Seeing the forest for its trees is a long-standing B.C. business tradition that is threatened with an abrupt unhappy ending if the province fails to find a middle ground between environment and economy.
One-sided victories won’t benefit the province or its residents. Environment has taken the centre stage of late. On many fronts it needs all the wins it can muster.
The destructive pine beetle infestation has taken its toll this century, and wildfires are destroying more B.C. woodlands as climate change delivers its own forest management plan. Protests this year have rekindled a war in the woods that is demanding more restrictions be applied to how lumber companies operate in B.C.
If it were up to mono-focused environmental activists, there would be no lumber companies operating in this province at all. Destructive logging practices need to be eliminated, and some old-growth timberlands need to be preserved, but the economy and every B.C. citizen who benefits from it have a significant stake in B.C.’s forests, too.
Forestry is fundamental to the province’s GDP, and its products remain a leading B.C. export commodity. But it is under siege from every quarter. Mills are closing all over the province, and forest industry employment has dropped from 200,000 to 100,000 over the past 10 years. A lot of those jobs are in First Nations and other rural communities that don’t have the luxury of employment diversity that is available in urban centres.
So B.C. needs to find middle ground where there is more diversified allowable-cut allocations, proactive forest management to reduce wildfire devastation, increased market leverage for value-added wood products coupled with strategic preservation of wilderness areas.
There is a road to that middle ground, but ill-informed activism and destructive resource extraction will not get us there. Unless compromise enters the forestry equation, we will remain mired in a deeply divided partisan battleground, and nothing good is seeded there.
