Old growth logging

Well this is pretty cool.

https://www.openculture.com/2020/10/daisugi.html

Not old growth but a significant forestry issue.

"Consider for a moment the massive Prince George Timber Supply Area, the largest forest administrative zone in British Columbia, a landmass larger than the Czech Republic.

Most of the readily accessible primary forests in that 80,000-square-kilometre land mass are gone, stripped of their green gold by the logging industry in the space of just 50 years."

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/01/18/Running-Empty-BC-Forestry-Crash/

Posted by: syncro

Not old growth but a significant forestry issue.

"Consider for a moment the massive Prince George Timber Supply Area, the largest forest administrative zone in British Columbia, a landmass larger than the Czech Republic.

Most of the readily accessible primary forests in that 80,000-square-kilometre land mass are gone, stripped of their green gold by the logging industry in the space of just 50 years."

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/01/18/Running-Empty-BC-Forestry-Crash/

I think of a lot of the logging was for pine beetle.  The forest companies and gov't also didn't invest enough into replanting and reman of forestry products for more value add. Hence the position they are in now.  Companies looking at the short term and gov't looking the other way on enforcement on the "forest practices code".

Posted by: LoamtoHome

I think of a lot of the logging was for pine beetle. The forest companies and gov't also didn't invest enough into replanting and reman of forestry products for more value add. Hence the position they are in now. Companies looking at the short term and gov't looking the other way on enforcement on the "forest practices code".

There's the idea that the pine beetle kill was used as a bit of an excuse for unfettered logging at the forest companies's benefit and the provinces' peril.
Further in the article this gets exposed.

"Every year since 2006, successive provincial governments also presided over another subsidy program known as “crediting.”

Anthony Britneff, a former registered professional forester and long-time senior employee in the provincial Ministry of Forests, charitably calls that program a Ponzi scheme.

Here’s how it works:

Companies that deliver “lower quality” wood from a logged forest to a pulp mill or a wood pellet mill get to apply to the Ministry of Forests for “credits” that allow them to go back into the forest and log an equivalent volume of trees again, with no restriction on what kind of trees are logged the second time around.

Magically, the “credit” trees don’t count toward the tallies used by the provincial government to limit what logging companies take from the forest each year (a ceiling known as the Annual Allowable Cut).

For a company like Canfor, the credit program meant that it was rewarded for delivering untold thousands of cubic metres of “lower quality” logs to its own pulp mills with even more forests to cut down and logs to deliver to its sawmills."

When I was working on Nootka Island they legit mowed down entire second growth hemlock cut blocks and left them there to rot so they could use the "credits" to continue smashing the coast OG cedars and valley bottoms.

I wonder if three-sheets will come running in to defend the logging industry on these sorts of things.

nothing new here, any RPF could have told you all this was gona happen and now it has.  PG is more diversifyed from 40 years ago but there is still gona be some bleeding.

those treeless areas are perfect to house all those climate refugees from down south in the coming decades /s

Posted by: Sethimus

those treeless areas are perfect to house all those climate refugees from down south in the coming decades /s

We're gonna be climate refugees too tf u talking about?

Posted by: syncro

I wonder if three-sheets will come running in to defend the logging industry on these sorts of things.

Nope. We all saw it coming, thats why i changed resource sector.

Posted by: syncro

Before Europeans came here and started logging, of the 3% of BC that has the potential to grow large trees about 80% of that was covered in old trees (and records would seem to support that). That would mean there was about 2.3 million hectares of prime old growth trees before logging activity started. There is now only about 35,000 hectares of that left. So in roughly 150 years we've managed to cut down over 97% of the forest that took about a millennium to develop. It's shocking to realize just how much of it is gone, and even worse that there are people out there who thing there is nothing wrong with wanting to take the last of it.

I've added a nice little before and after graphic of the result of logging on the Island and South Coast as well. The little blue dot on the after pic is basically where the Fairy Creek area is.

https://www.forest-monitor.com/en/old-growth-forests-vancouver-island/

Re-posting this for the devastating clarity it puts on the results of the logging of the old growth or large ancient trees that are so critical in many respects.

Posted by: syncro

There's the idea that the pine beetle kill was used as a bit of an excuse for unfettered logging at the forest companies's benefit and the provinces' peril.
Further in the article this gets exposed.

All for the big companies too because from what I remember all the loggers knew they were in a sprint to the end but felt they had no choice.

so this is canada‘s coal?

Posted by: Sethimus

so this is canada‘s coal?

Not really because the concern was legitimate.  I can remember a camping road trip I took with my wife in the early 2000s up to Barkerville and seeing the massive red swaths of dead pine.  We thought the whole forest was completely fucked.  Taking what you can before it is all a huge dried pile waiting to burn seemed logical.