How the present system works
The present system of forest management in British Columbia was created after World War II. Until that time the rationale behind timber harvesting in the provinces was one of forest liquidation. Few people considered the forest to be of much value or that a permanent, renewable forest industry was possible. It was widely believed that when the forests were cleared, people could then get on with the prosperous business of farming.
The new Forest Act of 1947 recognized the commercial value of forests and contained legislation intended to provide a perpetual supply of commercial timber at a steady rate that would stabilize local and regional economies. These policies, known as "sustained yield" forestry, were adapted from a long-since-abandoned, early 19th-century German system featuring a succession of clear cut logging and plantations.
The existing system of forest management in B.C. relies on large-scale clearcuts and monocultural plantations. Photo credit: WCWC files
One aspect of this system was the regulated removal of the natural forest. This would be done at a rate so that the new forest would contain an even distribution of age classes which would then yield a constant annual volume of timber forever. Sustained yield forestry would not begin until this new forest was in place.
The provincial forest was divided into a number of administrative areas or "working circles." In some of these, now known as Tree Farm Licences (TFL), the entire area was leased to a forest company, which also took on the responsibility of managing the area for future timber production. In the other areas, now called Timber Supply Areas (TSA), the government retained the responsibility for management and issued leases and licences that provided an annual volume of timber to forest companies.
A key feature of sustained yield forest policies was regulation of the annual harvest in each TFL and TSA. A formula was devised to calculate this Allowable Annual Cut (AAC). A rotation age was selected which determined how long the forest would be allowed to grow before it was logged and replanted. The amount of mature timber, along with the annual growth of new timber, was calculated. By dividing the rotation age into the volume of mature timber and adding the annual growth of new stands in the forest, the AAC was determined.
There were some obvious dangers to this calculation system. If the AAC were set too low, economic opportunities would be foregone. If it were too high, the timber supply of the area would run out before the new timber crop was ready for cutting; loggers would be put out of work, mills would close and communities would be destroyed.
In his 1976 Royal Commission report on forestry, Peter Pearse warned of another danger, which he called the "falldown." It refers to the situation that may occur when all the old-growth timber in a TFL or TSA is gone and harvesting begins in the managed forest. From this point on the annual harvest will be limited to the annual growth of the new forest—an amount known as the Long Run Sustained Yield (LRSY)—and it may be less than the AAC provided by the old-growth forest. This drop in annual harvest levels when logging begins in second-growth timber is called the "falldown."
Rather than wait until the mature timber was gone and abruptly reduce the harvest levels of the TFLs and TSAs to the level of the Long Run Sustained Yield, the Forest Service decided, in the 1980s, to gradually reduce the cuts of each unit until it reached the LRSY, with the intent of avoiding sudden job loss and mill closure.
However, over the past decade or so a number of other factors intervened which affected annual cut determinations. The environmental movement, along with other government agencies, forced the Forest Service to begin recognizing and managing for resource values other than timber—water, fish, wildlife, wilderness, recreation. In some cases, such as the creation of a park in South Moresby, the land was taken out of the TSA or TFL and the cut reduced accordingly. In other instances, which did not involve specific areas of forest land but were concerned with forest practices, there were no clear methods for determining the AAC reductions involved, so none were implemented.
During the recession of the 1980s the Bennett government directed the Forest Service to simply ignore a number of regulations, including some related to cut control in order to maintain employment and profit levels—an approach known as "sympathetic administration."
During this same period industry successfully lobbied the government to maintain unjustifiably high AAC levels through a variety of other mechanisms. One such means involved the inclusion of uneconomic timber in the AAC calculation process.
Industry argued that, even though it did not have the ability to economically log remote and/or low value stands of timber, it would be able to in the near future; therefore these volumes of mature timber should be counted in calculating the AAC. Years later, these stands are still uneconomic to log with the available technology, and the Forest Service has insisted they be removed from the calculations.
Political intervention in the cut-determination process continued until the appearance of the
Harcourt government, which decided not to overrule the Forest Service's decisions regarding AACs.
The new calculations, taking all the factors into account, have led to the large reductions in
logging levels that began a few months ago. An attempt by the Forest Service to impose a similar
reduction on one of MacMillan Bloedel's TFLs was overturned in an internal appeal, and is currently
being fought over in the courts. The Harcourt government deserves some credit for restoring a
measure of integrity to the harvest regulation process. But by fiddling with one part of the entire
system of forest administration, and avoiding other needed changes, it has brought about today the
very thing it wants to avoid in the future-unemployment and community upheaval.
The government has failed to make the changes needed to allow displaced loggers to go to work in
the new forests where they could increase the volume and value of the timber supply which, in turn,
would maintain employment in the mills.
Forest industry percentage of the B.C. Gross Provincial Product and the number of jobs per 1,000 cubic metres of timber 1961-87.
