Land and Forests

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.

by Dave Neads

As Minister Penner stated when commenting on the new carbon credit system the BC government is putting in place, things can get "complicated." Just how complicated becomes readily apparent when you examine the newest scheme to make us look climate friendly and make money to boot.

Here in the Interior, we get, on average, 125 cubic metres of tree mass per hectare. It takes 125 years or more for trees to achieve this size. Most of the beetle kill and most of the old growth logged here is 125 to 200 years old. The ministry has set the lower limit of loggable forest down to 60 cubic metres per hectare. That is about the same amount of wood that is contained in one big old coastal cedar. Or one off-highway logging truck load for every 2.5 acres of land laid bare.

The question is: What happens to the carbon when these trees are clearcut?

by Andrew MacLeod

Beating drums and wearing traditional black and red blankets, a large group of Kwakiutl protesters gathered one day in mid-February outside the British Columbia legislature in Victoria. They'd made the 500-kilometre trip from northern Vancouver Island, where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years, to show their outrage.

Two weeks earlier, the BC government had announced that Western Forest Products would be allowed to remove 28,283 hectares of private land from its Tree Farm Licenses (TFL) on Vancouver Island, a large part of which lies in traditional Kwakiutl territory. For decades, the company had managed the lands as part of the TFLs, a concession made in exchange for access to huge tracts of publicly owned forests.

"Western Forest Products stands to recover millions of dollars from the sale of those lands," says a Kwakiutl statement. "This is the primary reason the provincial government approved their application to transfer to private lands." The transfer amounted to a handout, the statement says, and the first nation should have been consulted before the government agreed to it.

DO TREE PLANTATIONS OFFSET FOSSIL FUELS?

XYZ Corporation has purchased carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon dioxide releases. Often they will do it for you too- pay to have someone somewhere "plant a tree" or a thousand trees or a hundred thousand trees, in order to go on with business as usual. The internet abounds with web sites that will help you calculate how many trees you need to pay for in order to do penace for your carbon-intensive lifestyle - at up to $5.50 per tree. So is it really that easy? No need to conserve or make radical changes, just pay someone somewhere a hefty sum for planting a few trees? Here's what forest campaigner Jutta Kill of the European environmental group FERN thinks of the concept.

1. Carbon in trees is temporary:

Trees provide temporary carbon storage as part of the normal cycle of carbon exchange between forests and the atmosphere. Trees can easily release carbon into the atmosphere through fire, disease, climatic changes, natural decay and timber harvesting.

2. One-way road:

The release of fossil carbon, in contrast, is permanent and, over relevant time scales, will accelerate climate change by increasing the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere - the very cause of today's climate change. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas are locked away and their carbon is only released when humans dig up and burn them for energy. Once released, they become part of the active carbon pool, disrupting the natural cycle.

3. Fake credit:

by Norberto Rodriguez dela Vega

Something very special happened on September 29, 2008 when the people of Ecuador approved by referendum Rights for Nature in their Constitution. This is the first country in the world to grant inalienable rights to nature.

In Ecuador, Pachamama, Nature, is not an object, nor a commodity to exploit and abuse. Pachamama is madre tierra, Mother Earth; she has her own rights, the same as any other subject in their Constitution.

The Rights for Nature are based on three fundamental natural laws that are recognized in Ecuador and in the indigenous cultures of South America:

1. We belong to Earth.

This is exactly the opposite of western culture where we little humans think Earth belongs to us. For them, defending Earth is then a duty, a responsibility to be proud of.

2. All is related.

by Will Horter

Scandal is not new to the private forest lands on Vancouver Island

Fortunes have been made – and are being made – by resource companies that benefit from sweetheart deals that privatize vast tracts of land in BC. A select few, with the right government connections, reap the benefits. The public, especially First Nations, pay the price. The BC government’s recent decision to privatize 28,000 hectares of forestlands previously in Western Forest Products (WFP) tree farm licences (TFL) is only the latest scandal in a sordid history that traces back to BC’s entry into the Canadian Confederation.

Few British Columbians are aware that a land privatization deal was written into the Terms of Union when BC joined Canada in 1871. As forester Ray Travers points out, “Clause 11 of the Terms of Union conveyed in trust to the federal government, provincial lands along the entire length of the railway across BC, some that later became the Esquimalt and Nanaimo (E&N) land grant on southeastern Vancouver Island.”