Three years have passed since the BC government promised to implement the Old Growth Strategic Review, but many feel very little has been done. On September 28 concerned citizens will be protesting in front of constituency offices across the province.
The local protest will be in front of MLA Michele Babchuk’s office at 908 Island Highway, in Campbell River, from 11:30 to 12:30.
Continue reading Sept 28: Day of Action for Old Growth in Campbell RiverLoggers on Quadra Island are confronted with a dilemma. Whether they cut trees from TFL 47 or from any of the 11 licenced woodlots, the carbon stored in the forests is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, thereby contributing to the climate crisis. But loggers are required by law, as operators of their tenures, to cut an annual amount of merchantable wood—measured as cubic metres—to earn royalties, called stumpage, for government revenue. Because most logged wood becomes the raw material used for making paper, packaging and many other disposable products, most of the cut wood is quickly consumed or discarded, and its stored carbon is released into the atmosphere as CO2 within the first year following logging—only about 20% of the cubic metres measured as forest product is sequestered up to a century as lumber for buildings or as kept objects such as furniture.
Continue reading The Quadra Project – Logging’s Carbon – Part 2The global climate crisis is forcing us to restructure our thinking about almost everything we do. In the last two centuries, rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the single most influential greenhouse gas, have risen from 280 parts per million to 419 ppm, and are now threatening to literally cook us off the planet. At the seemingly modest temperature rise of 1.2°C, we are already starting to experience the disastrous effects on climate, species, ocean levels, weather patterns, food production, human health, and our general sense of physical and psychological wellbeing. Meanwhile, as carbon dioxide emissions continue to go up rather than down, the circumstances invite a paradigm shift in our thinking.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Logging’s Carbon – Part 1Planting a trillion trees would be a major contribution to solving our global climate change crisis, a remarkably simple solution since trees absorb and sequester the excess carbon from fossil fuels that we have been emitting into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: A Trillion TreesEnvironmental scientists have long argued that the most serious of our global climate problems could be solved if we just planted a trillion trees to absorb our excessive carbon dioxide emissions—trees are the best known device for this purpose. Yet, just as we desperately need them, we are busy cutting them down.
Now Mosaic, one of Canada’s largest timber companies, has just announced (Globe and Mail, March 22, 2022) that it intends to end logging in 40,000 hectares of British Columbia’s coastal forests in exchange for carbon credits—at least for 25 years.
Continue reading The Quadra Project – Carbon Credits
