Steep price for forest management failures
For 10,000 years British Columbia’s forests and ecosystems have flourished, been productive and diverse, burned and regrown, been ecologically renewed in the process, and had never once gotten “unhealthy.”
There were no special interests to label fires “wild,” even when they burned as many if not more hectares than will burn this year. They did not “destroy,” or “threaten” the forests, or the land.
Then came Europeans, amongst them the people known eventually as the early timber barons; they did not see the forests that supported immensely productive fisheries, abundant and diverse wildlife, and a huge variety of plant communities, and trees, lots of trees, and big trees!
They saw only “timber.” They went wild, scalping the majestic ancient forests from, for example, Vancouver Island. Then, having seen, gained access to, and “harvested” these “riches,” they moved inland.
The triangle linking forests, forest fires and fighting forest fires to protect timber was inevitable, given the times. Forest management became not management of forest ecosystems and their diversity, but management of cutting trees and “protecting” them from fire, the very process that had been responsible for their richness and renewal. A bureaucratic monster, the firefighting arm of government forest management, was born.
Fuelled by paranoia and propaganda, every tree (log) had to be saved, we were told, otherwise everyone’s job would be lost! What arose was a fire attack strategy that rivalled the ferocity and intensity, and damn near the scale, of Desert Storm.
Scientifically and ecologically unsupported and self-serving claims by the Forest Service and the timber industry buttressed the logging agenda in the eyes of elected officials and the public.
“The Ministry of Forests must pursue an intensive logging agenda,” the argument went (and still goes), so that the risk of forest fire, of “damage” to timber companies interests, and by extension it was argued, our interests, would be lessened or eliminated. Watch media pictures of “runaway” fires; note how frequently they roar through intensively logged landscapes, precisely something we were told for decades that “fuel management” (otherwise known as logging) would prevent.
B.C. governments and the Ministry of Forests reduced our complex and productive forest ecosystems to logs, roads, and jobs.
What had once been a landscape whose forests faced fire ignition almost solely because of lightning, became a province where human occupation and road access resulted in even more fires.
Municipal governments have done almost the impossible; build another entirely greater level of value and worry for fire “management;” through indifference, lack of planning, and arrogance, they’ve casually placed on the landscape a vast network of human properties now demanding more protection than even the lingering worry about protecting forests from fire.
The very “consumption and growth” driven management of forests and human occupation that created these conflicts has helped create one of the greatest threats humans now face; global climate warming.
It’s ironic; forest “managers” aided and abetted global warming, and now, a “new” nature looms ominously over everything they do. It’s been an economically, socially and environmentally unproductive, misguided and costly history!
Would it not be rewarding to see commission-level hearings and reform blowing in the winds?
Dr. Brian L. Horejsi is a wildlife and forest ecologist. He writes about environmental affairs, public resource management and governance and their entrenched legal and social bias.