Short cycle stuff …. good for now …… think sustainability …. the above is not.

Frequency of building dams and pipelines is what??????

Besides, this is really nothing new. Loggers in this part of the woods … :-) … have been going to Alberta to cut seismic lines for some time.

Whether we like it or not, Canada’s economy is based on jobs, taxes, royalties, and trade related to resource extraction – forestry, oil/gas, mining.

Will that change in the forseeable future? No.

Glad to read good news about logging. I think the work would last longer and employ more people if we simplified the falling and processing. We should employ Fallers and Buckers instead of these big, expensive, energy-devouring machines. The carbon footprint of a man on the ground using a chainsaw is so small it is hard to see; the footprint of a Buncher blocks the sun.

Lumber super cycle? Good news, but the lumber industry better buck up if they want to attract workers.

I agree they need to buck up if they want to retain workers. Most drivers in the logging/chip hauling industry are making less than the provincial wage average of $24 an hour. The only benefit being you don’t have to deal with a lot of people. Drivers are bailing left right and center and the only ones left are trainers and trainees, or those too old to try something new.

The forest industry has become the training grounds for drivers in other resource sectors, shipping in general, and a stop gap to other careers. Very limited few view driving in the forest industry as a long term career anymore.

“Glad to read good news about logging. I think the work would last longer and employ more people if we simplified the falling and processing. We should employ Fallers and Buckers instead of these big, expensive, energy-devouring machines. The carbon footprint of a man on the ground using a chainsaw is so small it is hard to see; the footprint of a Buncher blocks the sun.”
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Now there’s a perfect example of the way people have been conditioned to view ’employment’ as the be all and end all of everything.

Who do you think is going to trade their safe, warm, comfortable seat on a modern feller buncher
or processor to go back to taking their chances getting killed or maimed hand falling and bucking in 20 below weather, freezing their buns off wading through the snow?

Perhaps you’d like the mills to throw out all the optimisation and automation they’ve put in, too? Go back to a hand set carriage, with a couple of doggers riding on it, and a couple of guys on the log deck doing the canting with peaveys, and a few more to roll the logs into the mill? That would make the work last longer, wouldn’t it?

Throw out those energy consuming j-bar sorters and automatic stackers and go back to a hand pull green chain? Or maybe even that’s too modern, and we could just push the boards along a set of dead rolls, and pile them and unpile them in those huge stickered stacks like we used to do, all by hand? Just think of of how many people we could employ doing that, and how small our carbon footprint would be.

Why stop there, though? We could even replace those awful, noisy, emission-spewing chainsaws with the old two man ‘misery whip’ and an axe, and employ legions more.

Lets make every thing as labor intensive as possible, after all isn’t that what all those preaching endlessly about the need for ‘hard work’ and more of it really want?
Fits right in with Mrs. Christy’s “Job Action Plan”, and Adrian would be all for it too, I’m sure.

Make everything as inefficient as humanly possible, (as if the government isn’t doing that already with the profusion of inane regulations it imposes that really have no other ‘benefit’, if the object could be called that, than to make a ‘job’ for someone to administer them).

Is that what we REALLY want? Are we so conditioned with the utterly ridiculous idea that ‘everyone’ HAS TO have a ‘job’, and do something MORE before they can draw on an already existing productive capacity where an absolute ‘glut’ of nearly every product imaginable is more often the problem than any shortage of it?

Are we so stupid that we’d eschew all modern progress that has enabled that ‘physical’ abundance, and go back to a world where scarcity was REAL unless EVERYONE who could work was working? Do you really want that, just to create ’employment’? Does misery really like company that badly? That we’d turn everyone into a drudge, and keep them there, permanently ~ no progress allowed?

Perhaps it’s not so stupid when we are unable to devise a better way to distribute the products we make here to those who need and want them here in sustainable quantities, without producing them in unsustainable quantities to FORCE them on foreigners just to try to make a failing financial system seem as if it’s working. For at least then we won’t moonscape our forests, or pump dry our oil, or level every mountain for the coal underneath it, at the accelerated pace we do all those things, and more, in a hurry to get financially rich, forgetting that will do us scant good in a country that’s physically poor. But why do we have to choose between two undesirable alternatives?

The only sane purpose of ANY economy is NOT to provide more ’employment’, but to provide first needed, then desired, goods and services in the MOST EFFICIENT MANNER POSSIBLE.

Which will only be accomplished by continually LESS overall human employment. But not, be it noted, less overall human emPAYment. For only humans consume, in a financial sense, in a manner which liquidates the costs of production as ‘production’ itself moves through into final ‘consumption’. And those financial costs CAN’T be FULLY liquidated unless those no longer needed on the ‘production’ side of the equation still receive an income WITHOUT working for it.

It’s important to consider the cost of harvesting natural resources. I agree with the above comment that it should be efficient.
Heavy equipment is costly to our resources to build, transport, maintain and operate. We need heavy equipment to build roads, skid,load and transport logs but we don’t need bunchers to fall trees.
A qualified Faller with a chainsaw uses little resources and energy with relatively few emissions to harvest trees; he is much more efficient than the machine that has replaced him because the cost of falling trees by hand is so small the finacncil reward is greater.
And, some people enjoy working outdoors even when it is 20 below.

Sign me up Socred. I’d rather be skiing!

Was watching some footage from the sixties about computers and automation. The big sell was that people would be working 30 hour weeks, due to said technologies, and would have more time for leisure, education, and family time. We all know how that panned out. The wealth is concentrating at the top end and will continue to do so.

Trickle Down my arse!

Absolutely, govsux. The workday was reduced from 12 hours on average to 10 at the dawn of the 20th Century. And then from 10 to 8 at the end of World War One. And there, for most of us, it has stayed. With pressure being applied on many of us lately to increase it, as supposedly being ‘financially’ necessary. And, individually, for many it is.

But each time a reduction was done in hours worked way back then, there was an INCREASE in overall industrial output. And our industrial output has been increased enormously since 1919. With fewer people than ever actually working at anything ‘productively’ in it. There is a lot of ‘dead wood’ that could be pruned out without the slightest decrease in ‘productivity’ whatsoever.

But what do we have today? People, supposedly educated people, too, who keep telling us that unless we ALL work longer and harder and produce more we’re all going to hell in a hand basket. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Sticks&stones, the problem with falling trees with a feller-buncher and running them through a processor, using two people on the machines vs. doing the same with chainsaws manually, is that for the volume of trees needed now to feed the modern mill there would be no cost savings.

How many people would you need with chainsaws to produce in a day what one feller buncher and one processor can produce? Could you get that many people to do that kind of work everyday, and do it safely, and within all the rules and regulations governing everything we have now?

Even with the high capital cost of the machines versus that of the chainsaw, it is the overall OPERATING cost that is the most important. And there the machines are going to win out hands down. Or they wouldn’t be there ~ we’d still be doing it the old way.

Our real problem isn’t “making work”. Work is simply a function of man, a means to an end. Like sleep. It’s in distributing incomes, which have been traditionally tied to employment, in an era where overall employment needed to actually meet our consumptive needs is continually declining.

If we insist on distributing incomes solely through employment we’ll end up wasting huge volumes of resources, not to provide products for ourselves or others who may really need or want them, but simply to provide an ‘excuse’ to pay someone an income. And we’ll do this until we have exhausted our resources, believing that ‘good times’ are just around the corner if we can only CAPTURE some market somewhere and keep it.