Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: Coming up in this episode, Lorraine Chisholm talks with Karen Price about a Sierra Club BC report highlighting the lack of progress in protecting old growth forests in BC.
Speaker: Five years after commitments from the provincial government to protect BC old growth, a new independent expert report concludes that the ecological integrity of our forests continues to decline.
Speaker: This threatens forest biodiversity, First Nations values, important carbon sinks, and a diverse economy. The report called Closer to the Brink was commissioned by Sierra Club BC to examine the state of the forest five years after the provincial government committed to fully implementing the paradigm shift in forest stewardship that was outlined in the 2020 Old Growth Strategic Review.
Speaker: Karen Price is an oncologist who co-authored the report, and she joins me now. Hello, Karen. Hello, Lorraine. Thanks for talking with us about this this morning. Well, thanks for inviting me and for covering this topic.
Speaker: Remind us of the direction and plans of action promised by the province on old growth in 2020 and again 2023.
Speaker: Can I start with a little bit of context? Because I think it's just important. Every time I speak, I just like to go, okay, we're starting from a place where we know that we're living within biodiversity and climate and social crises.
Speaker: And it turns out that BC's forests have really important role to play in our biodiversity and climate crises. And so that context is really important.
Speaker: You mentioned in the introduction, they matter for carbon, they matter for biodiversity, they matter for species. Essentially, we all depend on our ecosystems and in BC, our principal ecosystem is forests.
Speaker: So because of that, people in BC really care about their forests. and Wherever you are in the province, most people will go outdoors to recreate.
Speaker: They might forage. They might live off forest food. They might use medicines. They'll use it for spiritual values and peace. I know that I feel much happier when I'm outside in the forest.
Speaker: So people of BC care about our forests. And the government recognized that. And they recognized that there was trouble in the woods, so to speak. It's been going on for decades.
Speaker: Folks who are old enough will remember the Clackwood protests and then the Ferry Creek protests. And the province decided that they would try and do things differently. And they hired a couple of respected foresters who put together an old growth strategic review.
Speaker: They talked to hundreds of people and got all sorts of online and in-person feedback. And they recognized that actually the folks in BC agree that we need to do things differently, that we really need to steward our forests rather than managing them for industrial short-term profit.
Speaker: And so these foresters based on their conversations with folks all around the place put forward recommendations and the province to their credit accepted all of the recommendations.
Speaker: And this was the 2020 All Growth Strategic Review And the provincial government at the time accepted the recommendations. I'll highlight a couple of them. So the the first one, obviously, as should be first in anything that goes on with the province, is working with indigenous nations on everything that goes forward.
Speaker: The second one, second kind of pillar, is that the government committed to a paradigm shift. And what that means is just shifting the way that they steward or manage forests from putting timber and profits first to putting ecological integrity and human communities first.
Speaker: That was a big promise and there were then a number of other recommendations that fall under those two. One of them that was one that was supposed to be enacted immediately was deferring old growth.
Speaker: A lot of your listeners is probably will have heard about that because there was a lot of news about old growth deferrals. the idea here was that some of our old growth ecosystems are at such high risk, there' so few left that we really need to put a pause in the logging kind of to stop to stop the flow so that we have some forest left so that indigenous nations and other folks can get together and actually plan what they want to do for conservation and which areas they want to harvest.
Speaker: So the idea was to put a pause, a temporary pause in harvest. And this is called blogging deferrals of the most at-risk old growth. And a group of us, I was on the old growth technical advisory panel a year later came up with recommendations for just which were the most at-risk old growth. Turns out unsurprisingly that they're mostly the ones that have big trees because that's where industry targets.
Speaker: Another really important recommendation from the 2020 old growth ah strategic review was to increase biodiversity targets.
Speaker: Right now, the the province has very low targets for the amount of old growth that needs to be protected. And these targets are not sufficient to maintain biodiversity and ecological function.
Speaker: So they made the commitment that they would actually science-based targets. So that's another one of the really important from a kind of ecological science based perspective, another one of the commitments that they made in 2020.
Speaker: You know, I remember back then environmental activists we we spoke with were saying, the devil's in the details. And you've been mapping and analyzing the progress of five years worth of implementation.
Speaker: What is happening to the critically important old growth for us that had been recommended for deferrals? Well, we'd hoped that deferrals would pause logging and give enough time for planning.
Speaker: And unfortunately, not surprisingly, ah because of the way things unfolded, they have failed miserably to do so.
Speaker: There are some deferral areas that allowed nations who were already kind of ahead of the the the conservation game, who had already decided, look, we really need a tool that's going to help us conserve areas that are important to us.
Speaker: And so some nations were actually able to leverage the deferrals to use in their planning. But that was just a handful of nations who already had ideas about what they wanted to do for conservation.
Speaker: Now, shockingly, you report that logging was four times more likely inside at-risk old growth forests that were recommended for deferral than in other old growth. How can that be explained?
Speaker: Yes. There's a couple of ways to explain it. So obviously, if we've got more logging in deferral in old growth that was supposed to be harvest defer, then all growth elsewhere, they failed miserably.
Speaker: And so one reason is that the deferrals, i mean, it it was a process at the start. If you're going to defer harvest, it seems that you should initially have a status quo that you leave them standing and then OK, because we're we're honoring indigenous rights to make decisions on their territory.
Speaker: If a nation wants to harvest one of these deferral areas, fine, they can go ahead and harvest it. Instead, the government decided as status quo that it was okay to continue harvesting until nations agreed that they wanted to defer harvest.
Speaker: Yikes. Yeah, exactly. Yikes. so this caused, I mean, all sorts of challenges. if the First thing, it just dumped a huge decision on a number of nations who were going, what?
Speaker: We hadn't heard of this. So it was a rather large surprise for most nations. So that was that was a challenge. ah Second, the province did not provide sufficient support for nations to, A, understand what this was all about, and B, actually,
Speaker: make a choice because the ah the nations depend on income from logging in a lot of cases. And the province wasn't providing funds to say, okay, well, if you don't log, if you if you defer harvest here, then we will provide some finances to help you figure out what an alternative option is, what a conservation plan is, we'll help you with the with the planning. So the government didn't do that.
Speaker: And so industry kind of waded into the government vacuum And some folks from industry spoke to various nations. And you know I know this happened has happened in some parts of the province. I don't know how widespread it was. and this is a quote from someone in one of the nations.
Speaker: And they helped us understand the deferrals. The challenge there is that the industry folks who came in essentially and were downplaying the importance of not harvesting big treed forests.
Speaker: So what that meant was that nations were saying, okay, we don't need these deferrals. They're infringing on our rights and rightly so in that the way that it was rolled out.
Speaker: So that was a challenge. Also, ah there's a lot of overlapping territories and the province said, okay, we'll only agree to defer harvest if all nations with territories that overlap a particular harvest deferral area agree.
Speaker: So then that pits nation against nation, which is also a challenge for everybody concerned. So what happened is that a lot of the deferrals didn't get approved.
Speaker: And some of the deferrals are on land that's managed by the province. So the forestry is managed by the province through BC timber sales. And the government, the province had promised that in those areas, they would honor the deferrals and they would kind of spearhead the process to show how this would work.
Speaker: Unfortunately, the province even backpedaled on that and released new policy that said, actually, it's okay for BC timber sales to allow harvest to put areas, forest up to bid in big treed old growth areas.
Speaker: Because when we when we map the old growth deferrals, we knew the mapping isn't perfect. It's a huge scale, the province. And We knew that we mapped some areas that might not meet criteria and we knew that there were other areas that we would have missed.
Speaker: And the province came up with a field way to modify deferrals and that's fine as long as you add the ones that we missed and take away the ones that were wrong. Well, instead of that doing that, the province created a process that allowed you to take out a forest that didn't meet the deferral criteria in the field so you could log it.
Speaker: But whenever somebody found a stand that had been missed in the mapping and should meet the deferral criteria, and there's some pictures of those in the report, then they did not add those.
Speaker: I mean, this is evidence that the province was not following along with their promised paradigm shift. They were still putting timber first and still harvesting the big treeed old growth, including in these most at-risk forests.
Speaker: Let's break down what you think the provincial government needs to do to turn this around. First of all, what do they need to do to protect old growth forests? we need to designate them as some kind of conservation area.
Speaker: there There are some land use planning processes going on around the province right now, which are mostly led by nations with provincial government support. And the province needs to ensure that there is support at these planning tables to actually provide decision space And what that means is there's there's some funding that's come because the the province has committed to protecting 30% of its land by 2030 as part of a global agreement.
Speaker: And there is funding that comes along with that that could be used for conservation. So the province needs to take some of that and... work with regional planning processes to decide which areas of all growth should be conserved in one form or another.
Speaker: There's some work on indigenous protected areas, for example, So that's the kind of thing that can happen. The other tool the province has is old growth management areas. So they could put more old growth into old growth management areas.
Speaker: It's not a very strong protection. And surprisingly to most people, you'd think an old growth management area would have old growth, but most of the ones in the province don't. Only 30% do.
Speaker: And they're usually put small tree forest that industry doesn't want. So what the province should be doing is they should be taking the at-risk big treed forests and they should be putting those into either protection that would count into in international agreements, so parks, conservation areas, or they should put them into growth management areas.
Speaker: That's what we need to see. We need to see at least 30% of the amount of big treed forest in BC, protected. Now, you talked about First Nations and how they have a big stake in what happens with forests here. What are you recommending in terms of the government's support of First Nation forest management? Because obviously, it's just gone the wrong way up until now.
Speaker: It has. I do want to say that within the province, there are a lot of good people who are doing good work and really trying to make a change. And I really, I don't want to come down too hard on the province because partly they've got this behemoth of a system that they're trying to, they're trying to steer. And right now they're dealing with global economic challenges. They're running with fear, but they do need to do something differently.
Speaker: And I think that ensuring access to conservation funding is critical. and And as I mentioned, there is funding associated with the agreement to protect 30% of BC by 2030. ob bc by twenty thirty So that sort of funding would at least provide time for nations to sit down and plan what they want to do with their territory in the long term.
Speaker: So they need to do that. And also the province just needs to offer whatever support nations need because most nations are are struggling with capacity. they're They're doing so many different things on their land right now, and they have so many demands coming from all sides.
Speaker: So if they ask for support for ecological risk assessment or conservation planning, then the province needs to be able to give that as well as the funding. Now, just to wind up, we started out talking about how you know people in BC really identify with the kind of forest that we have. It's it's important to us.
Speaker: That was recognized in 2020. What can people do now to push the government to move in the right direction on protecting oil growth and to pull us back from the brink, as your report calls it?
Speaker: I think that the only thing that that people can do is work at local scales. Like, you know, we've got global problems and what gives me hope is that people do work at local scales. Grassroots organizing works.
Speaker: It was the folks that got arrested at Ferry Creek and the folks that supported those people that got arrested there that that made the province kind of wake up and go, oh, people do care. So showing that you care is one of the most important things you can do.
Speaker: You can do, but you can do that either by talking to your MLA, finding out who the critical people, this kind of a handful of critical people in government that you can find out who they are, talk to them, send letters. Yes, because letters still do matter. Talk to your MLA if you can and take part in grassroots organizations. and the other thing that I think is really important the most important thing for people to do, and that is to get out into the forest and take other folks out into the forest, take your kids out into the forest, take your friends who don't usually walk in the forest, go off the trail.
Speaker: ah We really need to reestablish our link to the land. And if we don't understand something and we don't love it, we're not going to want to protect it. So I think the most important thing you can do, as well as all of the the regular kind of political channels and supporting planning, if there's planning in your region, is to just get out into the woods and take other folks out into the woods so that everybody will fall in love with the earth that supports us.
Speaker: I just love that recommendation.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining me, Karen. It's been really very, very ah helpful. Well, thanks a lot, Lorraine. And I hope to see people out in the woods. Okie doke.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Karen Price. Karen Price is an ecologist who co-authored the report Closer to the Brink, and you can find it at sierraclub.pc.ca. dot c a You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver.
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Speaker: Thanks for listening.
