“It is generally accepted”, says Simpson , that , "Canfor and West Fraser are having trouble adjusting to the new surroundings in the forest."

And he knows this how? Has he taken a survey? What knowledge do the people who provide the "general acceptance" have of what is happening?

Do those who provide the "general acceptance" realize that licensees who have forest tenures in non MPB infested stands as well as MPB infested stands have shifted their capacity to the infested tenures without prior MoF approval (since the MoF was not prepared for such an obvious mitigation reaction) and risk of loosing their access to the AAC in the non MPB infested tenures?

Do those who wish access to MPB wood realize they can gain access to BCTS timber through the bidding process? 20% of the timber is accessible in that fashion. So what is this about having to deal with Canfor and others?

------------------------
"Companies such as Shell are having difficulty justifying an investment, if they have to assume silviculture, and other costs while dealing with the Forest tenure holders as well"

I could well imagine that they would have problems with that. After all, the wood is not worth the same anymore since it cannot be used for traditional higher end products. The costs of gaining access, harvesting, replanting to free to grow remain the same.

Shell, eh? About to play a shell game are they? Buying green credits for burning so called "green" products to offset their oil extracting business? As I keep saying, mother nature really does not care where the Greenhouse gasses come from. She has no separate accounting system.

Keep burning the chit without recovering or sequestering the carbon it really does not matter whether it is wood, straw, coal, or oil, it has the same effect with respect to global warming.

Redirecting timber from a lumber stream to a wood burning stream, for instance, means moving from a carbon sequestered product (lumber) to a carbon release (GHG) product.

NDP forest management plan? HeeHee! Too funny.

Owly, get off Simpsons back he's a good man.

Where do you get all your expertise from? Simpson is a hell of a lot more informed then Rustad.

Cheers.

Simpson is a talker, lacking any concrete action.
And where in hell is this being informed carrying any solution to the problems to be faced?
We are all not in "la la" land-and fully realize the beetle kill wood is a major problem, and any proposals to date have carried little promise a viable enterprise is on the horizon.
Beat it to death, and the politicians will continue to do so, as they have to have a subject to be heard on, and this has been the major hype for quite some time now.
We know the major players in the forest industry are concerned about the bottom line continuing to show black ink. Waste of time shoving that message in our faces!
I think the man is pretty useless, other than attempting to keep himself in the limelight-he offers nothing of any substance.
And never let it be said I think Rustad is any better!
Neither will get my vote.

Simpson is right, expropriate the tenures if they are not going to take action immediately, and secure it for those who can and will make the investment to take action right now. I have changed careers 3 times since I first read in the local newspaper about the pine beetle problem.

As someone who has made a good living mapping and surveying MPB from the far end of the Kluskus in 1991 to Tumbler Ridge and beyond last year, the devastation is indeed incredible. Many TFL's and TSA's simply do not represent any meaningful long term harvesting potential any more. This will become painfully obvious in the next three years as more and more wood becomes unharvestable. Kudos to Simpson for having the guts to raise this issue. The status quo doesn't work any more. The sooner we realize this and act upon it, the better off we will be. If it takes the NDP to describe the 'Emperors Clothes', then so be it.

Did Simpson raise any issue we were all unaware of?
Anyone with an ounce of brains knows much of the wood cannot be harvested. The cost would be absolutely prohibitive.
No one has come up with a suggestion-or plausible solution, nor will they, or can they.
Mother Nature decided to play "dirty pool" and she will become the deciding factor as to the destiny of the majority of the beetle infested wood.
She will show us "The Emperor has no clothes."
It will not be the N D P. And you can bank on that!

"Where do you get all your expertise from?"

Kimbo ... email me at pg_owl@yahoo.ca and I will let you know. If you want to talk about it over coffee, we can do that too..... I have seen Simpson go at it with Coleman in a small group. He is no doubt good. But people who are good are still not infallible.

He has opinions based on his experience and I have opinions based on mine. Both sets of experiences are valid.

His experince is more into organizational management of a licensee. Mine is associated with research programs and sustainable forest management practices as well as safety issues and training in woodlands operations. That has been over a 20 year period.

I have also written regualr columns in two forestry magazines, one western publication and one national publication.

Herbster: you state that the status quo doesn't work any more.

Of course it doesn't.

Simpson, however, seems to think that changing managing practices will overcome the truth of the biological imperative. He is replaying a broken record as far as I am concerned.

I disagree. Changing management practices will do nothing. We have an oversupply of dead wood at a time when the forest industry is changing in the rest of Canada and the rest of the world and we are stuck looking at red trees only without seeing the bigger picture. There are other problems to overcome as well. The MPB is only one of several.

I'm with 'trusted" on this one...In communities like Williams Lake for example,about 60 percent of the population is employed in the forest industry.It is generally thought that we will see a 40 percent decline in these very same jobs over the next 5 years as the bail out begins and smaller companies start to fail or attempt to adjust.
On the other hand,it takes about 7 to 10 years to bring a mine into full paying production and that mine will generally last about 8 to 15 years.(excluding those mines that are already close to actually starting to dig of course).
Can we grow trees in that time frame? No we can't,so all the yadda yadda from the politicians really means very little.Talk is all we are really getting.
And what if these same mines that the government now would have us believe will save the day, are nowhere near the communities hit the hardest by beetle kill? What happens to them.What happens to a community like Fraser Lake or Fort St.James where the ONLY industry is forestry even though they are close to potential mine sites? No viable solutions or answers forthcoming so far but the answer is NOT in mining!
If we have a handle on how much timber is harvestable right now,what about in 8 or 10 years? Can we predict that with any accuracy?
B.C. is in major trouble and people like Simpson and Rustad need to wake up to the fact that there very well may not be a satisfactory solution.This is a very unique situation the likes of which we have never had to deal with before.It is time the politicians started admitting that.

"Simpson is right, expropriate the tenures if they are not going to take action immediately, and secure it for those who can and will make the investment to take action right now."

Read what the government's policy with respect to the MPB is. Listen to the chief forester. This year is a research year, next year is the first action year with a peaking about 4 or so years later.

They have increase the AAC. Why do you think there have been extra shifts put on for the last couple of years? Why the truck traffic on the roads? Why the stockpiling of lumber products south of the border? Why the decrease in price of lumber?

Combination of less demand and more supply. An industry that has a capacity to use just over a percent of the standing timber on an annual basis all of the sudden finds itself with feedstock of 15 to 20 times as much. No plant capacity and no market capacity. There is no market for waverboard, no market for MDF. And certainly no market to pay 5 to 10 times the price for pellets, if not more.

What do you propose to do? Pull the same trick with pellets? Oversupply the world market and knock down the price of an item that has been made from garbage left over using the expensive technique of accessing, cutting, and hauling to the pellet factories something which they have been getting for virtually no cost? By thus knocking down the price, making it the red figures on the financial statements even higher?

And who is going to bear the cost of replanting then? And what are you going to plant? More pine?

Where is your sense of economics?

The researchers do not even know whether they should take the risk of replanting while the dead trees are still up, or whether they should be cutting them even though they may not be marketable, just to reduce the fire risk and the risk that they will have to go in to replant 20% or so due to fires which will break out. Forestry is not an exact science.

But this I will have to agree with you on. If I were the government I would select some MPB stands, make an agreement with the licensee letting them off the hook for that stand of timber, and allow companies to bid on the dead timber and see what happens. Since it is a natural disaster, I would go back and take care of the planting and stand tending.

Based on the ingenuity of the proposals, I would then decide whether to go further dwon that path, or stay the more conservative course and redirect communities more heavily into other industries for the next 4 to 5 decades.

"B.C. is in major trouble" ... I really do not think so. A component of a single industry is hitting the skids. The industry, however, is not dead. There will be a downsizing in the Interior. If you did not follow the news in the past, there has been a downsizing on the coast which is not beetle related and there is a downsizing going on in the rest of Canada.

There is life after wood. The sooner we realize that, the better off we will be. If you want to see what life after wood looks like, spend some time in Vancouver. Spend some time in traditional forest States such as Washington and Oregon.

Remember your history books when most of those in the world were farmers and hunters? The truth about primary industries is that they have lost tremendous number of employees and there is still room to lose more.

There will be very little or no life after wood in this area. We are totally dependent of the forest industrie and if it shrinks we shrink. Especially the greater Prince George area. Places like Houston, Vanderhoof, Quesnel,Mackenzie and the Hazelton, Terrace areas will continue, however as the wood supply moves further away from Prince George we will start to close mills.

We have little or nothing in this area that can replace forestry jobs to any large degree. Nor is there any projects on the drawing board at this time. Even the mines that are being planned are far away from Prince George and although we will get some storage and distribution business it will be minimal in comparison to what we have to-day.

Major projects in Prince Rupert, Kitimat, and the proposed Mines in the Smithers to Dease lake, plus all the action from Dawson Creek to Ft St John, Grande Prairie etc; will acutally pull people from Prince George rather than attract any.

I suspect that those companies who hold the TFL's on beetle killed timber are targeting those areas to log that will get them the most bang for their buck. In other words if you have an area that is beetle kill, but also has a lot of Spruce, Fir, etc; then they would log these areas in preference to an area that was just beetle kill. This gives them access to timber that they might not have had if not for the beetle kill. They can now go in and clear cut.

If someone else has access to the beetle kill then they would also get the **good** timber. Canfor or West Fraser would be loth to give up this timber.

The reason I think that the prime timber is being targeted is because I see some really fine timber going through town every day, that I havent seen in years, which tells me that they are now logging in areas that may have been off limits prior to the beetle kill. Im sure Owl can give us some info on this.

The beetle investation is a perfectly normal and GOOD stage in forest biology. European culture, still after so long, does not understand the truth of forest cycles. European forestry is based only on extraction of wood to convert to money and cares little to nothing what the long term effects are. So short sighted is this greed for money that the European will destroy even though by his own accounting the end of this resource is within sight. Those that are not job seeking today will be job seeking tommorow. Entire forests pay the price for delaying for only a short time what is to come without fail: Hundreds of jobless. It is the European mind set that everything must be exploited... no, destroyed, to satisfy their lust for little pieces of paper. History is packed to the ceiling with evidence of the European lust for more and more and more. Cancer is the Creator's metaphor for how the European thinks and lives upon the Earth and just like cancer the European will devour it's host until it kills itself by killing it.

Obviously you have not been to Europe lately, kevin. What you are referring to are displaced Europeans. Those who moved here have not changed their culture since there appeared to be endless riches.

In the meantime, those Europeans who have stayed behind have gone through that cycle and have created a much more sustainable lifestyle (still dependent on others, but less so than both North and South Americans). The average European makes a much smaller footprint on the globe than the average North American.

As for First Nations, I think you are also dealing with old cultures there. I suggest that the footprint made on this globe of the average First Nation person these days is considerably different in size from 100 years ago. In fact, for many it is on par with the non First Nations population. It is not as if First Nations involved in logging use hand saws and horses to log. The First Nations logging companies and thier workers use harvesters built in Asia just as others do.

Come on, owl, you know full well there is a day of reckoning on the horizon when the major lay offs leave hundreds unemployed in the lumber industry. Remember, one unemployed is potentially affecting 4 people. The communities to be hardest hit are mentioned above, so I shall not do a repeat performance.
If these communities will not be in "major" trouble, you tell us what the bail out will be. We are all ears, as if no sustainable employment surfaces we will most certainly see a glut of homes on the market and a mass exodus from the areas.
I have simply stated I am a bit weary of the same rhetoric spewing forth from the politicians. We know the mountain pine beetle is a major problem and will affect many. Keep telling us that-but do not come up with any solutions. Maybe they can get the exodus happening sooner. People can only consume so much bad news and then a reaction is a certainty.
Bad news is bad news is bad news-so lay it on us one more time!
I say-enough already!
Simpson might be one hell of an intelligent forester, but he is not capable of instilling any sense of security in the residents of the hardest hit areas by the MPB.
So maybe you can tell us, but make it good.

"Come on, owl, you know full well there is a day of reckoning on the horizon when the major lay offs leave hundreds unemployed in the lumber industry"

I am sorry, where did you get the idea from that I think that will not happen? It will happen, just as it has been happening more slowly over the years.

"one unemployed is potentially affecting 4 people"

What do you mean by that statement? The average family size in the order of 3 not 4. Are forestry workers more prolific? Are they younger so that they would have more family members at home? Are more of them married or living in partner realtionships rather than empty nesters?

Or are you thinking spin off jobs? In that case the nomral figure used is more in the 1 direct job produces 2 indirect jobs.

In either case, the number is exaggerated based on my information. I would be intersted in knowing your data source.

Owl you have estabilised you credentials. I am a retired and never ever have been an expert in anything. And I don't believe that you cant teach an old dog new tricks. I send you an email and you can start taching.

Cheers

Trusted said: "If these communities will not be in "major" trouble, you tell us what the bail out will be ..."

Trusted. Please recall the discussion about functional illiteracy - that a large percentage of people cannot read a newspaper. That did not mean that they could not read, but that they cannot read for content and that they often do not understand what they read and thus reach false conclusions

I get rather ticked when people on here cannot or do not read and then fly off the handle blaming the author rather than re-reading something to make sure that they understood something correctly.

I have found myself doing that on occassion as well, so I do not exclude myself from the occasional lapse of reasonableness when I read something which causes a red cape to be put in front of me.

So, tell me where I said that forest communities will not be in trouble. If you re-read my words you will notice that I quoted Andyfreeze where he stated near the end of his post that:
"B.C. is in major trouble and people like Simpson and Rustad need to wake up to the fact that there very well may not be a satisfactory solution."

I stated that in my opinion BC will not be in major trouble. Emphasize the word MAJOR. That is quite different from the notion that individual communities, especially communities in the interior of the province will not be in trouble. And the longer they think that the world revolves around them, the less likely it is that they will get themselves at least part of the way out of that trouble.

Here are some approxmate numbers with out trying to go back to some source data.

BC has a population of over 4.3 million. The population of the communities who are directly and predominately dependent on forestry is likely less than 100,000 (add up the Mackenzies, Houstons, Fort St. James', Quesnels, Burns Lakes, Port Albernis, Campbell Rivers, Slocans, etc.) Add another 100,000 or so in for good measure for larger communities who have a significant proportion of the population directly associated with the forest industry (17% in PG, for instance) and you get 200,000. Now please do not read this wrong. That number is not the number in the provnce who work in the forst industry. That number is less than 100,000 and has been going down steadily for decades, beetle or no beetle.

So, that makes it less than 5% of the population in BC that is directly dependent on the forest industry. Keep in mind that the industry will not be devastated. There will be a cutback in the central parts of the province with respect to woodland operations, but nothing on the coast, at least not for MPB reasons. The coastal woodland operations have about 40% of the provincial payroll. So, if there is a falldown in the interior to something like 60% of the AAC of the pre beetle decade, then around 25% of the 5% of population will be affected, which means about 1.3% of the BC population.

I do not consider that to be a precipitator of "MAJOR trouble" in BC. Sure, a closure of a sawmill in Bear Lake will mean the community will virtually fold, as have other communities throughout time. Just look at the names of communities along the CN tracks east of here. Each one existing because of a sawmill. Each one virtually dead due to sawmills folding. DId that mean that PG folded. Of course not. In fact, the most recent closure was because Canfor moved their primary operating area to get beetle killed wood to the west and saving the predominate non-pine stands in the McGregor for the time when the beetle killed stuff is no longer viable. I consider that to be good planning to mitigate total job loss and loss of opportunity. It is likely that many of those affected and did not move with the job opportunities do not feel that way.

What I keep saying on here is that in addition ot the MPB situation, there are other conditions which are causing and will continue to cause small forest dependent communities accross Canada and North America, including BC, to see closures of manufacturing plants - pulp, lumber, panels, etc. For some reason we seem to be blind to that at the moment. Too many people acting like chicken little because they finally saw red.

"Simpson might be one hell of an intelligent forester"

He is not a forester. Neither am I. He was a manager in a regional licensee operation in Quesnel. He is the forestry critic.

Don't get me wrong, I think he is a person who knows quite a lot. However, he is also a politician and in opposition at that. So, he needs to paly that role sometimes. To do that means that you skip over the things you think the party in power has done well and pick on the things you think they have done poorly. The resulting overview over time is a bad image of the other party.

When one is in the sme room with him, one can catch those kinds of things and ask the appropriate questions, and you can tell from his responses how solid his points actually are.

His is one opinion and one only. By and large they are reasoanble opinions. However, as with all of us, he has no magic bullet.

Give you a for instance. How would you like to replace those in charge on the deck of a disabled ship when those in charge had nothing to do with disabling the ship? It is often better to work with those you know and have worked with through normal times and know their quirks, than to change the entire system at a time of crisis. The risk is far too high for a total failure.

I would prefer to work with a large corporation that has operations throughout the province, many of which are not directly affected by MPB. Any souring relationship due to probelms in one or two regions, could affect operations in the entire province.

Clawing back tenure for the sake of some small upstart company is highly questionable. Small upstart companies can make all the agreement they want, knowing that they can simply leave when the financial climate does not pan out the way they thought. So, that leaves me, trying to look after provincial interests, holding the bag.

BTW. Speaking of Foresters. I do not know how many have noticed that the Professional Foresters in the province appear to be rather silent on such issues. I would think that they would be at least able to put together an awareness raising campaign in the Interior to explain to residence what is happening, what it means on the ecological side and what it means to the economics involved.

The data exists. The various opinions are available on which projections are based. But, unless one is involved with some of the processes, the general public is really left blind.

Damn, I wish I had time to absorb all that drivel, but this is one "chicken little" that sees a "red cape" wich signifies there is still a certain amount of work to be accomplished in a day, or I will have to hit the skids, and my ship will be left disabled with no one at the helm, and I will not so much as have a handle to fly off.
Just for the record-those other conditions affecting communities and forcing closure of manufacturing plants , pulp, lumber, panels etc., give us all those recently affected in northern B C in 3 postings or less, whichever comes first.
By the way, families are normally considered as consisting of 4 people. Not in your lifetime I guess. I fully accept the fact you are far more informed as to how prolific forestry workers are. I bow to your fact finding in that area. Must be a site for that information that I have not bothered investigating, along with many more.
God forbid I should ever get caught "holding the bag."
I would never want to infringe on your position!
Have an absolutely glorious day!

"Family size varies widely around the region (see map). Idaho has the region’s largest families, with 2.3 children per woman on average, while British Columbia has the smallest, with 1.4 children."

The above statement comes from the following link about the NorthWest of North America.

http://www.sightline.org/research/population/res_pubs/highlights

Families may "normally" be considered to be 4 people. However, not all "families" have 2 children, some have none, others have 4 and I even know of one with 6 which is rather rare these days.

When speaking of an entire population, one typically speaks of averages .... in BC that is 1.4 children per woman. Couple that with a father and you get 3.4 as the average family size before separation, divorce, etc.