THOUSANDS OF HECTARES OF ACTIVE LOGGING IN CRITICAL HABITAT OF AN ENDANGERED mOUNTAIN CARIBOU HERD

Valhalla Wilderness Society (VWS) applauds the TAP panel’s old-growth report, while it cautions the public against focusing exclusively on old-growth forest as a conservation goal. If we do that, we partly leave out the needs of wildlife, which form a vital part of ecological health and continuity. With over 2,000 species at risk in BC, we cannot afford to do that. Much of BC’s remaining old-growth is highly fragmented, often into small parcels. However, some wildlife need large, intact areas and travel corridors. Because of this, VWS’s work in the Inland Temperate Rainforest has identified large park proposals that connect scattered old-growth stands by including mature or young forest This would give our mountain caribou, grizzly bears, and wolverines their best chance of survival.

Even small species need spacious intact areas to preserve interior forest light and humidity conditions. A grove of old-growth forest surrounded by clearcuts is valuable to human experience, but it has lost or will likely lose sensitive species that need protection from drying winds and too much sunlight.

For all these reasons we believe that the conservation of biodiversity must integrate protection of oldgrowth forest with intactness and connectivity, which often requires including mature or even young forest. The new Incomappleux Conservancy, protected as a part of VWS’s Selkirk Mountain Caribou park proposal, did that very well for species such as grizzly bears, wolverines and fish, and all the biodiversity of old forest and wetlands. But it lopped off the part of our proposal meant to protect the Central Selkirk Mountain Caribou herd, which is now down to 30 animals while BC Timber Sales continues clearcutting much of the forest in that part of the proposal.

North of the Central Selkirk herd is the Columbia North herd. With 184 animals, it is the third biggest herd of endangered Deep-snow Mountain Caribou in existence. It represents one of BC’s last, best chances to save this unique and irreplaceable type of caribou. A year ago VWS commissioned an analysis of government data on logging in the herd’s range. It showed that there were 1,917 hectares of active logging in federally-designated critical habitat for the this herd. 121.7 ha. of the active cutblocks were in provincial Ungulate Winter Range (UWR) that is legally designated “no logging”.

This is the bitter reality under the government’s promises to save more old-growth forest. The BC government is very wrong if it thinks it can brand itself as a paragon of biodiversity conservation while logging our highest biodiversity forest and allowing BC’s endangered and irreplaceable D eep Snow Mountain Caribou to disappear forever. The government worsens these misrepresentations by slaughtering predators that are falsely blamed for the caribou decline. Studies have shown that wolves increase biodiversity, and when wolves are killed, other species are lost. Substantive and reliable reports show that feeding the logging shareholders their munificent profits has long been and still is the problem.