By Roy L Hales
The great stands of Douglas Fir that many of our ancestors saw are largely gone. Isolated pockets persists. IN the following interview Ross Muirhead, of the Elphinstone Logging Focus, talks about the attempt to save 98 ‘Old Vets’ on Mount Elphinstone. ” is an ECO Radio interview broadcast on CKTZ (Cortes Island Community Radio) , CJMP (Powell River Community Radio) and CFSI (Green FM – Salt Spring Island Radio).
Continue reading 98 ‘Old Vets’ on Mount Elphinstone
There are 466 watershed in British Columbia. More than a quarter have problems with logging activities. The requirements to protect drinking water are not always clear or enforceable. In the interview that follows, Hans Penner of the Elphinstone Logging Focus talks about logging Impacts in the Chapman Creek Watershed.
Continue reading Logging Impacts in the Chapman Creek WatershedThere have been 150,000 visits to the Global Forest Watch website since it went online Thursday and for good reason. The interactive map is an an online forest monitoring system, created by the World Resources Institute and more than 40 partners, that allows you to examine changes in the forest cover anywhere in the World. They drew upon many databases, including Google Maps , data from the University of Maryland and satellite imagery. Global Forest Watch has already shown that the World lost 2.3 million kilometres of tree covering between 2000 and 2012. My concerns were more specific, I wanted to know if the forests in Canada and the US are presently emitting, or storing, carbon.
“We don’t have that data yet,” said Forests Communication Officer James Anderson, who then proceeded to show me some of the data the site does have.
Originally published on A Conversation On BC Forests (2011).
As a woodworker on the drier southern BC coast with a very small woodlot, and some working familiarity with the timber journey – from seed to old tree and from sawn lumber to sailboat, it seems
obvious to me that there’s still a tug of war between two polarized goals in forestry. One strives for Quantity, the other strives for Quality. It’s a simplification I know, but then we could also call it
Ishmael’s battle between Takers and Leavers, and ask who is winning. Nearly always in our modern addiction to economic growth, gross volume wins over real value. But the short-term quest for higher quantity has already severely compromised long term timber quality in many coastal watersheds. Does this have to be the eternal dilemma in our transient relationship with wild forests, trees and wood? Or is this really a false dichotomy built on ignorant assumptions? Is there a better middle path, a more gracious future in a truly sustainable forestry?
Originally published on the Cortes Tideline (2014)
I believe that most of us now realize that a mature forest ecosystem is a complex community of interconnected, interdependent organisms demonstrably capable of developing, expanding and sustaining itself. To appreciate this, we only have to consider the forests that existed in much of North America and, more specifically, on our Pacific Coast, when we Europeans arrived.
Continue reading A Mature Forest Ecosystem
