Stumbling Blindly Into the Future
Thursday, October 11, 2012 @ 3:46 AM
-Bob Simpson – MLA Cariboo North (independent)
This week the BC Liberal government released its response to this summer’s Special Committee on Timber Supply’s report and recommendations. The Special Committee consisted of both Liberal and NDP MLAs, and its final report represented the unanimous agreement between the two political parties.
In essence, the government has accepted the Committee’s recommendations and has “committed” to taking steps to act on them. The overall intent of the government’s so-called 10 year action plan, dubbed “Beyond the Beetle,” is to keep harvest levels as high as possible for as long as possible in order to minimize any mill closures and job losses in the near to mid-term and to enable the rebuilding of the mill that burned down in Burns Lake earlier this year.
To accomplish this feat the government will allow logging in areas currently set aside for other values (including old growth management zones), they will include “marginally economic stands” into their annual allowable cut calculations so they can keep mid-term harvest levels high, and they will pass legislation this spring to convert volume based licenses to area-based tenures that can be directly awarded to private companies by Cabinet.
These fundamental and radical changes to BC’s forest management and forest tenure regimes will be done without an updated inventory or any additional funding for forest health and silviculture activities. Facing budget cuts in each of the next two years, the Minister of Forests can only promise that BC’s forest inventory will be updated over the next ten years.
In short, we’re going to blindly stumble into a whole new forest management regime that will see the further privatization of our public forests, threaten our reputation as sustainable forest managers and put the future health and ecological integrity of our climate stressed forests at risk. Other than some creative bookkeeping surrounding future annual allowable cut determinations, there’s not one ounce of creativity or innovation in the government’s response to the complex challenges we face in our forest sector.
We need to have the courage to face reality: the traditional forest sector is going to downsize, there will be mill closures and there will be job losses. In order to address the question of how soon this will occur and for how long, we must undertake an immediate re-inventory of our public forests that takes into account the implications of climate change and analyzes the potential to take advantage of economic opportunities outside of our traditional timber markets.
-Bob Simpson
Comments
And by the time such a study was completed it would already be hopelessly out of date.
There is really no way that the very real practicality of ‘sustained yield’ long term forestry can ever be maintained in any economy where a government fails to understand the difference between ‘inflation’ and ‘prosperity’, and seeks to encourage the former at the overall eventual expense of the latter.
This has been proven time and again through our past experiences with Tree Farm Licences, quota, and such other well intentioned, and potentially promising efforts at sensible forest management, (at the time of their inception) ~ all of which have been done in by ongoing ‘inflation’.
Those in charge fail to discern that the larger number of dollars represented by increased profits actually only have meaning relative to what they’ll continue to BUY. And with inflation, that’s less and less as time goes on.
On the Coast, we’ve seen many of the same large companies now active in the Interior, or previously so, trend towards a monopoly type of consolidation. Where it was once supposed that whoever could get to be the largest couldn’t help to be the most profitable.
But the theory didn’t prove to be the case in practice. With ongoing inflation, fueled further by each consolidation and the attendant costs that then had to somehow or other be recovered in prices, generally through the sale of increased volumes, it didn’t take too long before the majors were covertly “living off their (fixed) Capital” ~ their timber, through its ever faster liquidation.
Rather than from the increase in “Income” the acquistion of this additional (fixed) Capital should have enabled. Now the remainders of what was once the ultimate apexes of Corporate vertical integration are reduced to doing the same thing more openly.
As real estate pedlars, hiving off chunks of their private forest fiefdoms that aren’t even profitable enough operating as tree farms for Asia.
We should, and could, take lesson from this. But we won’t. We’re too hidebound in our failed perceptions to take notice, and those who’d lead us find taking us “down the same old garden path” to nowhere far easier than looking beyond where we have been looking for solutions. What could we expect from those who see “jobs” as the be all and end all of everything, while we ‘work’ our way into poverty?
Simpson’s article and Socred’s comment are the reason I get some of my news from O250 – well said, both of you.
The government’s action plan is a toxic cocktail of ad hoc tenure reform on the fly, subsidy through broadcast fertilization, and continued unsustainable logging reaching into economically marginal forests and old-growth reserves previously off limits to logging.
For government to pretend to solve the timber supply crisis with the same tired, misguided policies that created it in the first place is nothing short of lunacy.
One way or another the forest industry will have to rationalize declining timber supply as a result of today’s grossly unsustainable rates of logging, which will inevitably lead to more mill closures and a deeper timber supply crisis down the road.
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