No Virginia, trees do not grow on money

Back in May, Lorna Beecroft posted a photo on her Facebook page of a giant log being trucked down a Vancouver Island highway. It went viral.

“I have never honestly in my life seen a tree that big on a truck ever,” Beecroft said.

The log was almost ten feet -- three metres in diameter. It filled the entire highway lane, all by itself.

Here in the Okanagan, I see lots of logging trucks go by. At a guess, they carry up to 100 trees per load, some of them so small it would be hard to cut a single 2x4 out of them.

But this was just one log. A single giant spruce.

And therein lies a lesson in economics.

Some of you who are older may remember a rule of thumb: your car should cost about a third of your annual income, your house about three times your annual income.

Nowadays? Ha Ha Ha!

In Vancouver or the Central Okanagan, a single-family residence would cost about 40 times the annual income of a service worker in the hospitality industry, earning around minimum wage.

Our grandparents ran their finances on a simple motto: “You gotta put it in before you can take it out.” I doubt if my wife’s parents, living in a small town in the Kootenays, went into debt for anything. Ever. Pop Anderson paid cash. Period.

My generation had a different motto: “If you take it out, you gotta pay it back.” Joan and I did take mortgages for our homes. But we paid our debts off as quickly as possible. Debt was something to avoid. Younger generations today seem to operate on credit, not savings. Judging by advertising, credit ratings matter more than money in the bank.

Their motto might be, “If you can get it, take it.”

That attitude is anathema to their more fiscally conservative parents.

But in fact, the younger generation is simply living out the principle that a capitalist economy has embodied for several centuries.

Take one example -- oil. No one, but no one, operates an oil well on the assumption that you gotta put it in the ground before you can take it out. Ditto for the second motto: no one even thinks about putting oil back into the ground to restore the product pumped out.

Rather, the guiding principle has been the credit motto: “If you can get it, take it.”

And that is perhaps nowhere as visibly obvious as in our forest practices. Once upon a time, trees the size of Beecroft’s were everywhere. My photo gallery includes historic pictures of trees so big that a dozen loggers could dance a jig on top of a single stump.

Now the so-called “tree huggers” -- a misnomer, because no one can reach their arms around an old-growth trunk -- are desperately trying to save a few remaining oldgrowth stands up and down the coast.

Because we have never lived up to the motto we proclaim for our finances: ”If you take it out, you gotta pay it back.”

We’ve taken out the biggest, the best, the strongest -- and not one of those old-growth forests has been replaced.

Admittedly, the B.C. government introduced regulations to protect a limited number of “exceptionally large trees.” Cut one of those trees, and you could face a fine of up to $100,000. Pocket change for a corporate giant.

Governments and logging companies brag about their reforestation programs. The millions of seedlings they have planted. New practices to mitigate the worst effects of clear cutting.

But even if all those efforts pay off -- and I’m skeptical -- not one of those re-planting efforts will ever become an old-growth forest. Not one.

After 50 to 80 years, all those new trees will be cut down, sawn up, chipped and shipped before they ever have time to develop the intricate network of roots and rhizomes that makes an old-growth forest a massive living entity.

Environment scientist Nicholas Gottlieb notes that the trees in old-growth forests are far older than either the province or country and “are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. The massive trees sequester similarly massive amounts of carbon, support thriving networks of organisms from fungi, microbes and plants to vertebrates…”

Old-growth forests should be a model of interdependence for us. Instead, we treat them as a pool of potential capital, a line of credit we can draw on indefinitely.

To turn an old maxim upside down, “Trees do not grow on money.”