The B.C. Liberals should stop trying to divide forestry workers and environmentalists and heed the warnings of both: overcutting old-growth forests is a big mistake.

In the lead-up to the British Columbia election last month, several B.C. Liberal politicians tried to revive and deepen old community divisions by pitting forestry workers against environmentalists. This ultimately served to facilitate their corporate donors’ interests in liquidating, exporting, and ultimately selling off forestlands at the expense of communities and the environment.

“Environmentalists want an immediate moratorium on all old-growth logging to destroy jobs!” So went the tired but false rhetoric.

The fact is that the B.C. Liberal government hasn’t created a single park on Vancouver Island in over eight years, yet they’ve presided over the largest loss of forestry jobs in B.C.’s history. Over 20,000 forestry jobs and 60 mills have disappeared in B.C. in that time.

While they blame market conditions, their policies have greatly exacerbated the job losses. Their Orwellian-named “Forestry Revitalization Act” eliminated the local milling requirement, paving the way for the mass mill closures, while they’ve let almost 30 million cubic metres of raw logs leave for foreign mills. They’ve removed Tree Farm Licenses from an area 10 times the size of Vancouver, opening them up to expanded log exports and suburban sprawl.

At its root the coastal industry’s longer-term decline is being driven by the depletion of the old-growth resource, where 75 per cent of the original, productive old-growth forests on Vancouver Island have been logged, including 90 per cent of the valley bottoms where the largest trees grow.

The history of this high-grade overcutting is made clear in the Ministry of Forests’ 2001 report, Ready for Change by Peter Pearse, and recommended reading for the B.C. government’s recent Forestry Roundtable where industry participants provided their input on new policies to supposedly revitalize B.C.’s forest industry:

“The general pattern was to take the nearest, most accessible, and most valuable timber first, gradually expand up coastal valleys and mountainsides into more remote and lower quality timber, less valuable, and costlier to harvest. Today, loggers are approaching the end of the merchantable old-growth in many areas … Caught in the vise of rising costs and declining harvest value, the primary sector of the industry no longer earns an adequate return … ” (page 7)

The “future” has already come to coastal communities as the high value old-growth stands are depleted and the old-growth mills close.

Pearse continues: “Over the next decade, the second-growth component of timber harvest can be expected to increase sharply, to around 10 million cubic metres … to efficiently manufacture the second-growth component of the harvest, 11 to 14 large mills will be needed.” (page 29)

Today there is only a single large second-growth coastal mill. As the old-growth is depleted and harvesting shifts to second-growth stands, B.C.’s forestry jobs are simply being exported as raw logs due to a lack of investments in second-growth manufacturing.

If the B.C. government cared enough, they could implement effective regulations and incentives for a sustainable second-growth industry, including giving tax incentives for investors to retool mills and value-add second-growth logs, ending raw log exports so that B.C. mills will have a guaranteed log supply, and re-regulating former Tree Farm License lands. But they’re not.

Instead, they’re attacking the Wilderness Committee’s call for a general phase-out of old-growth logging from B.C.’s South Coast by 2015. The timeline lets industry transition into processing second-growth so that forestry workers can continue to work – not only until the last giant cedars are gone, but in perpetuity.

Old-growth forests are important for many reasons: they sustain endangered species that can’t flourish in younger forests; they provide clean drinking water for human communities as well as for spawning salmon and trout; they store two to three times more atmospheric carbon per hectare than the ensuing second-growth plantations that they’re being replaced with, which take at least 200 years to re-sequester the same amount of carbon; they are fundamental pillars for much of B.C.’s multi-billion-dollar coastal tourism industry; and they are important parts of many First Nations cultures.

Unfortunately, the B.C. government and much of the industry maintains that “old-growth forests are not endangered” on Vancouver Island despite all the satellite photos and they continue to promote misleading statistics to justify their continued destruction. In order to mitigate public concerns, they’ve been greatly inflating the statistics of the remaining old-growth forests and protected areas by including vast tracts of stunted “bonsai” forests in bogs and in sub-alpine snow forests, most of which can’t be profitably logged.

Few realize that old-growth logging is already being phased out by industry – simply through their depletion of the resource. Thus, a transition into a second-growth logging industry is inevitable, and is already well underway on Vancouver Island. We’re simply arguing that the transition must be completed through legislated timelines before they finish all of the unprotected ancient forests.

In a nutshell, the B.C. Liberal government’s South Coast policies can be summarized as:

1. Liquidate the old-growth forests.
2. Close the old-growth sawmills as the resource is depleted.
3. Liquidate the maturing second-growth forests.
4. Export the raw logs to foreign mills.
5. Sell-off deregulated forestlands for suburban sprawl.

In recent years forestry workers and environmentalists have shown unprecedented solidarity, standing shoulder to shoulder at rallies and even union pickets, calling for an end to raw log exports and deregulation. Those hoping to drive a wedge between workers and environmentalists are helping to ensure a growing disaster for the environment and B.C. jobs.