No jobs lost saving Carmanah saving Carmanah
Current forestry practices, which maximize short-term profits, have already put thousands of B.C. residents out of work. From 1997 to 1987, direct employment in the B.C. forest industry dropped by 15,000. If continued, the wasteful and ecologically-unsound liquidation of old-growth forests will mean unemployment for thousands more.
Automated factories and high-grade logging methods have also brought in record company profits. But at what long term environmental and social costs? It’s possible for Canadians to have their cake and eat it too! It is possible to save wilderness while keeping forestry jobs by implementing the following:
HALT RAW LOG EXPORTS
Shipping raw logs abroad exports milling jobs. Between 1978 and 1987, B.C. logging companies exported more than the equivalent of three entire Carmanah Valley's worth of timber to foreign mills.
BAN CERTAIN LOGGING METHODS
High speed, high volume grappel-yarders eliminate jobs. They caused increased log breakage, more soil disturbance, and more road-associated erosion, while decreasing the second-growth forests' productivity.
OUTLAW UNNECESSARY WOOD WASTE
The policy of "taking the best; leaving the rest" increases short-term corporate profits but uses up the old-growth forest more rapidly.
REQUIRE MORE SILVICULTURE INVESTMENT
Increasing short-term profits by withholding adequate spending on tending second-growth forests is unethical. According to MB's own statistics, an intensive forestry program for logged-over TFL 44 lands would produce an equivalent of seven Carmanah Valleys of wood. This would create 800 logging and milling jobs in the next century while creating more juvenile spacing and commercial thinning jobs today.
MB could easily have afforded to increase its investments in intensive forestry. From 1980-1987, the company made $719 million in profits.
MB's leave strip doesn't work
It is naïve to expect that anyone can place a reserve around the giant spruces in Carmanah's valley bottom and log 92 percent of the watershed without the spruce ecosystem experiencing drastic changes.
To suggest that a 70 year-old second-growth forest can have all of the hydrological and soil-holding functions of an old-growth forest which has taken thousands of years to evolve, is the product of wishful thinking. It is not based on experience gained elsewhere is similar situations.
Carnation Creek, further up the coast on Vancouver Island, is the most extensively studied watershed on the Canadian Pacific. Recent reports indicate that soil erosion and sedimentation caused by logging continues for decades after loggers depart.
Elsewhere on the coast, trees have blown down within the "reserves" created to protect them. Tiny sanctuaries and leave-strips inevitably fail to protect gene pools and ecosystems. Only real boundaries, like a watershed's height-of-land, work.
The fact that MB proposes to log Carmanah at a slow rate is irrelevant. Any clear-cut logging will inevitably release Carmanah Valley's "hydrological brakes". Catastrophic floods typically occur when the mantle of old-growth forest is removed from shallow-soiled, steep-sloped, west coast rainforest watersheds.
Carmanah's spruce flats will be inundated with gravel to a depth of perhaps one to two metres. This will have the effect of suffocating many of the great spruces. As the flooding frequency and intensity increases, the width of the river will glow, washing out the side banks and undermining the great spruces which grow beside the stream.
The increased erosion will also wash away the spruce giants of the future-the smaller spruces growing on the gravel bars that have formed in the last few centuries.
It is a natural instability of the river that produces the shifting gravel bars that become future spruce habitat. But too much instability would very likely convert the river's spruce beds to alder/cottonwood habitat, as has happened in many other logged-out west coast drainages.
We have no guarantee of spruce habitat protection if Carmanah is logged. Two of the key elements of background research that MB relies on to support its logging and leave strip plan (research on windthrow by T.P. Rollerson and a hydrological evaluation by R.W. Askin) are largely based on superficial, sketchy and subjective assessments.
Macmillan Bloedel logging just outside Carmanah, September 1988
MB gives no indication of any studies of wind patterns or measurements of wind speeds in Carmanah, and its hydrology "report" cannot really be considered a report at all. It fails to reference stream flow rates and velocities which are normally part of any hydrological assessment.
In short, MB does not provide the proof that its small reserve would work. Its proposed "sanctuary" for Carmanah's giants, if adopted, will become their tomb.
Although it's not really possible to "preserve" the giant spruce in Carmanah - only pickles can be preserved-you can preserve the Sitka spruce ecosystem itself by letting it remain in dynamic equilibrium with the rest of the valley.
