041OEC’sThis Week in Trees

041OEC’s This Week in Trees
Hello again! ;-) This week we have 35 news items from: British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Montana, Utah, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, USA, Canada, Finland, Brazil, Solomon Islands, Philippines, New Zealand, Indonesia, and Australia

British Columbia:

1) The twin-blade helicopter, a Boeing Vertol 107, had been logging an Interfor cutblock on South Bentinck Arm, 400 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, and was returning to a nearby floating camp when it crashed. Dead are pilots Duncan Ruth, 36, of Victoria, and Clayton Shearcroft, 26, of Maple Ridge, both of whom died at the scene.The two deaths add to the forest industry’s grim record of fatalities and serious injuries for the year. The 36 deaths in just over 10 months compare to 16 in 2004, 26 in 2003, and 31 in 2002. That is a record that a growing number of loggers say has to be recognized as unacceptable by workers, industry and the government. “No log is worth losing a life over,” Jim Girvan, executive director of the Truck Loggers Association, said when he heard of Thursday’s fatalities. “We have got to do something to fix this.” http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=21fdab5e-76e3-4efd-b934-9600129c09
95

2) Eleven logging contractors met on November 1 with the consultant working on Valemount’s community forest proposal. Local contractor, Bob Goodell said reaction among the people gathered seemed to be positive. Asked if he thought the community forest would leave Valemount taxpayers on the hook, he said that the project would have to be managed correctly. “If it doesn’t make money there is a risk of that happening. I am in support of this. It has to be managed properly.” He said a community forest would diversify the industry and could secure more logging jobs in the valley. “It all depends on the markets; that isn’t going to change any time soon,” he said. Rick Publicover, the forestry consultant working for the village on the community forest proposal, described the get together with logging contractors as a brain storming session. He said that contractors were interested in a high level of transparency in all aspects of the community forest and wanted assurances that actions by the board would be open to scrutiny. The contractors, by consensus, ranked their priorities for the community forest’s management. The first priority is to make money, the second, to create local employment, followed by addressing the beetle issue and fire risks for the community, managing the community watershed and then assisting other user groups with the development of recreation and trails. http://www.robsonvalleytimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=247&Itemid=49

3) Taken as it was from an aerial view, the establishing shot of the film left no doubt as to how the land was in trouble. It would be the elders who would try to change the course of this environmental carnage. Twenty years ago, the Haida First Nation in northwest British Columbia on the Queen Charlotte Islands (known locally as the Haida Gwaii) staged a blockade to prevent further logging by outside companies on its traditional lands. What made this successful demonstration different was how the community’s elders were on the front lines. The history of this event has been transformed into a documentary that is making its way through Canadian film festivals and television networks. ”Athlii Gwaii: The Line at Lyell” uses raw footage obtained in 1985, when the demonstrators established their line that wouldn’t be crossed, and mixes in interviews of Haida participants who reflect on their actions almost two decades later. After years of observing the dramatic alteration of large swaths of lands, the Haida had had enough. As a younger man, Richardson and his comrades were preparing to defend Lyell Island, which is accessible only by boat or helicopter. While eventually the elders believed this was their fight, too, the decision to allow young people to stand guard was a difficult one for the community because the threat of violence against the loggers loomed in addition to probable arrests and jail time. While numerous protesters came to Lyell by fishing boat, many left by air with the police. Underwood vividly recalls running with her camera to get a shot of the helicopter taking off. The juxtaposing image with the tree-stripped land was not planned. ”That scene evoked a very cold winter day when the elders were arrested,” said Underwood. ”It’s only when you look at the footage later that you saw the camera caught that [the clear-cut mountains] and that was because I was focused on the helicopter.” http://indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411879

4) A captive breeding program for the endangered northern spotted owl is being considered by the provincial government, but environmentalists say logging restrictions would be more effective. Without action to protect habitat, the small bird will be extinct in British Columbia by 2010, leaders of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee said. Scientists believe about 25 spotted owls remain in the province, down from about 100 in 1993, compared with 6,100 in the United States, where the bird’s fragile status has resulted in widespread bans and restrictions on cutting in old-growth forests. Plans to keep the bird from vanishing in British Columbia include captive breeding, moving owls, supplemental feeding and management of prey, predators, and competitors, Jardine said, noting that a spotted owl had been fledged successfully in captivity in the United States. Besides logging and other habitat loss, spotted owls have been hard-hit by an invasion of barred owls that compete for food and habitat and may be interbreeding with the closely related species, he added. Joe Foy, director of the spotted owl campaign for the wilderness committee, said the government was trying to look good while preserving timber cutting rather than trying to save the owl. “You can get great PR by showing the little cage with the endangered critter in it,” Foy said. “Meanwhile, your buddies in the timber industry are chainsawing down the rest of the habitat.” http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420AP_CAN_Owl_Breeding.html

Washington:

5) SEATTLE — The northern spotted owl, an icon of the Northwest’s environmental movement, was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, but federal officials still have not bothered to come up with a plan for protecting it, said a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court on Monday. “They’ve been telling us for years they were going to do it,” said Alex Morgan, conservation director at the Seattle Audubon Society, which joined the Kittitas Audubon Society in filing the suit. “This is 15 years late.” Joan Jewett, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, acknowledged that federal officials never completed a final recovery plan for the Northern spotted owl. Part of the reason was that the compromise Northwest Forest Plan reached in the early 1990s helped protect the spotted owl on federal lands.But, she said, the agency recently agreed that it would complete such a plan – hopefully within 18 months.Morgan said the Audubon Society chapters would be satisfied if they could get that in writing. The spotted owl was declared a threatened species primarily because of logging in the old growth forests of the Northwest. That designation led to an 80 percent cutback on logging in national forests and restrictions on private timberlands. But the number of spotted owls – estimated at 2,400 pairs in Washington, Oregon, Northern California and British Columbia – continues to drop. Logging, wildfires and the barred owl, a natural enemy that has moved in from the Midwest, are all to blame, environmentalists say. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420AP_WST_Spotted_Owl.html

6) When a state board sits down today to decide how to best protect spotted owls, the man in charge will be a Department of Natural Resources official who privately huddled with timber industry executives and promised to soften proposed regulations. An internal timber industry memorandum obtained by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer outlines how Pat McElroy, chairman of the Forest Practices Board, agreed to eliminate a key DNR staff recommendation to be considered today. The memo also suggests that McElroy had planned to alter his agency’s recommendations without telling others involved in the talks, such as environmentalists and tribal leaders. That didn’t happen, according to the memo, because Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland feared that environmentalists would find out and sue. Sutherland received heavy backing from timber interests in both his campaigns for lands commissioner. “This just shows how stacked the deck is against a credible public process,” said Peter Goldman of the Washington Forest Law Center, which represents environmentalists in timber lawsuits. “We’ve been working for two years to convince them what they need to do to protect owls. This is what the DNR staff came up with, and it almost went into the trash.” Goldman questioned whether McElroy is sufficiently neutral to run today’s meeting of the Forest Practices Board, which regulates the industry. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/247630_spottedowl09.html

7) Seattle– Environmentalists took to the streets of Seattle on Thursday to call for increased protection of Canada’s northern boreal forest, a significant source of timber for Weyerhaeuser and a native forest of global significance. The protest included unfurling a banner that called for a boycott of Weyerhaeuser products, and was part of a broader “international day of action” that included demonstrations in other U.S. cities. Frank Mendizabal, a Weyerhaeuser spokesman, said that the corporation supports an effort known as the “Canadian Boreal Initiative,” to work with scientists to develop an overall conservation plan for the boreal. The environmental coalition involved in the boreal campaign includes ForestEthics, Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Andrea Cuccaro, a local organizer with the Seattle Rainforest Action Group, said more protests are expected in the months ahead. http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=dige04m&date=20051104&
query=Seattle+Rainforest+Action+Group

8) Under a damp awning of yellowing bigleaf maples, Judith Starbuck is laying waste to a patch of English ivy. A vine at a time, she rips and tugs at the menace creeping through Madrona Woods. Starbuck and a small band of mud-stained volunteers are reclaiming these woods, saving native trees and shrubs from the stranglehold of fast-growing foreign invaders. The sloping park, covering more than 9 acres above Lake Washington, is a valuable piece of urban forest — a refuge where people can hike, learn a thing or two about nature and shed the stress of living in a big city. Seattle’s forests, though, are in trouble. Thanks to decades of neglect, many of the city’s parks and greenbelts are plagued by smothering ivy, Himalayan blackberry, holly, laurel, morning glory and other undesirables. Half of the acreage is seriously invaded, surveys show. Restoring the city’s 2,500 acres of wooded parks to healthy conditions would cost $48 million over the next two decades, estimates from the non-profit group show. And that’s only to help the park trees.There are also 120,000 trees lining Seattle’s streets, and while the city claims responsibility for up to 40,000 of them, there are only two city arborists working to keep them healthy in a hostile environment. Private trees, in most cases, receive no protection at all. Landowners with a developed piece of property can level every tree on their lot with no permits, no restrictions. At least one neighborhood bans trees taller than rooftops, resulting in the butchering of trees through pruning, if they are planted at all. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/247350_urbanforest07.html

Oregon:

9) While this isn’t 1970 anymore, the timber industry and wood products still remains and will remain a contributor to the Southern Oregon economy,” the governor said. Kulongoski addressed a large crowd. Comfortable in a bark-brown suit, he spoke under protection of the wood-framed pavilion on the Coos Bay Boardwalk, after the threat of rain pushed the ceremony off the North Spit. He talked about how sometimes good things just happen, with Southport’s investment as the example. The company considered building a new mill out of the area, Kulongoski said. Transportation was one impediment. Through federal, state and local partnerships and Southport investment, the $4.4 million rail spur went in. Once Southport lays its final rails into the mill yard, lumber will be chugging off the spit along tracks that the port hopes in a few years could be linking future industrial developers’ products to the nation. http://www.theworldlink.com/articles/2005/11/05/news/news01.txt

10) A deal between the Bush administration and timber industry probably will restart chain saws across millions of acres of Western Oregon in the next few years, including reserves set aside for the northern spotted owl and other wildlife. It will mark perhaps the single largest and most striking shift in public land management in the Northwest since the Clinton administration’s 1994 Northwest Forest Plan created those reserves in the first place. Conservationists fear it will begin the permanent unraveling of those reserves, a key piece of the strategy to sustain the spotted owl, marbled murrelet and salmon. But it gives the Bush administration one of its best chances to deliver on its goal of boosting Northwest logging. It comes at an opportune time for Oregon counties, too, because federal funding they received in place of declining timber revenue is about to expire. The federal deficit and costs of the Iraq war and hurricane recovery make renewal of the funding more iffy and logging revenue more sought-after. The sea change will come through a new federal blueprint for management of 2.5 million acres of Western Oregon, much of it lush forest in a checkerboard pattern between Interstate 5 and the ocean. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has begun asking for public input as it drafts the new plan for release in 2008. A clause in the deal hints at how sharply things may change. It directs BLM to abide by a 1990 court ruling that said timber production should be the “dominant use” of the lands — and a higher priority than wildlife habitat and old-growth forest. The BLM must consider at least one option that does away with all wildlife reserves. But the settlement also requires the BLM to follow the court rulings that concluded reserves have no place on O&C lands. That makes it likely that the BLM will get rid of the reserves, freeing up the land for logging. “That’s clearly the way it’s going to need to go,” said Robertson, a Republican. http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1131179743258870.xml&coll=7

11) The Sisters Area Fuels Reduction project will reduce fire risks and improve forest health through thinning, mechanical mowing and controlled burning operations. Managers also believe the project will nurture aesthetically-pleasing stands of healthy, mature trees. Forest Service officials will analyze the project under provisions of the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which streamlines administrative procedures and emphasizes community collaboration for hazardous fuels and ecosystem-restoration projects. Much of the project’s collaboration process included development of the interagency Greater Sisters Community Wildfire Protection Plan, which was completed last June. The Sisters/Camp Sherman Fire Protection District and other collaboration partners identified the project as a high priority for reducing fire risks. http://bend.com/news/ar_view.php?ar_id=23684

12) Nearly 25 percent of the Scattered Apples timber sale in Williams will not be logged under a legal settlement between the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Williams residents and a conservation group. Approved Thursday by U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan in Eugene, the agreement canceled logging on 152 acres, leaving in place mature trees home to old-growth species, such as the northern spotted owl. “We believe we developed a much better project than what was in place,” said Lesley Adams, outreach coordinator for Ashland-based Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, one of the plaintiffs. The settlement “is a great example of the BLM working with conservationists and the community to come up with a plan everyone can support. The agreement ended a seven-month legal mediation between the BLM Medford District and the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs sued the BLM in February 2004, claiming the agency had violated the National Environmental Policy Act during the environmental assessment of the timber sale. Williams resident Spencer Lennard said the new project is better than the original but will still cause problems in the watershed.”It’s still ecologically destructive, increases fire risk, stresses out (wildlife) and costs taxpayers money but all to a lesser degree,” Lennard said. “It’s not a restoration project.” BLM officials have repeatedly stated the bulk of the timber sale has focused on commercial thinning to reduce the fire risk and improve forest health. http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2005/1105/local/stories/07local.htm

California:

13) On Thursday, as part of a continued, far-reaching rollback of protected landscapes for scores of imperiled species around the country, federal officials proposed cutting 82% of the celebrated frog’s critical habitat. The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would eliminate federally protected critical habitat on 150 million acres of largely undeveloped public and private land. The Senate could act on the legislation by year’s end. But even without legislative action, the Bush administration is eliminating critical-habitat designations around the country. Administration officials say that habitat protections cost landowners billions and that voluntary plans work better for landowners and wildlife. In numerous cases, Interior Secretary Gale Norton and her top deputies, citing their own cost estimates, have agreed with builders and property owners that the financial burden of habit protections outweighed any benefit to species. (Note: Red Leggeds depend, in part, on Central Coast Conifer forest habitat) http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-frog4nov04,1,3088637.story?coll=la-news-environment
&ctrack=1&cset=true

14) The long-awaited final land management plans for the four national forests of southern California were released by the Forest Service in September 2005. The management plan affects more than 3.5 million acres of public forests, guiding decisions on everything from protecting plants and wildlife and providing recreational opportunities to deciding where potentially damaging development and off-road vehicle trails can be placed. The Center for Biologic Diversity recommends more wilderness and wild rivers for permanent protection. Without more wilderness, the Forest Service leaves the plants and animals of the forests at risk from toll roads, hydroelectric dams, mining, oil wells, power lines, and cell towers. Also prohibit an expansion of off-road vehicle trails and don’t legalize illegal trails. Also Designate the more ecologically sensitive areas as Critical Biological Zones. Increase protective standards for riparian areas, old-growth forests, oak woodlands and other rare habitats from damage due to roads, unsustainable recreation, logging, domestic livestock grazing and additional negative impacts. Help us write Letters at: .http://actionnetwork.org/campaign/socalforests/

Montana:

15) HELENA – A federal appeals court on Monday upheld the Helena National Forest’s plans to log and burn about 1,500 acres in the Jimtown Road area near Canyon Ferry Dam east of here to reduce the risk of wildfires. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments by the Native Ecosystems Council that the U.S. Forest Service broke two federal acts in drafting the project. The environmental group claimed the project would further limit prime habitat for the goshawk, a small raptor, in an area already damaged by the Cave Gulch fire of 2000, the Jimtown fire of 2003 and the logging and prescribed burning done in nearby Bull Run and Sweats Gulch in 1996. http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/11/08/build/state/60-log-plan.inc

16) A Jefferson County Commission meeting Oct. 25 to discuss the future of Forest Service roadless areas in the county was long on management philosophy, but short on specifics. None of the 25 citizens attending the meeting had particular roads to recommend in the three Forest Service inventoried roadless areas within the county. However, Commission Chairman Tom Lythgoe said Wednesday that the commissioners may themselves propose new roads. http://www.helenair.com/articles/2005/11/04/neighbors/c011103405_01.txt

Utah:

17) ONLY A DECADE AGO, towering spruce trees shaded the runs at Brian Head resort, a picturesque ski area perched above red-rock cliffs in southwestern Utah. Then came the beetles. After a series of windstorms in the early 1990s toppled an unusually high number of trees, bark beetles proliferated in the deadfall. In 1994, they began to overwhelm and kill healthy trees on Cedar Mountain, where Brian Head is located. Over the next 10 years, beetles killed up to 90 percent of the spruce trees across 30,000 acres of Cedar Mountain, including most of the trees at Brian Head. The spruce needles turned red and fell off, exposing “ghost forests” of standing deadwood. To reduce the risk of fires and to protect skiers from falling limbs and trunks, logging crews began removing dead and diseased trees. By the time the infestation ended, areas of the resort looked as if they were above treeline. “It used to be a big, beautiful, thick green forest,” says mountain manager Mac Hatch, who’s worked at the resort since the mid-1980s. “Now there are just patches of spruce.” If you ski in the West, what hit Brian Head could happen at one of your favorite resorts. With astonishing ferocity, several bark beetle species are devouring conifers across millions of acres of forest in western North America. You can find epidemics in Colorado’s Vail Valley; in the lodgepole pine forests around Breckenridge; throughout Grand County, home to Winter Park; and in the Stanley Basin north of Sun Valley, Idaho. Besides being unsightly, a tree die-off can harm a ski operation in a number of ways. With fewer trees to block the wind, Brian Head has had more lift closures. The loss of trees also makes steep runs more avalanche-prone. But the most frequent damage is to the texture and depth of snow, and is caused by something usually warmly welcomed by skiers: sunshine. http://www.skimag.com/skimag/travel/article/0,12795,1123611,00.html

Indiana:

18) Advertising a day of “old-time rabble-rousing,” friends and neighbors of Yellowwood State Forest gathered in Nashville Saturday, October 29, to protest a state plan that will increase by four times the amount of logging in state forests. At the Village Green gazebo, members of the activist group Friends of Yellowwood spoke with curious tourists, collected petitions against the forestry plan and discussed ways to drum up more support in the county. “Our economy is so tourism-based,” Yellowwood supporter Linda Baden said in explaining how the health of the forest affects the health of Brown County. “The beauty of hardwood forests is what brings people here. The Nashville tourism industry lives off that.” She said the Friends of Yellowwood are especially upset about two things: that Department of Natural Resources began its new forest management plan without public input, and that the increased logging will speed the erosion that is gradually filling in Yellowwood Lake. “To increase logging by 400 percent will have a dramatic impact on the lake,” Ms. Baden said of the man-made reservoir that has shrunk 22 acres since 1990. “The new plan is arrogant and a slap in the face to voters,” he said. “It’s symptomatic of the hijacking of our institutions for private interests.” http://www.browncountyindiana.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=6419&TM=22081.4

New Hampshire:

19) I found my way back to New Hampshire and a job as policy director of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, a statewide conservation group. While I was there, it became clear that the conservation community needed a broader regional approach. With other leaders across the region, I organized the Northern Forest Alliance — a coalition of conservation groups advocating for protected wildlands, sustainable forestry, and sustainable communities and economies across the Northern Forest. We work to revitalize the rural economy and communities and conserve the forests of the 30-million-acre Northern Forest region of northernmost New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine — the largest intact wild area in the Eastern U.S. Unlike the large forest regions of the West, the great majority of this land is privately owned. Nearly 2 million people live in and near the wildlands, and their communities are having a hard time. The region is losing a lot of its best-paying jobs — many in the paper industry — as manufacturers cut costs in order to remain competitive in what has become a global industry. Lack of economic opportunity had led, in many instances, to strong local opposition to conservation, which some people view as “locking up” land that represents the only tangible economic opportunity. I founded the Northern Forest Center eight years ago to help the region focus as much time and attention on addressing social and economic needs as protecting land. Achieving landscape-scale conservation depends as much on building sustainable communities as it does on saving land. And making a better life for people depends in large part on living in and around healthy ecosystems, including wild places. http://www.grist.org/comments/interactivist/2005/11/07/blackmer/index.html?source=daily

20) With the Executive Council demanding more answers about purchase terms for a proposed ATV park, city officials hoped public hearings would show councilors there’s strong support for the project. The proposed 7,200 acre park near Jericho Lake would abut the White Mountain National Forest. It would be owned by the state and would include an estimated 350 miles of trails for off-road vehicles. The purchase price is $2.16 million dollars, but executive councilors questioned terms that would give current owners Thomas and Scott Dillon, of Anson, Maine, logging rights for another 5 years and long-term gravel-mining rights. They tabled a vote on the purchase last week and rescheduled it for Nov. 16, saying they wanted more information and more public input before reaching a decision. http://www.boston.com/news/local/new_hampshire/articles/2005/11/07/berlin_officials_hope_public_hearing_sho
ws_support_for_atv_park/

North Carolina:

21) Durham, N.C. — Duke University environmental scientists have received a five-year, $1.88 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop an advanced wireless sensor network that can measure, model and predict biophysical changes in the forest environment. James S. Clark, who is H.L. Blomquist Professor of Biology at the NicholasSchool of the Environment and Earth Sciences, is principal investigator on the grant. “This network will allow us to go into remote locations, install the sensors, and, for years to come, collect a depth and breadth of data that would be virtually impossible to obtain through any other means,” he said. “It has the potential to let us study environmental change on a whole new scale.” The new network builds on successful past efforts by Clark and his colleagues to construct and deploy wireless environmental sensing networks in two forests in Piedmont and western North Carolina. The palm-sized, weather-resistant sensors they developed can be placed virtually anywhere in a forest — high in the tree canopy, in the understory or near the forest floor. Hundreds of them can be deployed to “network” an entire forest. http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/11/wirelessnetwork.html

USA:

22) Stop 2 salvage bills that would authorize logging projects on public lands. One bill was introduced by Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), the other by Rep. Tom Udall (D-NM). “Environmentalists” supporting the Udall bill are supporting a “consensus compromise” that agrees with the general principles of Bush’s bogus “Healthy Forests Restoration Act.” By supporting the Udall bill, these so-called conservationists lose us
valuable credibility, because they are supporting something they originally opposed (at least I hope). The Healthy Forests law allows the timber industry to take larger trees in order to pay for “fuel reduction” projects, which are generally money losers even with tax-subsidies, because smaller trees and brush fail to net the timber revenues that larger trees do. Thus, aims in the Udall bill to prevent the logging of old-growth and LSR (see below) forests will be entirely ineffective, especially with no means for enforcement. Please contact your Senators and your Representative in Congress, encourage them to vote no on BOTH the Forest Emergency Recovery and Research Act (H.R. 4200) and National Forests Rehabilitation and Recovery Act (H.R. 3973).
http://www.forestcouncil.org

Canada:

23) A report by international accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has determined that specialty products and niche marketing are the way to make the forestry industry work in the southern Yukon. A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers says even with the highest prices available, a commodity sawmill in the Watson Lake area would not be able to cover operating costs. Over the past few decades three multi-million dollar mills have gone broke milling lumber in that community. The $75,000 report goes on to suggest Southeast Yukon forest managers, who are now developing a forestry plan for the region, should concentrate on niche markets and specialty products. The Yukon Conservation Society’s Karen Baltgailis is praising the report’s findings. “The whole point is it’s so expensive to process here and so expensive to ship things that you’ve got to have a product that’s worth more,” she says. “So products like furniture, and also the potential to supply the Yukon’s own lumber market, those are the kinds of things that actually could work. http://www.cbc.ca/north/story/forestry-report-04112005.html

24) Three Rivers: The Yukon’s Great Boreal Wilderness is a gorgeous coffee-table book about a wilderness area so vast and so crucial to planetary survival it defies comprehension. Previously unknown to the outside world, the Yukon’s Three Rivers watershed is emerging as an environmental issue of global importance—a key piece of the boreal region. The boreal forest is like a green banner draped around the northern hemisphere. It is the world’s largest expanse of intact forest, covering nearly 11 percent of our planet’s surface. Every breath we take is in part a gift from this immense, earth-circling ecosystem. Now the renewed Mackenzie Valley pipeline proposal, the Alaska Pipeline and escalating energy and mineral exploration in the north all threaten this last world-scale refuge of natural values—and conservationists around the world are mobilizing to defend it. Three Rivers focuses on one of the most strategic undisturbed regions left in the world, an oceanic wilderness that is under threat from gas and mining development. http://www.harbourpublishing.com/author/JuriPeepre

25) Alberta – A number of JIST members expressed concerns over public perception and the adverse reactions by some who may view the thinning as ‘logging’ in the park. Jasper Interface Steering Team (JIST) was presented with the results of the review by ecologist, forester and educator Herb Hammond. With two winters of work on the project already completed, Hammond spent last week touring the restored and fuel reduced areas near the town site and at Lake Edith to provide feedback. “This project gets an ‘A’ from my stand point. Both Hammond and park officials were also careful to point out that any money made from the extracted trees has gone straight back into funding the project. http://www.jasperbooster.com/story.php?id=195191

Finland:

26) A dispute over tree felling in the forests of the north of Finnish Lapland flared up again on Monday, when activists of the environmental organisation Greenpeace held a protest near the Veitsiluoto factories of the paper company Stora Enso in the northern city of Kemi. The protesters used five rubber boats in an attempt to blockade the Finnlines Antares cargo vessel, which had arrived to pick up a load of paper manufactured from trees felled in the far north. Some of the demonstrators used ropes to board the ship. http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/english/article/Greenpeace+protesters+blockade+ship+in+Kemi+harbour%0D%0A/
1101981555490

Brazil:

27) Not far from the mouth of the Amazon, dead animals, including manatees — mammals up to 3m long with flat, paddle-shaped fins — and distinctive pink dolphins, line the banks of some tributaries. Normally, you would have to take a boat to cross these rivers but today, because of the Amazon basin’s worst drought in memory, they are little more than mudflats with a trickle of water in the middle. So far, the drought has had its most serious impact in the upper reaches of the river and its hundreds of tributaries in Brazil, Colombia and Peru. There, along many stretches, the water has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded and has become impassable even for canoes. Some 600 Brazilian schools in Amazonas state have had to be closed and many hamlets, whose only contact with the outside world is by river, are running short of food and medicines. Several districts have been declared disaster areas and the army is having to bring emergency supplies to 900 towns and villages. The problems are expected to get worse before the drought eventually breaks, perhaps in the next month when the Amazon’s rainy season usually comes. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2005/11/05/2003278875

Solomon Islands:

28) On Sunday last week Bishop Koete paid a visit to a newly constructed logging campsite near Bola village, on South Gela and raised a ‘wooden rugged cross’ with a public notice halting further work on the site. The Environmental Concern Action Network of Solomon Islands (ECANSI) has applauded the decision by Bishop of Central Islands, Reverend Charles Koete, to end logging operations in Central Province. Spokesperson for ECANSI Moses Rouhana said such action should not be left unnoticed because Solomon Islands is running against time to save our forest.“It is one of the great acts of boldness and concern, more appropriate and timely for leaders of this nation to learn from. Action speaks louder than word for Rev Koete, he did all of it. “Without barking in the media about his grievances, he has done the right thing by going straight to the logging site, immediately declaring an end to this scrupulous kind of forest activity,” Mr Rouhana said. The Diocesan Bishop took the action in accordance with the resolution passed by the recent Diocesan Synod held at Nagotano Village, Gela in July 2005, which declared that “logging is not development but destruction”. Bishop Koete said his diocese further declared that logging be stopped because it causes destruction to God’s creation. While politicians are seeing the writings on the wall with regards to the current unsustainable harvesting rate of our forest resources, little has been done to control this trend. What is happening is exactly the opposite with loggers fighting each other as they scramble to get the last tree. Log ponds dot our shores. And you know what; there are enough bulldozers, chain saws and log trucks available now in the country to put the final nail to the coffin. We don’t need to look further or carry out research on this. http://www.solomonstarnews.com/drupal-4.4.1/?q=node/view/5844

Philippines:

29) IT IS neither kingly, like the Philippine eagle, nor cute and cuddly, like the tarsier. It has none of the mystique of the tamaraw, nor the serenity of the whale shark. It is noisy, smelly and pesky. It is also rather frightening. But the latest poster creature of biodiversity and forest conservation has its charms, too. Meet Pteropus vampyrus lanensis, otherwise known as the Philippine giant fruit bat, the biggest “flying fox” in the world and king of the lowland forests of Central Luzon. Hoping to educate more Filipinos about environmental concepts, such as biodiversity and balance of nature, the Haribon Foundation has launched the GuBAT Learning Center, a joint project with the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) and the US Peace Corps. More than 100,000 fruit bats used to roost in Subic’s lush forests a few decades ago, but today, only a few thousand remain, Leones said during a media tour of bat-roosting areas in Subic on Saturday. “There are two types of bats — the fruit bats and the insect-eating ones. The first are seed-dispersing agents of the forests. Pollen and grain fall from their bodies as they forage for food at night. The second help control the insect population,” Leones says. The giant fruit bat can attain a wingspan of 1.5 to 2 meters, and is distinguished by black or reddish-brown fur covering its forehead, neck, shoulders and back. But the single biggest threat to the survival of bats is still the loss of habitat because of illegal logging and the denudation of forests, she says. Less than 20 percent of the country’s forest cover remains, she says. A study has found that a country needs at least 54 percent of forest cover to ensure a stable life support system. http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=55744

30) Standing firm on his decision to allow Senator Juan Ponce Enrile’s company to resume logging operations inside the Samar Island Nature Park, Environment Secretary Michael T. Defensor yesterday challenged his critics to take their grievances to court.Defensor, who signed the order allowing San Jose Timber Corp. to cut trees inside the protected forest, maintained that Enrile’s firm had a right to log in the 95,770-hectare area covered by its timber licensing agreement. “If they feel that what we did was wrong, they should test it legally,” Defensor told the Inquirer by phone yesterday.“They should not connect this to my confirmation,” said Defensor, who had faced rough sailing at the Commission on Appointments, of which Enrile is a member. Defensor said Enrile had raised the issue of his company during the Senate’s inquiry into existing logging concessions last December following the flash floods that killed and displaced hundreds in the provinces of Aurora and Quezon. http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=55840

31) For his first solo exhibit, Aner Sebastian, part-time faculty member at the Feati University’s College of Fine Arts and twice included in the annual Kulay Sa Tubig tilt’s top five watercolorists, has chosen to depict nature. The choice is propelled by his disdain for the lackluster public attention to the degradation of the environment. Concern over the environment heightens only during crises or the aftermath of disasters, he complained. But when the disasters disappear from the headlines, public concern wanes and nature continues to be degraded. Sebastian carries out his ecological campaign via lush visual narrative. His is protest art in the most beautiful form. The medium flows surely but does not assault as water cannons would. His message comes across effectively without burned effigies and violent confrontations. The narrative begins with pieces like “Vertical Limit,” with its rectangles that magnify portions of the gnarled tree trunks, the rough bark indicating age, exactly the reason why forests should be left untouched. “Intact” depicts a robust woodland while “Rain Forest” shows the subject awash with seeming drops of precipitation, the drips turning out to be plant branches. “Prime Cut Loggers Delight” is much darker than the rest of his pieces, and Sebastian’s signature pixelate divisions are no longer enlarged parts of the whole picture. Within some of them are boxed the remnants of once-huge trunks, stumps that sit beside faces of lumberjacks, their illegal trade signified by faces covered with cloth. The pixilation is highly interesting for it suggests the televisions screen as well as censorship and the practice of providing anonymity to people who offer classified information. The straight lines and angles of pixilation lend a surreal quality to the works. Despite the grimness of the works, Sebastian also tries to be positive, as can be gleaned from such works as “Recovery Period,” “Growth,” and “Full Grown” which interestingly has a man who looks like a farmer, the face no longer concealed, the shamefulness of environmental degradation absent. http://news.inq7.net/lifestyle/index.php?index=1&story_id=55697

32) Ignoring appeals to bequeath” the forests of Western Samar as his legacy, Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile isn’t about to waive his logging firm’s rights to log anew in the province after getting a favorable ruling from the government after 16 years of waiting. “If the environmentalists want to expropriate my property, let them do it. But they can’t tell me how to handle our rights,” Enrile said in a phone interview. Finally breaking his silence, Enrile, however, made the assurance that his firm, San Jose Timber Corp. (SJTC), would harvest trees selectively in a 95,770-ha area in the province, as it had been doing for 22 years until it was stopped in 1989. “We’re not going to destroy the forest. We will preserve it,” he said. “We will do selective logging operations there… We’re not unscrupulous people who will just cut down trees right and left.” By selective logging, the senator said his firm would harvest trees that are at least 70-cm in diameter. “They should see how we do logging operations without destroying the forest,” he said, stressing that his firm employs forest management experts and uses forest management methods adopted from Burma (Myanmar). Environmentalists have appealed to Enrile to give up his concession and “bequeath” it as a heritage area after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources allowed his firm to resume logging operations in the province. http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=55601

New Zealand:

33) The importing of up to $350 million of wood every year is killing the local specialty wood industry, new lobby group the Specialty Timber Council says. New Zealand furniture makers and joiners are using Canadian western red cedar, American white oak, Indonesian kwila and Fijian kauri when they could be using native, or specialty, timbers from sustainably managed forests, the council says. Not only are forestry exporters struggling against the high New Zealand dollar and high shipping rates, but producers selling to the local market are competing against cheap imports, it says. Imports are cheaper when the exchange rate is higher. Council spokesman Roger May said he met the late Green Party co-leader Rod Donald last Friday to discuss the issue. Of the 1.3 million hectares of native timberland in private ownership in New Zealand, about 600,000ha could be sustainably managed to supply the local furniture and joinery industry, he said. Only about 100,000ha was being managed in this way now. http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3471022a13,00.html

Indonesia:

34) People in the remote hamlet of Sungai Utik, Embaloh district, Kapuas Hulu regency, had laid out the red carpet to welcome Minister of Forestry Malam Sambat Kaban, who had planned to visit the part of West Kalimantan bordering Malaysia in mid-October. The plan was called off, however, to the disappointment of locals who after hearing about the high-profile visit had immediately asked for talks with the minister to tell him the problems they were encountering. For Thomas Langit, a youth leader from Badau regency, Kapuas Hulu regency, the minister’s visit would have enabled him to find out what steps the government would take to overcome the economic effects on people in border areas resulting from the crackdown on illegal logging. “It is only natural that locals continue to fell trees in the forest. About 90 percent of the people depend on the forest to support themselves. If what they have been doing is considered illegal, then what must be done to make it legal? Unless the government provides an alternative, how can they give up their long-standing activities?” Thomas asked. http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailnational.asp?fileid=20051107.C03&irec=2

Australia:

35) Logging contractors in Tasmania have been urged to learn lessons from New Zealand in order to reduce the number of log truck crashes. Warwick Wilshier from the New Zealand Log Truck Safety Council says logging contractors in Tasmania need to acknowledge the problem in order to reduce the number of accidents. “The operators need to look at the design of the vehicles, go though the calculation, work hard with the drivers, because a lot of it is about attitude, about the professional way they operate and they can achieve,” he said. Guest speaker, forestry analyst Robert Eastment says contractors need to become more efficient to enable them to remain competitive in a world market. “The future for the market, for the forest industry, while in the past it’s been dominated by the native forest sector, the market will be increasingly relevant to what’s happening with the hardwood and the softwood plantations,” he said. “There’s still a future for the native forests, but we have to look for the future, we certainly have to look at hardwood and softwood plantations.” http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200511/s1498551.htm