
On Tuesday May 17th, a group of Mosaic (Island Timberlands / TimberWest) employees travelled to Cortes Island to host an “open house” at the Gorge Hall. They set up displays indoors and offered a casual one-on-one discussion period from 10AM to noon; at noon, they made a formal presentation which — thanks to improving weather — was held outdoors for better Covid safety.

Mosaic’s plans to resume industrial logging on Cortes Island are controversial and have already inspired a petition-style letter and a series of community meetings. Mosaic has received significant feedback from the community challenging their cut plan on various grounds, including location (cutting within the boundaries of sensitive ecosystems) and extraction rate (several times the rate recommended and practised by the Cortes Community Forest).
Local activists opposed to clearcutting arrived early to stage a peaceful protest featuring hand-lettered signs and the construction of a tripod similar to those used at Fairy Creek to blockade access roads. In a humorous early moment, protesters greeted the arrival of Mosaic’s team with the “Darth Vader march” theme from Star Wars. The Mosaic team seemed to take the joke in good humour.

Although the protest event was fairly small initially, there was quite a large turnout for the presentation part of the day. By noon, about 40 people had gathered to hear what Mosaic had to say — and to ask questions.

Mosaic’s presentation was in several sections, each with its own speaker. The principal topics were (a) their responses to previous community feedback and modifications of their cut plan, and (b) their carbon-credit strategy (aka Big Coast Forest Climate Initiative). Their presentation was challenged throughout by questions from the audience, but the overall tone of the meeting was civil and orderly.
Topics raised by local residents included the proposed cut rate, Island Timberlands’ history, recent Mosaic harvest areas that don’t inspire confidence, impacts on wildlife, watersheds and water security, soil conservation, raw log exports, community economic benefits such as employment, disposition of slash, possibilities for community purchase of Mosaic’s holdings on Cortes, and the importance of forests in sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change.
The presentation/discussion continued for about two hours and covered a lot of ground. Currents will be reporting the content of the meeting in greater detail in a day or two.
I asked a few random attendees why they had come to meet Mosaic.

Bill Wheeler: You look at the picture, at the world, and we’re deforesting the place, and Mosaic is just part of it. And here they come, right in our face. It’s like, what are we going to do? Are we going to say something now? Or let them rip? I’m not optimistic about very much, but we got to give it a shot anyway; I don’t know what to do, but I’ve got to try something.
Kioshi: We’re going to need those forests and those trees to keep the water in the ground and keep life — not just us, but life on Cortez — and biodiversity — keep it living and keep it healthy. We are a species among millions of other. And so we are not the only important thing here, many things and many other species are important as well, for our wellbeing.
Sandy Hoffman: We need to be looking at logging sustainably, and that’s not how they are currently looking at logging. They’re looking at clear-cutting, they’re looking at doing it in a way that’s not sustainable and that doesn’t even consider a future. We should be thinking about our future. We need the trees for the future. We need the trees and healthy forest for the inhabitants. We need them to mitigate climate change, and they want to export raw logs. We shouldn’t be exporting raw logs. We should be doing value added products here.

Jeannie Mengee: I’m a registered nurse working on the island here. I came today because I am worried about what I’m watching in the world, watching really poor logging practices that are slaughtering our ecosystems — with really poor education behind them. I know they could be go to forestry school for so many years, but they’re studying it from textbooks. They’re not studying what a real forest looks like and how it actually behaves. And they’re not applying that in the forestry industry. I’m here also so that they know there’s a huge number of people here that are opposed to the logging practices that they have done in the past and we are, you know, hoping to buy back the land or make some sort of a, carbon tax credit offer… or do anything basically to save our forests. Because we’re tired of fighting decade after decade, one big logging company after another.
Kim Phillips: I live just on the road here and I came because… well, I want to help preserve our beautiful, incredible important ecosystems here. And I just don’t think a for-profit company can put environmental interests first. They just are incompatible to me. So I’m really interested to see and hear what comes out of the community in terms of what we can do to take our forests out of the “care” of for-profit. I think by its nature, a for-profit corporation is beholden to its shareholders to prioritize profit. So they can talk about they’ll do it nicely, blah, blah, blah. But they’re legally bound to prioritize profits. So how can they do otherwise? They would not be following their corporate bylaws if they did. So it just doesn’t make sense to me that they’d be in charge of ecosystems.

Dancing Wolf: I was a tree hugger long before this, but I just love trees. And I think that there’s been enough logging in our province and on our little island here. Definitely enough logging — and just leave it alone. It’s just bottom line, too much.
Tamias: I’m a single parent with a five-year-old on Cortez. That’s most of who I am these days, and I’m really interested in communities and how we can get along better as a community. So when I see conflict or controversy in the community, and I see. People coming together to talk about it. I want to see what happens next, and I want to see how this community handles it. My ideal would be to find a solution that works for everybody. And it’s not going to be everyone’s preferred… but something where everyone can go, “oh, okay. It’s not worth fighting.” And the option that I’ve heard of so far for that is to purchase the land and for some community organizations to own those parcels so that we don’t have mosaic owning any land on Cortes.
Christopher: I live full-time on Cortes and it’s different. It’s a different feeling from any other place I’ve been, and I really cherish the forests. And I know that even though most of the forests have been logged once over the last 150 years, there has been that time for significant regeneration of the forest. And what’s proposed to be cut are some of the last tracts of that kind of regenerated forest, that are truly beautiful with some amazing old growth and ecosystems that are somewhat rare in British Columbia, if not the world. And it’s important that we protect what little is left of that, what is rare. In particular you know, old growth or near old growth, healthy forests.

[Note: I approached the Mosaic staff for interviews, but they declined to speak on the record, saying they are not allowed to talk to media. They offered to put me in touch with their media liaison office instead. So unfortunately we cannot offer their point of view in this article.]