With much of BC Timber Sales' old-growth logging on pause, the Province could direct the publicly-owned agency to focus its logging program on second-growth forests using ecosystem-based management.
First our warming climate caused the winters to be milder, and then the pine beetles were able to survive over the winter, and then the pine forests were overwhelmed by the beetles, and then the province let the foresters harvest the pine trees to salvage the crop, and then the wildfires came and burnt through the debris fuel, and then the atmospheric rivers dropped months’ worth of rain in a few hours, and then there were no trees to hold back the water, and then the creeks and rivers overflowed, and then the town of Merritt was evacuated to Kelowna and Kamloops.
Editor: Note the date of this piece. So there were warnings.
May 10, 2012
Rapid runoff, scoured silt from B.C. Interior pose threats downstream.
The Fraser River is at risk of much more frequent and devastating floods because of the rapid pace of logging in the B.C. Interior to salvage vast stands of beetle-killed timber, according to a UBC researcher.
Rachel Holt was part of a technical panel that mapped old growth
A Nelson ecologist who served as part of a provincial government panel that mapped B.C.’s remaining old growth forest is concerned about the way the government has implemented the panel’s work.
The Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel identified and mapped 2.6 million hectares of at-risk old growth forest.
As more old-growth trees topple and forest industry jobs plummet, an obscure government subsidy scheme fuels the collapse
For more than 15 years, the BC government has rewarded logging companies with millions of additional old-growth trees to chop down thanks to an obscure “credit” program that allows companies to log bonus trees that don’t count toward their licensed logging limits.
Nearly every one of the last 20 forest ministers, going back 35 years, has stood up at one point or another and indignantly denied that forestry is a sunset industry.
The fact they felt the need in the first place means the impression was out there. More and more, it looks like that impression was and is correct.
Deferrals and changes to logging legislation is coming. But the activists aren’t leaving
The first thing you need to understand about Fairy Creek, if you’ve never been to Fairy Creek, is that the real fight isn’t in Fairy Creek. It’s beside it in Granite Creek, and above it at Ridge Camp, and to the west in the Walbran Valley.
As British Columbia’s New Democratic Party prepares for its first biennial convention since winning the 2020 election, memories of last summer’s deadly heat domes and wildfires still burn deeply. B.C. is experiencing the global consequences of carbon-intensive extractivism – the kind of “rip and ship” (extract and export) economic policies pursued by the previous right-of-centre B.C. Liberal government for most of its 2001-2017 term of office.
MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian island north of Japan has become a testing ground for Moscow’s efforts to reconcile its prized fossil fuel industry with the need to do something about climate change.
More than two-thirds of Sakhalin Island is forested. With the Kremlin’s blessing, authorities there have set an ambitious goal of making the island — Russia’s largest — carbon neutral by 2025.
