Pine beetle plague is being exploited to cut healthy trees

Ask who caused this plague destroying our province's biodiversity.

Those who go to our backcountry are familiar with our huge clearcuts and the damage done.

"How goes the raping and pillaging?" is a greeting used by our truck-loggers that dates to the 1970s for its origin, well before the beetle infestation.

Truck loggers daily, monthly, annually watch the clearcuts grow. All who drive our Coquihalla Connector have seen the vast areas, some freshly logged with this season's smoking piles of wood wasted.

Extend this image to all forested regions to ask: How many clearcuts? How many waste woodpiles burning? Google Earth is helpful to grasp the immensity. Biodiversity is severely impacted when we endorse single-purpose plantation forest-management policy. Yes, down the road profits will rise in a more efficient plantation of second growth with one tree specie, all uniform in age and size, but at huge cost to biodiversity, the environment and other values we hold dear, especially our fish and wildlife.

The bug-kill issue is being exploited by industry to promote their single-purpose plantations on our public land. Successful competing corporations excel. They lease our Crown forests.

It's time to rewrite the terms of the lease.

Larri Woodrow Director, Lower Mainland Region, B.C. Wildlife Federation