One of the founding directors of the Cortes Community Forest Co-operative says Mosaic Forest Management is proposing to harvest its lands on Cortes at a rate that is roughly six times greater than what the island residents are accustomed to. 

This contradicts the Mosaic brochure released at the end of January which stated quote, ‘Our planned activities will look similar to the other forest managers activities on the island.’’  

During the ZOOM conference it held with islanders earlier that month,  a senior planner for Mosaic’s north island operations said their cutblocks on Cortes would be quote ‘similar in size and scope’ to those island residents are used to.

“No, it’s not true. I do grant them the somewhat correct interpretation of the way that they’re going to lay out their cut blocks, but their cut blocks individually are larger than what we have been doing except for this last one in Von Donop, where there was a lot of root rot,” explained Bruce Ellingsen. 

The Community Forest’s normal annual harvest rate, on a land base of 3,800 hectares, is about 3,000 cubic metres. That is less than one cubic metre per hectare every year.

Mosaic is proposing to harvest between 6 and 8 cubic metres per hectare from its lands. 

Expressed in percentages of the average annual incremental growth, the Community Forest is taking about 16% – so they are actually adding to the forest timber base. Ellingsen suggested Mosaic is probably taking roughly 100% of the annual growth.

If the Community Forest continues to cut at its normal rate, he calculates the next harvest cycle will start in 500 to 600 years. That first cutblock will be full of ‘old growth’ trees.

Mosaic’s brochure states, “Each years planned harvest is <1% of our private managed forest lands on Cortes.”

At that rate, Mosaic’s next harvest cycle could start in 100 years.  

(Ellingsen goes into these statistics in much greater detail in the podcast above.) 

“I suspect they are testing the waters over here on Cortes, just to see what the community is willing to accept or go along with. If they get an agreement on what they’re proposing now,  whenever they come back to do some more they’ll probably want to see if they can nudge [the cut rate]  up a little higher,” said Ellingsen. 

He added, “For them to claim that  they’re mimicking what the community forest partnership is doing is, I would say, grossly incorrect.”

Ellingsen suggests people look at what satellite images say about the forest loss in the part of eastern Vancouver Island where the two companies Mosaic is managing have been logging for the past 20 years.

“I would say well over half of the land base is coloured in,” said Ellingsen. “It’s a vivid display when you look at how little is left and consequently, what relatively has been done in 20 years. I’m guessing they’ll be back to do it again in another 10 years or so.” 

He said that after a clearcut, it takes 50-80 years for the epiphytes, that take nitrogen out of the air and into their tissues, to start up again. 

“And it might take as many as 250 years for their full range of up to 400 different types of fungi and epiphytes to properly re-establish themselves and put all that free nitrogen into the system that they do  in an old growth forest system.”

While Ellingsen has not seen any related studies, he suspects it may take just as long for Mycorrhizal fungi and lichens to recover.   

“Those are the sorts of natural inputs that we totally miss out on with, relatively speaking, short term harvest rotations,” he said.

This post was originally published on March 14 and republished Apr 14, 2022.

Top image credit: Map showing 2000-2022 timber losses on Mosaic (Island Timberlands & TimberWest) lands vs the loss on Cortes Island adapted from the Global Forest Change website by Roy L Hales

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