Tag Archives: Ministry of Forests

Forests

Bruce Ellingsen: 2022 recipient of the Jo Ann Green Award

Every year, the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI) give the Jo Ann Green Award to a Cortes Islander who has made a significant contribution to the environmental wellbeing of the community. Bruce Ellingsen is this year’s recipient.

“Jo Ann Green was an exemplary environmentalist who came to Cortes in 1969, and she immediately became involved in social environmental activities on the island,” explained Helen Hall, Executive Director of FOCI. 

Continue reading Bruce Ellingsen: 2022 recipient of the Jo Ann Green Award →
Forests

Community Forest Cooperative seeks proposals to create products from local wood

By Greg Osoba, CKTZ News, through an LJI grant from Canada-info.ca

The Cortes Community Forest Cooperative (CCFC) is hoping to reduce logging on Cortes Island by developing more wood products locally.

The organization, in partnership with the local Klahoose First Nation, holds a community forest tenure with the BC Ministry of Forests, covering about 30 per cent of the crown land on the island, according to CCFC President Carrie Saxifrage. Each year the partnership needs to harvest a demonstrable portion of trees under its tenure.

Continue reading Community Forest Cooperative seeks proposals to create products from local wood →
Cost of Climate Change

Talk is Cheap, Part 2: the worst possible choices

Evidence of climate destabilisation — aberrant weather — is now everyday news. “Record-breaking” has become a routine description of wind speeds, rainfall, flood levels, mudslides, wildfires, high temperatures and drought.

The drought which afflicts BC this October of 2022 is a record-breaker and a tragedy; near Bella Bella, tens of thousands of salmon have died trying to return to their breeding grounds in streams now too warm and shallow for them to survive in. Over the last few summers, BC has lost millions of hectares of forest and entire towns to wildfire; “fire season” and multi-day smoke palls are becoming business-as-usual in mid to late summer. In December last year, flooding destroyed livestock and crops in the lower mainland. These events are happening more frequently and their severity is ramping up, slowly, year by year.

Continue reading Talk is Cheap, Part 2: the worst possible choices →
Forests

B.C. failing to meet promised benchmarks to transform old-growth logging

National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Two years after pledging to take a new approach to the management of old-growth forests, the B.C. government is failing to make the grade, environmental groups say. 

The province promised to act on 14 recommendations in an independent old-growth strategic review to protect the most at-risk big tree ecosystems while transforming forestry over a three-year period. 

But the NDP government continues to lag on its most urgent and important commitments, and hasn’t completed any recommendations most of the way through the stated timeline, a report card issued by the Wilderness Committee, Sierra Club BC, Stand.earth and Ancient Forest Alliance suggests.

Continue reading B.C. failing to meet promised benchmarks to transform old-growth logging →
Forests

Old-growth forests remain at ‘immediate risk’ despite B.C. government promises, report finds

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

B.C.’s old-growth forests are still in jeopardy despite the province’s pledge to work with Indigenous nations to temporarily ban logging in specific areas, a new report by Stand.earth finds.

More than 55,000 hectares of B.C.’s proposed old-growth deferrals are still at “extreme risk” of being logged, Stand.earth’s spatial analysis revealed. Satellite imagery analysis shows some deferrals have already been destroyed or are in the process of being clear-cut.

Continue reading Old-growth forests remain at ‘immediate risk’ despite B.C. government promises, report finds →