Land and Forests

 by Joyce Nelson

Most of BC's public land forests, and all of BC's private land forests, are owned by two huge companies, known as TAM and BAM [see diagram]. TAM is Third Avenue Management of New York, and BAM is Brookfield Asset Management, based in Toronto.

As Briony Penn wrote for Focus Magazine (Feb. 2011), "Look out your window anywhere from Crofton to Sooke and you'll be gazing at a piece of real estate owned in some fashion by BAM or TAM ... [which] form a many-headed hydra that has been devouring most of the private forest lands on southeast Vancouver Island." 

Maintaining Whole Systems on Earth's Crown: Ecosystem-Based Conservation Planning for the Boreal Forest, by Herb Hammond. Published by Silva Forest Foundation, Slocan Park, BC, www.silvafor.org; Distributed by New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, www.newsociety.com;  402 pgs, soft cover, $49.95; ISBN 978-0-9734779-0-0

by Maggie Paquet 

by Delores Broten

It's been a long haul, but after almost twenty-five years of angst, anguish, and mind-numbing, soul-crushing, hard work, the entire Crown land forests of Cortes Island are finally in the process of coming under community control. The invitation from the provincial government to apply for a community forest comes after a group was created two years ago by the now Acting Chief of the Klahoose First Nation, Kathy Francis, that entered into discussions with the Ministry of Forests.

BC Ministry of Natural Resource Operations "Super Ministry"

by Delores Broten

The BC civil service remains in major chaos, issuing flow chart after flow chart, as it tries to figure out the structural changes imposed by the new Ministry of Natural Resources Operations (MNRO). The new super ministry was a surprise creation of lame-duck premier Gordon Campbell and some senior bureaucrats, announced in October with no public consultation.

MNRO will be responsible for all crown land permitting and authorizations. It will also look after stewardship, including fish, wildlife and habitat protection.

The changes are intended to streamline land and water use applications for industry. They also separate policy from licensing and permitting.

by Delores Broten

The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, billed in May by par­ticipants as "historic," appears to be constructed of a set of boxes within boxes. It is, says Aran O'Carroll of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Soci­ety (CPAWS), an agreement between some major environmental or­ganisations and most of the Ca­nadian boreal forest industry on "how we are going to work together for three years." How­ever, critics say it could also be characterised as a deal between private partners over public and First Nations lands.

The Forest Products As­sociation of Canada (FPAC) has agreed that its members will not log, build roads, or plan logging on 29 million hectares of woodland caribou habitat before March 2012. Both O'Carroll and Avrim Lazar of FPAC agree that the companies had no plans to log much of that area in that time, only 72,205 hectares, according to Dawn Paley in one of the first critiques of the deal published in The Dominion (www.do­minionpaper.ca).

by Stephanie Orford

Should Delta sacrifice a keystone ecological region for a chance at economic growth? Many Delta citizens and en­vironmentalists are outraged by the proposed South Fraser Perimeter Road (SFPR), a four-lane highway to run along the south side of the Fraser River, and by their inability to give input on its development. The provincial government signed the SFPR design, build, finance, and operate agree­ment on August 12th with the Fraser Transportation Group, a conglomerate of companies that will build the road.

Eliza Olson, president of the Burns Bog Conservation Society, says the proposed highway would have myriad disastrous effects on Delta's Burns Bog and surrounding ecology. "We're not opposed to the road. We're opposed to its location," she told the Watershed Sentinel. "There are alternatives."

by Stephen Leahy

North Carolina's Scot Quaranda is terrified that the southern United States plans on becoming the Saudi Arabia of biomass. But isn't biomass a renewable source of clean and green energy?

"Not when you're burning trees," says Quaranda, the Communications Director of the Dogwood Alliance, a coalition of 70 citizens' organizations trying to prevent the South's remaining forests from being turned into tree plantations. Some 102 biomass/biofuel facilities are currently being built or planned in the region. A single facility could require millions of tons of biomass, mostly wood chips grown on the fast-growing loblolly pine plantations that already blanket the southern states from the Carolinas to Arkansas.

No one seriously argues that tree plantations have anything like the biodiversity, ecological function or spiritual essence of natural forests, be they first or even second growth, but have they reduced pressures on old growth forests?

by Morgan Hite and Dave Stevens

In January 2005 the neighbours first learned that a company called Blue Pearl had optioned the rights to begin mining Hudson Bay Mountain, right next to Smithers, BC. The seven million tonne deposit of molybdenum ore had been explored in the 1970s but never put into production. In the subsequent three decades, land originally set aside for a tailings pond and processing plant had been sold off and turned into housing developments. Housing had grown up to the foot of the mountain in the area below the historical mine site. By 2005 people lived close to the old mine site, and in many cases drew their water from the slopes below it.

We felt that something needed to be done to make sure this mine was done right, and most importantly, that water quality would be protected. To that end a number of groups were formed. This initial tack, of forming more than one local group, proved to be very fruitful later on.

We formed an umbrella group for the whole Bulkley Valley called Hudson Bay Mountain Neighborhoods. One  neighbourhood group was the Lake Kathlyn Protection Society, whose members took their water from Lake Kathlyn, directly below the proposed mine site. Another was the Glacier Gulch Water Group, whose members shared a communal well on a small creek flowing from the site of 1970s exploration work.

BC Environmental Assessment

by Anne Sherrod

Many environmentalists feel that their most important role at this time is to help the public accept that global warming and peak oil are real and potentially deadly problems. We hope to persuade people that solving these problems will require radical change in a short timeframe. But what kind of radical change? Exploitative and dictatorial forces in society have historically claimed a need for rapid and radical action as an excuse for seizing more control. 
The proposed Bute Inlet independent power project (IPP) is being justified as a producer of "green energy," yet it includes diversion of 17 streams, 445 kilometres of transmission lines, 314 kilometres of roads, 142 new bridges, 16 power houses and a substation - all in a coastal wilderness area teeming with wildlife and crucial fisheries. That's radical change, alright. The environmental damage stands to be massive. IPPs that will produce over 50 megawatts are subject to Environmental Assessments (EAs). Will EAs prevent or even significantly reduce the impacts of these developments?

by Briony Penn

This summer a long, detailed and beautifully illustrated report came out called Taking Nature’s Pulse: The Status of Biodiversity in British Columbia, (See www.biodiversitybc.org). On the front cover is a Taylor checkerspot butterfly, a coho salmon, a bumblebee, a spirit bear and an ensatina salamander. The report is a labour of love and science put out by Biodiversity BC, a coalition of fifty scientists from both environmental organizations and the provincial government.

What struck me most is that I haven’t seen a document like this for nearly 15 years. Not since BC took a huge leadership role by being the first to sign the UN Convention of Biodiversity at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 has there been such a concerted effort to bring together all the people observing the natural world (in BC) to give us a status report on their research. The most important thing about the report is not simply the findings, which are as serious and disturbing as we could have imagined, but that it hopefully signals a resurrection of Rio in the hearts of British Columbians.