"Clearcut logging on the scale that has been occurring in BC—which is unparalleled anywhere else on Earth on a per capita basis—is contributing significantly to global heating and climate instability. Those mega-impacts are, in turn, contributing to further, widespread loss of BC forests—whether they are “protected” or not—as a result of drought, fires, wind and insect infestations. All of those impacts are occurring with greater frequency and severity than in the past. That added loss, in turn, further worsens global heating and climate instability. So the scale of logging in BC is contributing to a dangerous global feedback loop that, on a per capita basis, British Columbians have been more responsible for than any other population of humans on the planet."
"Moreover, BC is now beginning to experience unpredicted, complex and serious side effects from that feedback loop between growing climate instability and forest loss. Recall the unprecedented flooding that occurred after an “atmospheric river” swept over southwestern BC in mid-November 2021. The flooding occurred downstream from areas that had been heavily logged and were later burned by forest fires. The amount of rain that fell was not unprecedented, but the flooding was. Climate scientists say such atmospheric rivers will occur with greater frequency due to global heating. But the unprecedented magnitude of the flooding was attributable to both the loss of forest cover from clearcut logging and the way that forest fires make soil less able to absorb water. The large area of the forest fires was attributable, at least in part, to the widespread extent of clearcut logging and tree plantations and the unfortunate fact that clearcuts and plantations make forest fires easier to ignite and harder to control."
Also quoted from that EA article:
"When the cost of public forest management is included in a consideration of government revenues, there was an average net loss of about $1 million per day between 2010 and 2019.
The economic importance of the logging industry didn’t justify the damage it was doing in 2003, and since then the industry has shrunk to less than half its former economic importance while the damage it is doing has grown immeasurably.
Another much-touted justification for the vast extent of clearcut logging in BC is that logging can’t be reduced because it provides wood products that are essential for growing and maintaining BC’s own stock of buildings and infrastructure. But that line of reasoning is a ruse.
According to Sheng Xie, a postdoctoral research fellow with UBC’s Department of Forest Resources Management, about 85 to 90 percent of the volume of wood logged in BC is exported. In 2016, for example, 88 percent of the volume logged was exported.
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If logging on publicly-owned land were limited to supplying BC’s own needs for forest products, the area cut each year could be reduced by 80 to 90 percent. Instead of cutting 180,000 hectares (the Ministry of Forests’ number), that could be reduced to 18,000-36,000 hectares each year.
At that rate, how much land would need to be set aside for logging? It would depend on the rotation period between cuts, but certainly no more than 1.8 to 3.6 million hectares. That’s just 3 to 6 percent of BC’s forested land. That’s all that’s needed to meet BC’s own requirements for wood products!
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Before all of BC’s primary forest is gone, citizens need to rise up and demand an end to exports. First the export of raw logs and then all wood-product exports. Let other countries figure out how to meet their own needs!
Unless there is a large reduction in logging, none of the existential threats to BC’s remaining forests posed by the current scale of logging —such as more aggressive forest fires— will be diminished. Any newly protected areas, including temporary logging deferrals of old-growth forest, will be just as likely to become burned forest as they would if they were unprotected.
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From The Great Tree Robbery by Ben Parfitt:
“A crime against the province”
Arnold Bercov, a former president of the Public and Private Workers of Canada, said he is deeply unsettled by the subsidy program’s implications. He fears the credit logging will further deepen problems for already stressed forest ecosystems, community watersheds, rural First Nations, non-Indigenous rural communities, and forest industry workers alike.
“It’s so bad what we’re doing. We’re liquidating what’s here. That’s what’s going on. And that’s just a crime against this province,” Bercov said.
The union is one of three representing forest industry workers in BC and has been vocal about the need to protect more old-growth forests, and ensure that much higher value is added to whatever trees are logged in the province’s forests.
While Bercov says the credit program poses risks to forests and forest workers alike, its biggest victims will be First Nations on whose ancestral lands all the bonus logging is taking place. “Ultimately, it won’t matter about First Nation land claims. In a few years, it won’t matter if they win or lose because there won’t be anything left to win,” Bercov says.
“Here we are speeding down a climate emergency and we are putting holes in our only lifeboat,” says Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and author of Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.
Simard said she wonders now how many of the logs “trundling out of the woods daily” near her home community of Nelson in the West Kootenay region may be a result of the credit program, including trees from the interior rainforest, one of the rarest forest ecosystems on earth.
Thanks to generous BC government subsidies, wood pellet mill yards are overflowing with logs culled from the interior region’s primary or old-growth forests. Photo: Stand.earth.
“The BC government is targeting natural hemlock forests in our inland temperate rainforest for pellets even though this ecosystem is red-listed,” said Connolly. “Now we find out that the direct destruction of these rare forests is being subsidized with public money and packaged as a bioeconomy. I really want to know how decision-makers sleep at night endorsing this and calling it clean and green.”
Left completely unsaid is how saving wood from being burned at logging sites only to deliver it to pellet mills that make a product that is then burned equates to a climate benefit.
Old-growth cedar logs from one of the world’s most unique and imperiled forest ecosystems—BC’s interior rainforest—make their way into a wood pellet mill yard in Prince George. Photo: James Steidle.
Finally, a heartfelt comment that touched a chord (below) found on the Evergreen Alliance public forum @ this link: EAforum-Clearcut-logging-is-an-immoral-practice
By Guest Salmon in the Sky
Logging as it is now practiced is an immoral practice that destroys nature. Not only does it destroy nature, it will slowly but surely kill us.
Trees are the “Lungs of the Earth” because they create and cleanse the oxygen we breathe. In logging (at least in how it is now practiced — clearcutting) we plunder and rape and kill our very breath of life — it can be no plainer than this.
We also set off irreversible chain reactions and compromise our children’s futures. In the name of Love for our children we will cut down irreplaceable old-growth forests for temporal "satisfactory pleasures" — that all too soon lose their amusement.
We deplete the soil, pollute the water and create landslides that the children will have to deal with. Do you call this love? It definitely is not.
And with climate change threatening us this is definitely not the time to be procrastinating.
We have the means and the ability to stop unsustainable forestry and get off fossil fuels. The only thing in the way is our sinful selves with not enough Love in our hearts to really stand up for what’s right, for the whole future of the planet, for everything special to us. Are you willing? Are you going to act? Are you going to act in love, now?
