Category Archives: Forests

The Cortes open letter and community engagement with Mosaic

On Thursday, March 31, Regional Director Noba Anderson gave Mosaic Forest Management an open letter* calling for them to make changes to their plan for logging on Cortes Island

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Critique of Mosaic’s 2022 Forest Stewardship Plan for Quadra Island (P3)

Originally published on the Discovery Islander

“Noise is the amount of disagreement between people who make professional judgements.” This is the definition supplied by Daniel Kahneman, a behavioural scientist and Nobel Prize winner, and his two fellow scientists, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, who were trying to understand and explain why “a lot of professional judgement actually has no connection to reality.”

Their studies were initially inspired by a survey of 208 federal judges in the United States. On convictions for the same offence that received an average of 7 years incarceration, sentences varied by as much as 50%. Another study found that the value estimates of insurance underwriters varied by 55%, a large enough range that made their assessments almost useless. Psychiatry is particularly “noisy”. So is forestry.

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Cortes Island community  discusses Mosaic Forestry Management’s logging plans

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

In response to Mosaic Forest Management’s proposed logging activity on Cortes Island, announced in January, a public meeting was held outdoors at the Village Commons lot in Mansons Landing on March 12. More than 30 people attended on the cold and rainy day under a tent set up for the event.

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Quadra Project: Critique of Mosaic’s 2022 Forest Stewardship Plan (P 1)

Originally published on the Discovery Islander

Mosaic’s 2022 Forest Stewardship Plan (FSP) for TimberWest is a legal document describing in general terms how the forests of Tree Farm Licence 47 on Quadra Island will be treated during the next five years. Except for changed dates and a few bureaucratic adjustments, it is ostensibly identical to its 2017 predecessor, an indication that Mosaic’s management objectives have been unaltered by the climate crisis that is now occupying the attention of every thoughtful and informed human being on our planet. Their corporate activity is unchanged, as if they were somehow exempt from any responsibility for “heat domes”, “atmospheric rivers” and the other extraordinary weather anomalies that have and will continue to plague us.

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Removing select old growth from a Quadra Island woodlot

Three months ago, Cortes Currents published a story about some old growth trees cut down in one of Quadra Island’s woodlots. It almost immediately became apparent that some of the information I had been given me was incorrect and there was more to the story. So I published a retraction. As the site was buried under two feet of snow, the woodlot licensees invited me to examine the site myself in the Spring. That was how I came to visit woodlot 2031 on Saturday, March 19, 2022. 

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