I have written this week about the Corporate Forest Industry.  Corporate Tax Cuts, followed by Industrial Disease.

 

In my last post, I quoted an article by Ben Parfitt, from policynote, I would like to provide the entire article.  It was so well written, it should be read in it’s entirety.

 

Cuts to Forest Service are too deep

by Ben Parfitt

There are many things that distinguish “supernatural” British Columbia from other jurisdictions. But one of the most enduring of them is its abundance of publicly owned lands.

While many of us may not realize it, about 94 per cent of BC is Crown or public land. And over the decades the wealth generated from that land – the royalties and taxes from forest, natural gas, and mining activities – has enriched public programs such as health care, education and transit to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

Lately, however, our provincial government is behaving as if there’s nothing particularly important about our great, shared natural assets.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the speed at which one of BC’s longest standing public agencies has been gutted and dismantled — to the point where it is dangerously close to becoming irrelevant.

I speak of our Forest Service. In less than a decade, the provincial government has axed one quarter of the agency’s staff (1,006 positions) and cut the number of fully staffed district offices in half, effectively severing the link between the agency and 21 communities that it once so ably served.

The depth of the cuts to the nearly 100-year-old agency is a serious concern. And when one bores down to what the cutbacks mean on the ground — our shared ground with First Nations — the alarm bells really go off.

To give perspective, consider the United States and its national Forest Service of nearly 30,000 employees. Each of its employees is responsible for an average of 2,700 hectares of national forestland. BC’s Forest Service is roughly one-tenth the size, but individual staff members are responsible for nearly 7.5 times more land – about 20,000 hectares each. And in northeastern BC, where the natural gas industry is cutting through forests faster than a knife through soft butter, each Forest Service staff person is responsible for about 232,000 hectares of land, or more than 580 Stanley Parks each.

Just about every facet of BC Forest Service work has been compromised by the cuts. Field investigations by compliance and enforcement staff — who work to ensure that companies do not illegally log trees on public lands or engage in environmentally destructive logging — are down by more than 14,450 visits annually over what they were a decade ago, and will likely continue to decline due to more recent job cuts.

Audits of company reports on the value and volume of Crown timber they log are slipping as Forest Service “scaling” personnel diminish in number. With the most recent job losses, government scalers are now responsible for an average of 36,961 truckloads of logs each — a 7,500 truckload per person increase since 2002-2003.

Meanwhile, inventory specialists — who count trees to help determine sustainable rates of logging — have been reduced to just 39 people. That’s down from an inventory staff at Victoria headquarters alone of 100 people in the early 1990s and at least another 48 inventory staff in regional and district offices. Is it any wonder, then, that government accounts of how many trees are found where are in some cases 30 years or more out of date?

As if the drop in public servants wasn’t troubling enough, what is left of the Forest Service has been cleaved in two as a result of October’s cabinet reorganization — a move that saw internationally renowned departments within the Forest Service such as its 83-year-old research branch completely disbanded and scattered among four different ministries. To what end, no one inside the Forest Service seems to know.

All of this and more occurred against a backdrop of escalating forest losses due to a surging natural gas industry, increasing losses of trees due to devastating insect attacks and severe forest fires, and a rapidly growing stock of insufficiently reforested lands.

Twenty years ago, a crisis of a different sort was confronted when the so-called “war in the woods” saw pitched battles between environmental organizations, unions and rural communities. Back then, the provincial government correctly responded by appointing the Forest Resources Commission to solicit public opinion and arrive at a new vision for BC’s public forests.

Today’s challenging environment demands no less a response. It’s time for an independent commission to determine whether or not the public service can any longer protect our publicly owned forests. Until the commission is finished we should declare a moratorium on any further cuts to our dramatically reduced Forest Service, and a halt to the cabinet reorganization that almost certainly means an end to the institution as we know it. 

Today Mr. Parfitt added an equally important insight into this aspect of the overall picture of the health of our forests.  I have noticed in the coastal rainforest that certain species are not thriving in the habitat that traditionally has supported them naturally. The forest companies may have actually been planting species that are favoured to reach free to grow status.  As Mr Parfitt will illustrate, does not necessarily mean optimum survival of the ecosystem. Species that favour high yields and added value are planted, without regard to the species that nurture them. This may sound like good policy on the surface, but it doesn’t take into account that the forest is an interdependent ecosystem, rather than a monoculture, or plantation.  Please take a moment to read his follow up here.

Even those of us who know comparatively little about our forests understand that some astonishing things have occurred in recent years that raise questions about the health of one of our most important publicly owned resources.

Two of the more evident of those things are the epic mountain pine beetle attack that has left in its wake one billion or so dead older pine trees, and a spate of terrifically intense fires that have burned forests across huge swaths of land.

But as it turns out, these are far from the only events that are giving rise to a burgeoning reforestation crisis in the province. While the beetle attack and fires have predictably captured  media attention, another event with significant implications for the health of future forests has quietly unfolded.

That event is the widespread die-off of large numbers of planted trees in allegedly healthy tree plantations – our so-called future forests.

Traditionally, in the coastal forest Alder Alnus rubra has been hacked down, poisoned and left to rot. Alder has always been considered a low value species, even though it grows much faster then Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar and Spruce and helps maintain and build the soil structure needed by those species preferred by markets, fixing nitrogen in the soil much like legumes in the garden.  Alder is a fragrant hardwood that bleeds red when cut, it has to be dried carefully to avoid checking and cracking, but once dried it has beautiful variations in colour, which makes it a favourite of electric guitar manufacturers. It is the best wood to use when smoking salmon. 

It seems that industry, left to it’s own devices, will do the most to expedite value for shareholders and not for the public good.  Quite the opposite to the position taken by the Fraser Institute, lovingly printed by the mainstream media, who insist that Private ownership will naturally insure sustainability. I think it’s safe to assume that Private ownership only ensures the health of the shareholders bottom line.  

On South Vancouver Island  where I live I am surrounded by Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar and Hemlock mixing with Arbutus, Alder, Dogwood and the iconic Bigleaf Maple that graces our vistas with brilliant hues in the fall, mimicing the sunlight we all crave so much here.  They are all important to us all, whether we make our living off them or just wipe our asses in the morning with the byproducts.  These are the lungs of the world. The great Carbon sequesterer.  Cutting the dedicated and educated workforce in the BC Forest Service at a time of unprecedented climate change is like having lung cancer and cancelling your health Insurance and firing your oncologist to take advice from the tobacco company!

It’s time to ante up.  We can’t afford to allow the government to continue it’s present course of gutting the Public Service.  They have corrupted with political appointments (as in Elections BC and their Acting CEO) or gutted every arms length regulatory body in Canada and our province. If we don’t force them to ensure the public trust, we lose everything that we hold dear. Look to Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan. Now is the time. They will have to listen.