Tenure Reform
The greatest barrier to making Vancouver Island's economy sustainable is the current forest tenure system. The various forms of tenure (government granted rights and logging privileges) are complex and, many say, impossible to reform. They extend over huge tracts of lands-80% of Vancouver Island's productive forests. Their boundaries are politically, not ecologically, determined.
In BC over 85% of the wood supply is allocated to multinational logging companies that export jobs and profits along with unprocessed wood. Under this system, some predict that 2,000 jobs a year will be axed until all the old growth is gone.
To stop this doomsday scenario from playing itself out, the big companies' tenures must be broken up. Local operators, small selective logging companies and First Nations must be given a secure access to wood. Local communities, reaping the profits from selection logging, will reinvest them back into the local community and the local forests.
The Failure of Industrial Forestry
Clearcutting is not the cost effective and efficient method of logging it is purported to be. It is simply the most profitable under the present system of forest management. The way it now works on Vancouver Island, most of the benefits of industrial forestry are concentrated in a few off-Island hands, while the downside costs are borne by local people. Local people, not the big companies, suffer the consequences of the degradation of the environment and loss of resources such as salmon habitat caused by logging. The upside is supposed to be jobs!
Since 1980, 13,000 forestry jobs have been lost on the BC coast, many of them on Vancouver Island. It amounts to a decrease in forestry employment of 26% in less than 14 years! Over 4,000 jobs have been lost in this period in Port Alberni alone, 1,500 in the last four years due to MacMillan Bloedel's "restructuring" program to make itself more "competitive" (in other words, to maximize its profits at the expense of the workers).
The jobs have been lost primarily through overcutting, switching to less labour intensive, more environmentally destructive logging methods such as grapple yarding systems and minimal raw commodity manufacturing in mechanized mills where foreign-made computerized technologies replace workers. Only about 2% of the forest industry job loss in BC over the last 14 years can be traced to land withdrawals for new parks.
Forestry employment on Vancouver Island, once an economic mainstay, now provides only about 7% of the Island's total labour force. As long as the companies continue to be subsidized by low stumpage tax breaks and bear fewer costs and receive more benefits than they should, the current job-reducing environmentally insensitive system of forestry will continue.
Saving Forests and Jobs
The alternative to industrial forestry ensures jobs and a permanent supply of timber. Eco-forestry produces lower volume, high quality wood that guarentees sustainable livelihoods while respecting the integrity of the wild forests. Healthy, diverse forests are maintained through a system of selective logging operations. Community-based forestry emphasizes independent sawmills and the manufacturing of value-added wood products.
The more jobs and profits we reap from each tree, the fewer trees we need to cut. Small operators pay on the average of 2-3 times more for wood than the major companies and offer much better utilization of the wood they cut. Through fancy stumpage formula machinations and avoidance of bidding on an open log market for wood, the big companies are cheating us out of literally billions of dollars.
The Science of Protecting Ecosystems
Parks of the past were usually created because of an area's scenic and recreational attributes. As a result, our parks system contains a high percentage of mountain tops and very little of the more biodiverse and low elevation productive lands. This imbalance must be addressed when adding new parks to complete the system.
The BC Government's Protected Area Strategy Goals (CORE Report-Appendix 14) are as follows:
Goal 1: Representativeness
To protect viable, representative examples of the natural diversity of the province, representative of the major terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems, the characteristic habitats, hydrology and landforms, and the characteristic backcountry recreational and cultural heritage of each ecosection.
Goal 2: Special Features
To protect the special natural, cultural heritage and recreational features of the province, including rare and endangered species and critical habitats, outstanding or unique botanical, zoological, geological and paleontological features, outstanding or fragile cultural heritage features, and outstanding outdoor recreational features such as trails.
In order to meet these goals, the BC government has made commitment to increase our protected areas to at least 12% of the province's land. But giving protection to just 12% brings no guarantee of environmental security. In fact, conservation biology says that this 12%- a goal set by the 1987 Brundtland Commission based on tripling the size of the Earth's protected areas-is grossly inadequate. For example, if the natural ecosystems on the unprotected land base were replaced by tree plantations, industrially managed on short rotation harvesting schedules, over the long run half of the natural biodiversity could disappear-half of the species would go extinct.
BC forester Herb Hammond states that besides protecting forest ecosystems through selection-based management techniques, a land-use plan needs to protect 25-30% of the land base from consumptive use. This is similar to the percentage of productive forest land proposed for protection in WCWC's Vancouver Island Conservation Vision.
Clearcut Logging- A Curse Upon the Land
The negative impacts of clearcutting on soils, forest productivity, salmon habitat, water quality, tourism, animal and plant species, and forest ecosystems are costs that the forest industry has never had to pay. Clearcutting is a brutal "silvicultural tool" that wreaks havoc in our coastal rainforest. The terrain is too steep, the rainfall too intense, the resultant increase in erosion too great, the winds too strong and the "immature," even-aged forests too different from the natural forests they replace for this method of logging ever to be "eco-friendly," no matter how many rules are made to round off its rough edges.
Clearcutting destroys salmon habitat.
An independent audit in 1992 of 21 clearcuts on Vancouver Island commissioned by the BC Ministry of the Environment, Lands and Parks found that 64% of the streams flowing through these clearcuts had suffered significant fish habitat damage.
Industrial forestry- a raw deal for forest based communities
Under the current industrial forestry system, set up in the 1940's over the objections of the socialist and now supported by the NDP government, the future for jobs and community stability on Vancouver Island is bleak. Timber companies and jobs now rely on huge volumes of increasingly rare and valuable old-growth wood. The second growth forests, managed on short clearcut rotations in "tree farm" plantations, will not produce the same quality or quantity of wood.
Scientists at FORINTEK, an industry-sponspored research facility housed at the University of British Columbia, found that short rotation second growth tree plantations that follow clearcutting are growing low-value, marginally useful wood.
In 1991, Glen Manning, Chief of Economic Analysis for Forestry Canada, told the Victoria Times Colonist "that when the big timber is gone, small towns such as Port McNeil and Gold River will likely die." "Port Alberni," he warned, "will go through major shakedowns, if not death."
Forest Resources Commissioner, Sandy Peel, stated that 120,000 jobs could be lost in BC as the old growth forest disappears, unless drastic changes are made to the structure of the forest industry. This means switching now to sustainable selection methods of logging in second growth forests and carefully choosing old growth trees for value added products.
