A reminder to come out to the Pre-Election Info Night and Rally for Ancient Forests on Wednesday April 10th from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at Alix Goolden Hall, located 907 Pandora Ave (corner of Quadra and Pandora), Victoria BC.
Join the Ancient Forest Alliance for an info night with new maps on the status of BC's endangered old-growth forests, draft legislation on how to protect them, and a variety of speakers including:
- Robert Morales (Chief Treaty Negotiator, Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group),
- Scott Fraser (NDP MLA for Alberni-Pacific),
- Dr. Andrew Weaver (Deputy Leader, Green Party of BC, and climate scientist),
- Vicky Husband (Victoria conservationist, Order of BC and Canada recipient),
- Arnold Bercov (President, Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada – Local 8),
- TJ Watt (Campaigner and Photographer, Ancient Forest Alliance),
- Ken Wu (Executive Director, Ancient Forest Alliance) and others.
Background info:
Ancient forests are vital to sustain endangered species, tourism, the climate, clean water, wild salmon, and many First Nations cultures. See VIDEOS at: http://www.ancientforestalliance.org/videos.php and PHOTOS at: http://www.ancientforestalliance.org/galleries.php
A century of unsustainable logging has eliminated the vast majority of the biggest, best old-growth trees in the valley bottoms and lower elevations that historically built BC’s forest industry. This has resulted in diminishing returns as the trees get smaller, more expensive to reach higher up, and lower in value.
As second-growth forests mature and now dominate the forested land base, the BC government has done little to stimulate investment in second-growth sawmills and value-added facilities to process the logs. Instead, they’ve allowed vast quantities to be exported raw to foreign mills in China, the US, and elsewhere.
Much of BC’s remaining old-growth forests now consist of marginal or “low-productivity” trees growing on poor sites at high elevations, on steep, rocky mountainsides, and in bogs. The BC government’s statistics deliberately over inflate the amount of remaining old-growth forests by including these stunted “bonsai” forests – mainly uneconomic to log – in their public relations figures, as well as failing to provide context on how much old-growth forests once stood.
Our remaining “productive” old-growth forests where the large trees grow, or “ancient forests”, today consist of only a small fraction of their original extent. This is particularly true on Vancouver Island, the southern mainland coast, and in the BC interior.
On Vancouver Island, 75% of the original, productive old-growth forests have been logged, including over 90% of the valley bottoms where the largest trees grow.
The history of unsustainable resource extraction around the world is replete with examples where the biggest and best stocks have been depleted one after another, resulting in the loss of resource industry jobs along the way.
BC’s politicians must not allow this familiar pattern of high-grade resource depletion, ecosystem collapse, and the impoverishment of rural communities to continue in BC’s forests under their watch – or through their active support. A major change in the status quo of unsustainable forestry in the province is vital. Politicians who fail to understand this fundamental concept must not have power.
From: Ancient Forest Alliance
