Island's private forest logging grows: report

The Douglas fir forests of southern Vancouver Island are being logged at a faster rate than they were as recently as five years ago, according to a report on private-land logging by resource researcher Ben Parfitt.
The report examines for the first time the harvesting rates on the swath of private forestland on the Island’s eastern slopes from Sooke to Campbell River. It shows that 2007 logging rates were up more than 20 per cent over 2003, when much of the private land was in government-regulated tree farm licences.

The report, titled Restoring the Public Good on Private Forestlands, comes at a time when public interest in private forest lands is at an all-time high. On Vancouver Island, more than 600,000 hectares — one-sixth of the Island — is owned by three major forest companies, an anomaly in a province where 94 per cent of the land is publicly-owned. But there’s a sound reason the harvest levels have gone up, said Darshan Sihota, president of Island Timberlands, the province’s second-largest landowner.

He said Island Timberlands has stepped up harvesting deliberately to restore a more healthy age balance to the forest. The private lands were clearcut extensively 50 to 80 years ago and are now dominated by trees in that age class, he said. Most of the forests are in a belt of private lands 200 kilometres long by 40 kilometres wide in a long strip on the Island’s relatively flat eastern coast, stretching west from towns like Duncan, Nanaimo and Comox into the chain of mountains running down the Island’s central spine.

The region is renowned for having Canada’s mildest climate. It is also one of B.C.’s most productive timber-growing sites, making the lands a lightning rod for controversy. They have regenerated magnificently since being logged in the first half of the 20th century, and now logging companies and resident interest groups view them as a rare patch in the coastal forest that is exempt from the government controls in place on adjacent Crown lands.

For companies, it’s an advantage that provides the flexibility to match logging with markets, whether here or offshore. For activists, it creates two classes of logging, one that is subject to public oversight and one that isn’t.

At the root of the conflict are the changes that have taken place since loggers last felled the Island’s east-coast forests:

- Vancouver Island has become more urban. Development pressure has increased, pushing up the value of forest lands near communities.

- The rebirth of the sawmilling industry in the U.S. Pacific Northwest has created a ready market for the prime Douglas fir logs from private lands. Log exports, always a volatile B.C. issue, have increased.

- No sawmills are being built to manufacture the harvest this time around and most of the original mills have closed. Woodworkers have equated the export of logs to the loss of jobs.

- With fewer people dependent on forestry for a livelihood, the return of logging has led to protests. Unemployed workers blockaded trucks loaded with export logs in Port Alberni, Sooke residents fought against subdivision developments replacing the private forests outside their community, and Shawnigan Lake residents told a forest company seeking their input that development plans were not welcome. The rate of change on the lands is hard not to notice.

Retired Port Alberni forest worker Jack Klock said lands that took MacMillan Bloedel more than 30 years to log the first time around, have been harvested the second time in five or six years. As a teenager in the 1950s, Klock went to work on those lands in Port Alberni’s Ash River Valley. He was a whistle punk on a high-lead show that featured a wooden spar tree.

Now, he sees mechanized feller bunchers — large mobile logging machines — marching down the valley at a pace that astounds him. A cougar hunter and self-described environmentalist, Klock said he’s concerned that the return of logging on such a scale has affected wildlife and water quality.

“All the indicators of damage are there. You can’t find the frogs. The land is exposed more to the sun. The turtles are disappearing and the game is disappearing. It only takes a change in water temperature of one or two degrees and you can wipe out an entire fishery. This is not rocket science,” he said in an interview.

Klock’s observations that the tempo of logging has increased are backed up by ministry of forests statistics Parfitt used in his report. A resource researcher for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, he found that between 2003 and 2007, the three major landholders, TimberWest Forest, with 325,000 hectares, Island Timberlands, with 265,000 hectares, and Western Forest Products, with 28,000 hectares, increased the overall log harvest from their lands by 22 per cent.

Logging jumped from four million cubic metres in 2003 to 4.9 million in 2007. Island Timberland’s Sihota said today’s land managers are attempting to restore a balance to the lands, which he said, were actually logged in huge progressive clearcuts the first time around.

That’s how the single age-class forest was created. Today’s loggers are generally taking out smaller patches. Their goal is a multi-aged forest that would be more economically sustainable, he said. But it can only be done by concentrating more of their harvesting on the even-aged timber now. He said there’s a psychological impact for long-time residents when they see logging on hillsides that have been green for 50 or more years.

But if the lands are to be sustainable economically into the future, the forest must have timber of all ages. “We are here for the long term.” In the future, the harvest will likely be stepped down, Sihota said. Island Timberlands has already cut back on harvesting this year because of depressed markets, a change that has yet to show up in ministry of forests statistics.

“The challenge is: How do you distribute the age classes if you never step the harvest up or step it down? “What we are doing is taking the excessive volume of timber in the 50-year-plus age class and putting it at the front end (of the harvesting plan).” The province’s largest landowner, TimberWest Forest, is also developing its harvest plans to cope with the uneven age class of its forestlands and in response to markets, said company representative Steve Lorimer.

It began cutting back harvest levels in 2007. In 2008, logging is expected to be below 2003 levels.

Most of the Island’s private lands were granted to the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway in 1884 for building a rail line between Victoria and Courtenay. They were acquired by forest companies parcel-by-parcel over the years. In the 1950s, in exchange for greater access to Crown timber, their owners put much of the land in tree farm licences, subject to the same rules that governed Crown lands.

But in 2004, Victoria began permitting companies to uncouple all their private lands from tree farm licences, leaving only the Crown lands under forests ministry regulations.

Freed of the requirement to harvest the timber as part of a larger plan, land owners discovered a new value in the forests by applying economic standards to how much timber can be sustainably harvested, when the land is logged, and where the logs will be sold. Lands with higher value than logging are being considered for development.