There is some dispute ongoing in British Columbia regarding the treatment of forests and first nation people rights
Issue date:
December 3, 2011
Fiery debate surrounds benefits of salvage operations
Logging B.C.'s beetle-killed pine forests can, in theory, reduce the risk of a wildfire.
But when fire ecologist Bob Gray visits a logging site, he can see just the opposite: a heightened fire risk because of so much uneconomic wood left on the ground.
Salvage logging of B.C.'s Interior lodgepole pine forests is having major consequences for wildlife by eliminating vast stretches of habitat used for activities such as feeding, hiding and keeping warm or cool.
It's not the tropical Amazonian rainforest or even B.C.'s temperate rainforest, but a stand of lodgepole pine located off the Pelican Forest Service Road about an hour's drive southwest of Prince George.
The plan was simple: Log and sell as much dead pine as possible before it decayed or burned. But the environmental costs of the large-scale salvaging of Interior forests are still being tallied...
B.C. should use policy, not dollars, in carbon fight
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, natural gas prices were high and many major gas consumers worried that continued high prices posed serious risks to future profitability.
In January, a deal was struck between the Pacific Carbon Trust (the provincial Crown corporation responsible for buying carbon "offsets") and one of British Columbia's biggest logging companies - a deal that would allegedly result in hundreds of thousands of tonnes of additional carbon being stored in trees.
Ever since United States house prices peaked in mid-2006 and the great economic slump began south of the border, British Columbia's government and forest industry alike have been understandably anxious.
Dependent as we have been on the U.S. market for billions of dollars in forest product purchases, B.C. naturally yearned to open up new markets.
Given its spectacular economic growth, China became the focus, and before long B.C.'s marketing efforts yielded gains in both the volume and dollar value of forest products exported.
In the aftermath of the disastrous wildfires in 2003 that burned hundreds of homes and caused millions of dollars in property damage in and around the communities of Kelowna and Barriere, the City of Cranbrook began doing what hundreds of other communities across B.C. must do if they wish to better protect themselves from future wildfires.