To walk through an old forest –one that has not been profaned by human encroachment– is to get the feeling of being in a holy place. It is to realise how solemnly the mist, like incense, hangs in the air; how gracefully a single leaf drifts to the earth; and how motionlessly an owl stares down from a branch, or an elk, unnoticed behind a distant bush, waits for the human intrusion to pass before venturing down to its watering hole to drink.
BC’s rainforests are not on any list of the world’s natural wonders. They’re not the Grand Canyon nor the Great Plains nor the Rocky Mountains. But BC’s rainforests, more than any of those places, are the key to the world’s survival. Millions of years ago, when carbon levels in the earth’s atmosphere were too high for human habitation, nature did something miraculous: it created fungal networks; and out of those networks trees began to grow. Eventually, when there were enough trees to absorb enough carbon to bring the atmosphere to liveable levels, human life began. Of course, it isn’t just the standing trees that absorb carbon; it’s also the fallen trees, the roots, the moss –the entire biomass. And the forests of the Pacific Northwest contain more biomass than any other ecosystem on the planet.
When I walk under a forest’s canopy with the light filtering through the branches overhead and the little streams babbling underfoot, in those moments, I realize how much I owe to these forests – how I depend on them to nurture, sustain, protect, enchant and heal me.
But then, when my trail spills out onto a newly clear-cut expanse of stumps, burn piles and stacks of logs waiting to be shipped out to who knows where, in those moments, I am suddenly shocked by the magnitude of the devastation that we humans inflict on the natural world. And, as I feel the crunch of crisp underbrush beneath my shoes and the bare sun burning down on my head, I am equally shocked to realize that the newly exposed area is more than just a scar on the landscape – it is also a sun-scorched tinderbox; a potential wildfire waiting to ignite.
In BC, such vast areas of devastation are not rare. At any given time, there are dozens of active logging sites throughout the province and dozens of other sites being flagged for the next round of logging. It is an assault that never lets up.
How did we get to this point? We of the ‘baby boomer’ generation were taught to reach beyond our grasp, to compete for more and better things in life and to celebrate our excesses. That preoccupation has led to enormous disparities in wealth and power and enormous disruptions to the natural order. The giant timber companies are an example of those excesses. They have expanded to unprecedented levels, with ever newer and more improved mechanisms for wreaking destruction on the forests.
That’s why now, whenever a trail I am following opens out onto a field of newly clear-cut stumps, I feel a great sadness. I know that our government is not committed to saving these forests. It has no long-term plan for forest conservation, and its short-term plans are always diluted to accommodate the demands of the timber companies. Public relations gestures, such as creating a Ministry of Climate Change and naming its logging agencies “Community Forest Associations” don’t help. Such pretences do not change the government’s pre-conditioned imperative which is to continue clear-cutting BC’s old forests.
In previous times, when the forests were being selectively logged, their ecosystems remained intact and continued to replenish themselves. The big transformation came in the 1960’s, when timber companies suddenly grew larger and became more industrialised. They introduced the practice of clear-cutting and began extracting more timber than ever before. In the process, they wiped out elaborate ecosystems and turned old-growth forests into monoculture tree farms. In every decade since then, the pace of logging intensified and became more mechanized, to the point where they now have machines that can clear-cut a whole grove of trees in a few hours. To the companies, the ability to cut more trees more quickly became like an addiction. And, like addicts, they kept pressuring the government to give them more and more trees to cut down. The government, for the most part, has surrendered to those demands.
Meanwhile, the planet, which never stops working to keep itself in a state of equilibrium, has become unable to keep pace with the rate at which the timber industry and other industries have been working to throw it out of balance.
We are now seeing the consequences of that imbalance: melting glaciers and polar ice caps, extreme weather, dead zones in the oceans, etc. The scientists are telling us that earth is approaching the point where it will no longer be able to sustain us. And they are telling us clearly what measures we need to take to counteract this. The first and most urgent measure is to stop destroying the forests. The forests here in BC absorb millions of tons of carbon each year. They are one of the earth’s main mechanisms for managing the planet’s CO2 levels. Also, as everyone knows, they do much more than that: they create the oxygen we breathe; filter our water; provide biodiversity and food security; protect us from droughts, floods & landslides, shelter us from extreme heat in summer & extreme cold in winter, etc. – In short, the forests are our life, and we owe them a much greater debt than we could ever repay. It goes without saying that we should, at the very least, heed the scientists’ warnings and stop cutting them down. As David Attenborough said: “When we destroy the forests, we destroy ourselves.”
In 2018, BC’s Premier received a letter signed by more than 180,000 citizens, calling for protection of the remaining rainforests. At the same time, his independent advisory panel issued a report recommending protection of the Province’s old-growth forests. In a press conference, he promised to implement those recommendations. However, instead of doing that, he has allowed the logging companies to cut down many of the same forests he promised to protect. Conservationists see the government’s continued acquiescence to the companies’ demands as a spineless abnegation of its responsibility. The government, in an effort to respond to the criticism, has been making vague promises to protect 10 to 30 percent of the remaining older forests. But even those promises are getting pushed into the future.
Here on the Sunshine Coast, the environmental activists’ main demand has been for the protection of 2,000 hectares of forest around Mt. Elphinstone Provincial Park – a forest that borders on our coastal communities and is vital to their life and health. This is an extraordinarily modest proposal, compared to the hundreds of thousands of hectares the Province awards to the logging companies.
[In my October blog I will write about the relative merits of protecting this modest section of forest.]