The vanishing wilderness
Less than nine percent of the total area of Vancouver Island has been set aside for ecosystem protection in parks and reserves. The old-growth forests within these reserved areas account for less than three percent of the island's entire land mass. A minimum of 80 percent of Vancouver Island is allocated to logging. The remaining 11 percent is mostly mountains and cities.
The Coastal forest industry makes its money by clearcutting old-growth timber - Douglas Fir, Sitka spruce and amabilis fir (balsam). And they intend to go on logging the ancient temperate rainforest until it is gone. That is current government policy - all old-growth timber currently not protected in parks and reserves will be logged.
There is no middle ground here, no flexibility. Over the years, the government has allocated virtually all the public's timber to the forest industry, even though the last Royal Commission on forestry in 1976 headed by Peter Pearse strongly recommended against it.
Today's tree farm licenses and timber supply areas extend across massive and very dissimilar forest landscapes. This is contrary to the recommendations of the 1956 Sloan Royal Commission on forestry that called for the management of individual, self-contained watersheds on a sustained yield basis.
Forest managers in industry and government prefer the megaforest administrative unit because it provides them with more "flexibility" in planning allowable annual cuts. However, those cuts are rarely spread evenly throughout administrative units. Instead, logging typically is concentrated in only one part of the unit at a time.
As a result, separate regions within the mega-unit are not managed individually according to a sustainable timetable. And that is a two edged sword. Although Fletcher Challenge (TFL46) and MacMillan Bloedel (TFL 44) logged much of their old-growth rainforest on southern Vancouver Island, they made comparatively fewer inroads into the wilderness forests of Clayoquot Sound. Today, the companies are looking to the forests of Clayoquot Sound to take up the slack.
