw and focus of the annual Fraser Valley Bald Eagle Festival, which this year is held Nov. 17 and 18.

But while boat and hiking tours have long allowed people to see the eagles feeding along the rivers, few knew where the birds went when darkness fell.

Mr. Ben-Oliel says they come by the hundreds, just at dusk, to settle in the big trees cupped in the small valley that holds Echo Lake, east of Mission.

“They are like a secret and that little valley is like a secret,” he said. “People living in the Fraser Valley often don’t know there’s a lake there because it’s surrounded by mountains. It’s a hidden valley, with this secret of the eagles.”

Mr. Ben-Oliel said a Ministry of Forests land use plan under study for the Fraser Valley sets aside part of the old-growth timber around Echo Lake, but would allow a swath of trees that the eagles perch in at night to be logged.

“The outside of this valley has all been hammered by logging. Why not save this little place.…Why not leave this as the place they sleep?” he asked.

Mr. Ben-Oliel said the birds don’t come in large numbers every year, but when they do it is a major wildlife event.

“Some years it’s like you are in the middle of a National Geographic shot and then, for reasons I don’t understand, in other years there aren’t many,” he said. “They come in singly just at dusk, from the end of November through December and into January. There are certain points, about an hour before the sun sets, when the sky is not empty of them. Sometimes they are circling one of the two small mountains, in groups of 15 to 20, but then they start to stack up in the trees. It’s not something that is easily photographed because it’s twilight, but you see their white heads sticking up like golf balls around the lake.”

Ken Wu, executive director of the Ancient Forest Alliance, said the provincial land use plan sets aside trees on one shore of Echo Lake, but not the other. “It all needs to be saved,” he said, arguing the government needs to double its plan to save 45 hectares.

Mr. Wu said his organization, which searches for the last remaining patches of old growth around the province, then lobbies to save them, became aware of Echo Lake in 2007, when the area was first slated for logging.

Protests at that time persuaded the government to hold off, he said, but now a detailed land use plan for the Fraser Valley is being finalized, which would allow a portion of the Echo Lake timber to be cut. Mr. Wu said he has been unable to find any comparable old growth anywhere in the Lower Mainland. The trees are 300 to 600 years old.

“I mean, it is exceedingly scarce. It’s like coming across a Sasquatch these days, to find valley bottom, low elevation old growth in the Lower Mainland.”

In an e-mail, Vivian Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Forests, said the government is now accepting public comment on Fraser Valley land use plans, and concerns about Echo Lake will be considered in that process. She also said the government is looking at a proposal to designate 1,500 hectares in the Harrison and Chehalis area for wildlife management, which could protect winter feeding areas for eagles.

Link to online Vancovuer Sun article

The B.C. government announced plans on Tuesday to meet timber supply shortages in the B.C. Interior by reviewing current prohibitions on logging in environmentally sensitive areas and giving forest companies more power to manage the land base.

In releasing a plan titled “Beyond the Beetle,” Forests Minister Steve Thomson said the provincial government was moving toward the “next phase in our decade-long battle with the mountain pine beetle.”

But no new money has been committed to critically needed inventory work now that the beetle epidemic is winding down. The plan is the government’s response to a special legislative committee on the timber supply that tabled a report last month.

Critics called the plan vague, saying it doesn’t adequately address how much timber is actually left in B.C. forests. An update of the timber inventory is to begin in 2013, but the plan commits no new money to do the work.

Independent MLA Bob Simpson, whose Cariboo North constituency is ground zero in the beetle-damaged forest epidemic, called the plan a recipe for disaster.

“We are going down the same path as we did with the East Coast cod fishery,” Simpson said. “We are going to play with the rules, the regulations and change the tenure and access, to go and bleed the forests dry in order to keep the status quo.”

NDP forests critic Norm Macdonald said the plan was too vague on the issue of investing in an updated timber inventory. “It was clear there had to be serious investments in inventory. Over 72 per cent of the land has base data over 30 years old. You can’t expect proper forestry to be done with that sort of data.” However, Thomson said the ongoing deteriorating condition of beetle-hit forests dictated that the province delay inventory work until the infestation is over. Federal Student Loan Consolidation

“Now we can proceed,” he said. But he also acknowledged that he is restricted by budgetary constraints and that needed money has yet to be committed. Besides beginning on inventory work, the key elements of the plan include: . A commitment to move from volume-based timber tenures to area-based tenures, where forest companies would assume more management control.

. Increasing the timber inventory by including marginally economic stands that up until this point have been excluded.

. Developing a review of so-called “sensitive areas” that have been exempted from logging because of their wildlife or scenic values, and possibly reopening land-use plans.

Jens Wieting, a forest campaigner for the Sierra Club of B.C., said the province has done exactly what environmentalists feared – sacrificed other forest values to ensure a timber supply for Interior sawmills. He said the government is putting at risk not only environmental values but the forest industry’s reputation.

“To put these at risk for a short-term win is unbelievable. It is a level of ignorance that is hard to digest.”

Thomson said logging communities have asked for the review of restrictions on forest reserves. “It will be done very carefully, and only where there is consensus and agreement from the community,” he said.

The forest industry said Tuesday that it supports the government initiatives.

“We see the potential for some tangible improvements in the short-term and midterm timber supply by following the various courses of action,” said Doug Routledge of the B.C. Council of Forest Industries. “It’s a positive action plan. It provides some definitive timelines. We are a little concerned that there will be sufficient human and financial resources to accomplish what is in the action plan, but that is something that can be worked on over time.”

He said key components for the industry are the commitment to update the timber inventory and a commitment to monitor land-use plans that predate the beetle infestation. Routledge said many values may have changed as a result of the beetle. Current land-use plans leave broad areas out of bounds to logging when it is possible for wildlife conservation to be accomplished in more specific areas, he said.

Routledge said a very rough estimate shows 40 per cent more timber could be found if land-use plans were updated to optimize the allocation of resources and land.

The greatest gains in timber supply are likely to come from the inclusion of marginally economic timber stands.

The beetle is expected to knock 10 million cubic metres a year out of the timber supply. But, in Burns Lake alone, including marginal economic stands added 60 per cent of the volume back into the supply. An economic stand is one with more than 140 cubic metres of saw-logs per hectare. The new standard lowers that to 100 cubic metres.

“They are logging stands below 100 cubic metres per hectare at the moment at Williams Lake,” Routledge said.

Link to The Tyee online article

The British Columbia government says it is acting on a series of recommendations to help the province’s forest industry in the wake of the mountain pine beetle epidemic. Critics say it’s a weak response to the issue that shows the government hasn’t learned from the collapse of other natural resource industries.

“The action plan represents the next phase in our decade-long battle against the mountain pine beetle,” said Steve Thomson, the minister of forests, lands and natural resource operations, talking to reporters on a conference call.

The 16-page plan is a response to an August report from the legislature’s special committee on timber supply that held hearings throughout the province last spring and into the early summer.

It sets out nine actions it describes as “sustained” and 11 that it characterizes as “new.” As the plan puts it, “The key elements of the action plan focus on reforestation, forest inventory, fuel management and intensive and innovative silviculture.”

The plan includes a promise of legislation to move to area-based licenses from volume-based, and to create licenses to allow companies to harvest wood that is not sawlog quality but that could be burned for energy.

Thomson said there is $100 million in the 2013-2014 budget for reforestation, and the ministry will seek further funding through the budget process to pay for the rest of the plan.

He defended the decision in the past to drop doing forest inventory and planning for reforestation during the worst of the beetle epidemic. “The rapidly changing situation in our forests dictated that we hold off on updating our inventory and reforestation plans until it stabilized, and now we can proceed,” he said.

Beetle like a hurricane

John Rustad, who is the parliamentary secretary for forestry and who chaired the timber supply committee, compared it to coping with other natural disasters. “If you’re planning to do some work on your house, and there’s a hurricane approaching, you’re not going to undertake the work on your house until you’ve seen what happened with the hurricane,” he said. “The same thing is what happened with the mountain pine beetle epidemic.”

However, the New Democratic Party’s forestry critic, Norm Macdonald, said it was “ridiculous” to stop doing inventory during the worst of the crisis.

The auditor general, the forest practices board and the Association of B.C. Forest Professionals have all criticized the government’s failure to keep forest inventory up to date, he said.

“They were making cut determinations based on data that’s 30 years old,” he said. “They’re setting cuts. Forestry doesn’t stop.”

The government has taken a hands-off approach to the industry and is responsible for the consequences, said Macdonald. “They’re trying to rationalize what they’ve done, which is to step away from the responsibility to manage the forests properly.”

In general, the plan offers little to help the forest industry, he said. “It is a predictably weak response from this government that’s shown no interest in looking after the land over the last 10 years,” he said. “It’s basically business as usual … There’s no new money. As far as I can see, it’s just not there.”

Jobs today, consequences later

If there’s going to be a shift to area-based tenures, which would set the number of hectares to be harvested each year and give the industry flexibility on how much volume it harvests each year, it needs to be done very carefully and with an eye on the public benefit, said Macdonald.

“It’s a complicated thing to do properly,” he said. While the switch might help, he said, “There really isn’t the proof you necessarily get benefits.”

The government is trying to keep the status quo in the forest industry, even though it’s obvious the province’s forests cannot keep the industry going at the rate it has in the past, said Bob Simpson, the MLA for Cariboo North and a former forest company executive.

“You’ve got an eleventh hour panicked response to something the government’s had a long time to prepare for,” he said. “We’ve seen this movie play out since humanity settled down in one location and wiped out the natural resources around them. It always ends badly.”

Simpson compares the state of B.C.’s forest industry to what happened with the Atlantic cod fishery two decades ago. Despite warnings from non-government scientists, the stocks were allowed to be exploited at an unsustainable rate to feed processing plants in places that identified as fishing communities all along the coast, he said.

“None of those communities can describe themselves as fishing communities anymore,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing here.”

The government should allow cut level to come down and let the industry “rationalize” so there isn’t so much overcapacity for milling, he said. “What the government’s doing is preventing any rationalization whatsoever.”

Fully depleting the resource might delay going over the cliff, but it will make that cliff even bigger when the time comes, he said. “We’re always extinguishing the resources for today’s jobs and today’s economy, and eventually you lose those two as well.”

The government would be wiser to put its efforts into climate change adaptation and mitigation, he said, as well as helping communities that have been dependent on forestry to transition into other ways of surviving.

In an ethereal valley near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, more than 100 remarkable Douglas-fir and red cedar trees have held their ground for centuries. Members of the Victoria-based Ancient Forest Alliance came upon the gnarled titans – some over 60 metres tall and more than four metres in diameter – in December 2009. Soon after, they learned the area was slated for harvest and launched a campaign to save “Avatar Grove.” Earlier this year, the provincial government expanded an existing old-growth management area, where logging and mining is prohibited, to 59.4 hectares, encompassing the grove in its entirety.

Avatar Grove has “some of the most bizarre and beautiful giant cedars known,” says Ken Wu of AFA. “It’s definitely a place of superlatives.”