They should try that "fall and burn" method, I hear it works slick.

Does the Ottawa area have pine trees?

Maybe we could lend them TDB and their mini-loggers!

Sure...NOW they decide to do something!
Wasn't all that important when they were eating B.C.pine trees!

We now have knowledge on the aftermath. Maybe we should start marketing it to the rest of the country.

Kind of like life insurance.

Runner, sorry but that is to logical.

Never work. We are still in the process on inventing the wheel.

"Sure...NOW they decide to do something!
Wasn't all that important when they were eating B.C.pine trees!"

Memories are short ...... no wonder government in power prefer to spend most of the money at election time .... helps to get the support from those with memory loss ....

http://www.opinion250.com/blog/view/5308/3/beetle+battle+heats+up

Don't blame the feds. Our province had a motto throughout this beetle disaster- "Results based forestry"- where the private sector was supposed to become stewards of our crown owned forest, allowing the gutting of M.O.F. staff, offices and Forest Renewal Funding projects.Too bad (for us) the companies looked on the beetles as a source of cheap wood. The only real effort to stop the bugs started with significant fed funding three years ago- much too late for BC. Funny how you don't hear the term "Results based forestry" any more.

I think that concept was developed at a forestry round table ....... ;-)

"Memories are short"...yes, they are Owl!
Does anyone recall just how long it took to for the governments to actually DO something?
When they finally stepped up,it was to clean up the aftermath...not to stop it from spreading as they appear to be trying to do in Alberta.
Guess they learned something in B.C.

And now the "beetle boom" is over and PG's hurtin'. We all saw this coming years ago, commented on it years ago, and now some people are surprised?

I do not believe they could have done much about it.

First of all, there was no single epicentre in BC like some people would like to believe that like to blame government instead of realizing this is nature and it is larger and more powerful than than any government or industry.

Second, the pine in BC was not the only one affected. Read the article from Colorado of some two years ago. It's all the way down to Mexico and it is going east. $2 million more won't do much. neither will $20 million or $200 million or $2 billion .....

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4287134

The money needs to be spent on getting the affected communities to bridge the gap from the high levels of harvest of the past to a lower harvest level in the next 50 years and more.

Some points to consider:
Owl has it right. Three or four million is not enough money to do anything. For reference, the old FRDA agreements were for 500 million over 5 years. That was in the absence of a forestry crisis. Given colder temperatures in northern Alberta, and a sustained LARGE SCALE effort at clearcutting infestations it may well be possible to prevent this from becoming a national disaster. Remember though that this surplus wood will essentially be wasted.
It is highly doubtful that anything short of divine intervention could have stopped the spread of MPB in BC once it reached epidemic numbers in the park. The infrastructure did not even exist at the time. As well, we had an overabundance of mature and overmature Pine in the area. The bad side of protecting forests from fire.
The beetle is largely a man made problem but bot because of bad management. It was due in large part to bad management by the parks department and to good protection (fire) practices. Restricting the size and distribution of clear cuts and the amount of beaurocracy involved with cutting permits didnt help either.
The idea that 'gutting the ministry' or 'results based forestry' are to blame in any way flies in the face of the facts. Industry has done a lot better job at reforestation and silviculture in general than was the case under the MOF. Industry pays stumpage on everything it cuts. Pine beetle wood has arguably been over priced since the start.
The 'beetle boom' isnt over, the 'building boom' in the US is. That and the devalued US dollar are to blame for the current forestry slow down. There is a LOT of wood still out there waiting for harvest. Find markets and we can work our butts off for a few more years.
The mid term timber supply data provided by the ministry and others is likely in error. Smaller (read younger) utilization standards, alternate species use and other factors may well reduce the pinch when the time comes. Tighter inventory practice is also possible.
When people throw criticisms around or predict crises at every corner it is inevitable that those in power will begin to tune them out. I am unaware of a concerted timely effort by anyone to change beetle management. Most of it has been 20:20 hindsight.

Caranmacil-you have drunk deep of the industry's kool-aid. Although at this point it is moot-the damage is done- for future reference:
1) Beetle wood was at salvage rates for many years. The trouble was that clearcut size was limited. So in 2003, Plateau had over 200 3ha. openings to plant, since there was salvage stumpage only on clearcuts less than 3ha. in size. Given the massive edge area involved in so many openings and access roads to reach them, this enabled the beetles to multiply like crazy. However the industry chose this approach due to low stumpage rates, not due to any long term management consideration.
2)It has been well documented that companies were scamming good wood along with beetle wood. This is why stumpage rates were raised.
3)Part of industries "good management practices" involved trucking 400,000 M3 of beetle wood from Vanderhoof to Chetwynd in 2003 to make up for wood that got left in the bush at spring break up. Funnily enough the beetle started showing up in Mackenzie and the Pine Pass soon afterwards.
4)As far as silviculture goes, I work in the industry and can assure you that private companies are no better at planting trees than the MOF. In fact in their rush for lower bidders, some companies are really shoddy in their reforestation practices. Two years ago in Mackenzie one company had to replant over 500,000 trees.
I point this out not be a monday morning quarterback, but to get the record straight for the reckoning that one day will have to be addressed. If we leave that reckoning solely to private industry we will be shortchanging ourselves and our children of the birthright that is our forests.

Check reforestation planting numbers, I believe the figures speak for themselves.

"private companies are no better at planting trees than the MOF"

?????? I did not realize that the MoF had planting crews on staff.......

"Given the massive edge area involved in so many openings and access roads to reach them, this enabled the beetles to multiply like crazy"

I always thought that limited clearcut sizes came about through government foresters, not industry foresters. Which is it?

Who then is responsible for exposing so much to the elements and pests?

Private companies don't have planters on staff either...;)
The limit in clearcut sizes was`economic. Companies could have cut larger areas, but not at salvage rates ($0.50/M3). So they wound up being penny wise and pound foolish. If we were now to judge them on results based forestry, they failed.

"Private companies don't have planters on staff either...;)"

Hmmmm .... so you mean to tell me that the planters they hire are not employees as understood under the Employment Standards Act? I do not think so!

That Act governs and they are employees no matter what you wish to call them. They have to be paid the minimum wage, vacation pay, etc.

So, back to the heart of the matter. The companies who do the planting have contracts with both licensees as well as the forest service. In other words, the same contractors are the planters no matter what the case.

The contract administrators are different. In the final analysis, the MoF is the decider of whether the planting has resulted in a free to grow or NSR state. So, if there is blame to be laid for a sytems failure, I assume that is where it goes. That is where the buck stops.

So, lets go back to the notion that many smaller patches result in greater edge exposure conditions and thus exposes the stands to greater risk to beetle attack.

Those stands were developed in that fashion long before the current notion of "results based" forestry practices and were actually the dominant condition for a couple of decades or more.

So, why blame results based forestry rather than the more prescriptive forest practices code developed by the MoF?

By private companies I meant Licensees. Sorry if that was unclear. The statement was in rebuttal to another poster who claimed Licensees were somehow better at meeting silvicultural obligations than the MOF.
Smaller patches were used to try and target pine beetle infestations. As I stated before, the patches were limited to 3 ha in size to escape full stumpage. However the beetles quite often didn't feel constrained by this artificial size limitation. So part of the infestations were quite often left alone. The beetle would then spread easily along the edges of the opening and access roads to it. Kind of like cutting out 1/2 of a cancer.
Why blame results based forestry? Because the companies (licensees) used these ineffective and counterproductive tactics long after it was shown not to work. Results based forestry depends on good faith on the owners of the forest (us!) to allow the managers of the forest (the licensees) to act in our benefit. However putting the fox in charge of the henhouse has never worked, and we shouldn't be surprised that it didn't work here either.