352 BC – Canada

–British Columbia: 1) Bioenergy: Gov. makes lemon out of lemon aid, 2) Cherry Ridge community forest, 3) Gov lied about tree planting promises, 4) Workers want forest land reserves to fend off Real Estate mob, 5) Scavenging for rubbish amid the ruins,
–Canada: 6) No one is talking about how loggers caused the flood, 7) Future management of Nova Scotia landscape, 8) 90% say: kick ‘em out of the Boreal, 9) Remote monitoring technology, 10) Clear-cutting a waste of soil and money,

British Columbia:

1) The B.C. government says it will be ready by July for bids from bioenergy producers for the mountains of debris in B.C. forests not being used now by sawmillers. The bids will be for a new form of forest tenure aimed at utilizing waste wood and will coincide with a B.C. Hydro call for proposals on large-scale bioenergy plants, Forests Minister Rich Coleman said at a Prince George bioenergy conference this week. The forests ministry estimates that in the Interior alone, 4.4 million cubic metres of wood a year is being left after loggers leave. A cubic metre of wood is equivalent to a telephone pole. Most of the waste wood is in the regions hit hardest by the mountain pine beetle – the western Interior from Fort St. James in the north down to Merritt in the south. Those regions are also well away from the existing pulp and paper industry, which is now paying from $25 to $35 a cubic metre in transportation costs for dead pine logs hauled from the bush to mills. The most economic way to get the waste to power plants would be through overlapping forest tenures, where a bioenergy producer piggy-backs on an existing forest licence, sharing harvesting and transportation costs with the primary licensee, said David Gandossi, chair of the B.C. Pulp and Paper Task Force. The pulp sector had been concerned that the province’s bioenergy plans, if not co-ordinated with existing fibre users, could push up wood chip costs for their plants. “Our industry believes the government gets it and understands the issues,” Gandossi said Friday of the new tenures. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=c22c9476-5e4b-4fd4-a08b-3918ae3d98ce

2) CHERRYVILLE – The Province’s invitation to the Cherry Ridge Management Committee to apply for a Probationary Community Forest Agreement will enhance long-term stewardship in the area, Okanagan-Vernon MLA Tom Christensen announced today on behalf of Forests and Range Minister Rich Coleman. “This agreement would allow the management decisions of the forest on two Cherryville mountain sides to be made in Cherryville,” said Christensen. “The committee will be able to make decisions that affect the forest and the community’s environment, water and recreation options as well as pursuing the economic and employment opportunities a community forest provides.” The agreement would allow the committee to manage areas on Cherry Ridge and Heckman Ridge that the community of Cherryville uses as water sources, and also highly regards for recreation values and wildlife habitat. The agreement would carry an initial five-year term, and also grant the committee the right to harvest a total of up to 1,500 cubic metres of timber per year from the two areas. The Cherry Ridge Management Committee has operated small-scale salvage licences over the years to log beetle-killed and other dead timber and voluntarily replanted areas. “The agreement would lead to forestry and ecosystem management techniques and priorities that are favoured and selected by area residents,” said Cherry Ridge Management Committee president Wayne Cunneyworth. “The committee looks forward to the long-term stability and stewardship a community forest will bring to Cherry Ridge.” Community forest tenures are area-based, and give communities exclusive rights to harvest timber, as well as the opportunity to manage forest resources such as timber and plant products, recreation, wildlife, water and scenic viewscapes. http://www2.news.gov.bc.ca/news_releases_2005-2009/2008FOR0094-000852.htm

3) The replanting of British Columbia’s forests is falling behind because of economic woes affecting industry and a funding lapse in the government’s reforestation program and unable to keep pace with the voracious mountain pine beetle. Fewer trees will be planted next year than at any time in the past two decades, even though the pine beetle has ravaged vast tracts of land, the head of a tree planting association says. In April, Premier Gordon Campbell and Forests and Range Minister Rich Coleman also held a ceremony, near Kelowna, to mark the planting of the six-billionth tree and highlight B.C.’s reforestation efforts. “Planting the six billionth tree symbolizes our approach to sustainable forest management. We have nearly as much natural, diverse forest as we had 150 years ago,” Mr. Coleman said at the time. “This year we had expected to plant around 260 million trees based on the sowing requests. But a number of companies have since cancelled or reduced their programs, so this year we are planting 250 million trees, which is more or less the average we’ve been doing since the turn of the century,” said John Betts, executive director of the Western Silviculture Contractors’ Association. “Meanwhile, the mountain pine beetle has just been eating away into the woods. So it doesn’t seem quite to line up,” said Mr. Betts, whose association yesterday had ceremonial plantings around the province to celebrate the six billionth seedling to go into the ground since reforestation programs began in the 1930s. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080606.BCFORESTS06/TPStory/TPNational/Briti
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4) An alliance of workers and environmentalists has called for a forest land reserve in B.C. that will put private forest lands under the same kind of protection from development as farmland. The United Steelworkers Union and the Western Canada Wilderness Committee said Tuesday that tens of thousands of hectares of B.C. forest lands are coming under intense development pressure. An Agricultural Land Reserve-style designation could prevent that, they said. The loss of forest lands affects jobs and wilderness values — clean drinking water to animal habitat — according to the two allies. “Those options are off the table once you have residential development on the land,” said Ken Wu, campaign director of the Wilderness Committee’s Victoria office. “We want a Dave Barrett-style Forest Land Reserve, something like the Agricultural Land Reserve that would prevent the conversion of lands under forestry use into lands for residential use.” Lands in the ALR are subject to land-use and subdivision restrictions. It was highly controversial when introduced in 1973 by the Dave Barrett NDP government as a means of preventing prime farmland from being converted to residential or industrial use. Now, the downturn in the B.C. forest industry has led forest companies to re-examine their land holdings in a search for a new stream of revenue. Selling land to developers can provide that stream. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=ee6e5a03-daaa-4bd4-9c78-9c113702
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5) As the mountain pine beetle munches a devastating path through B.C. forests, another blow for the down and out forestry industry, governments and corporations are working on better ways to use the dead wood in everything from furniture to energy production. West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. (TSX:WFT) and Epcor Utilities said recently they are contemplating building a power plant near Houston, B.C. that could be fuelled by pine-beetle-killed wood. Pinnacle Pellet Inc. is one of a handful of private B.C. companies that has started turning shavings from beetle-affected wood into pellet fuel, a practice that is popular in Europe and gaining recognition in North America. The University of Northern British Columbia has received government funding for a pilot project comparing beetle-wood pellets to natural gas for fuel in terms of cost, productivity and emissions. Researchers are also studying more X-ray style methods of looking inside the wood to find other uses. http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5isEFudLQtQCa3IblLWqVusB6FVRA

Canada:

6) People in New Brunswick should be sending letters of gratitude to the forest decimating companies for our spring floods. Since the flood of 2008, I have heard talk of possible causes, but not a word about the most obvious – the clear cutting by the forest decimating companies. It is a simple truth that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If one cuts down all of the trees, which is a very unnatural thing, then that unnatural human action will, in turn, produce a very natural reaction – that being massive floods. It is our people’s belief that creator’s creation is sacred and perfect as created, requiring no help from one of creator’s creation (humans) to “improve” upon her sacred creation. Our responsibility, as humans, is to recognize and acknowledge the sacred and the perfection of creator’s creation. And to remember, honour, respect and protect creator’s creation. The reason that Euroman found the paradise on Earth that is our homeland, is this worldview of the sacredness of creator’s creation. In order for things to begin to change for the better, in terms of the self-destructive path humans find themselves, there needs to be a revolution – revolution of the heart in which humans begin to see themselves as being part of Creator and part of her sacred creation. Not separate, not divided but whole and complete, all possessing the power of creator to create or destroy. –Dan Ennis, Tobique First Nation, Tobique, N.B. http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/318842

7) The hearings on the future management of most of Nova Scotia as a physical entity – its forests, parks, mines and general ecology – have ignited something. They’re drawing crowds the way travelling hearings usually don’t. I was at the Yarmouth gathering this week, one of 26 across the province, where some 150 people showed up – complaining that if it had been better publicized, a lot more would have come. The meeting was in the hands of pleasant volunteers with the arm’s-length provincial agency Voluntary Economic Planning (VEP), and everyone on all sides had their say without raised voices. I mention this because it counts as progress, in itself, in a province where even calm talk about forest management has been extremely scarce. Remember that ecology groups fought a long battle just to get VEP to run these hearings instead of the Department of Natural Resources. The DNR has administered a decades-old policy of industrial forestry that has reduced this province to one long clearcut with only a few accidental stands of old forest still standing, worse economic outcomes than most other provinces, and has largely lost public confidence. Just getting this little bit of the process out of DNR’s clammy hands caused the MacDonald government some headaches. At the Yarmouth meeting, someone – obviously not up to speed – asked: “Where’s DNR?” The moderator explained that they weren’t here, in order to avoid an “us-versus-them” situation. That is, with DNR there, the reasonable tone in the room would have disappeared. It happened last time there was such an exercise, about a decade ago. At that time, I attended a meeting in Sackville, where we were jammed into a small room. DNR field people took a barrage of hostile policy questions that only their superiors could have properly answered, and with a long line of angry questioners still standing, shut down the meeting because “we only hired the hall until 8 o’clock.” http://thechronicleherald.ca/Columnists/1060693.html

8) Nine in ten Canadians with voting intentions across all party lines support greater protection of the Canadian Boreal Forest, according to a new national poll conducted by McAllister Opinion Research for the Canadian Boreal Initiative. “Like the Boreal itself, Canadians think big. They overwhelmingly view this part of the country as a national treasure, and believe that more than half should be protected from industrial development,” said Larry Innes, the Executive Director of the Canadian Boreal Initiative. “The poll results demonstrate that the public strongly supports Boreal protection, and they are using it as a yardstick by which to measure government environmental performance,” added Innes. The results revealed that 87% of respondents are concerned about the threats posed by industrial development, and 69% do not accept the argument that protecting the Boreal is ineffectual in the face of forest fires and pests such as the pine beetle. In fact, respondents overwhelmingly championed increased protection for Canada’s Boreal Forest. When asked to recommend how much of Canada’s Boreal Forest should be protected from industrial development, the average response across voting preferences was 67%, with Conservative voters giving an average response of 61% and Liberals voters 69%. Currently, only 10% of Canada’s Boreal Forest is permanently protected. Last year, over 1,500 leading scientists recommended that at least half of Canada’s Boreal Forest be protected. Over the past year, the Governments of Canada and the NWT have set aside nearly 140,000 square kilometres of Boreal Forest in the Northwest Territories for new protection. This is one of the largest areas of wilderness ever protected in Canadian history and one of the greatest conservation achievements in North America. When provided with this information, close to 70% of respondents said that this action would have a positive impact on their perception of the federal government, with nearly 90% of respondents wanting to see more protection initiatives. Additional areas have been nominated for protection across the Boreal Forest. http://www.thegreenpages.ca/portal/ca/2008/06/canadians_strongly_favour_bore.html

9) Have you ever wondered what happens in the rainforest when no one is looking? University of Alberta’s Faculty of Science may soon be able to answer that question. The departments of computing science and earth and atmospheric science have been working together to create a Wireless Sensor Network that allows for the clandestine data collection of environmental factors in remote locations and its monitoring from anywhere in the world where the Internet is available. The research team, including Pawel Gburzynski, Mario Nascimento, and Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, recently launched EcoNet, a functional model of a WSN for environmental monitoring in the display house in the University of Alberta’s Agriculture/Forestry Centre. The display house hosts a small but feature-rich environment that mimics that of a tropical forest. Using a WSN, a number of sensors can continuously monitor factors like temperature and luminosity and will process, store and transmit data co-operatively and wirelessly with other sensors to generate data that can then be collected and made available to users virtually anywhere on the globe. The sensors represent a technology for researchers to monitor diverse phenomena continuously and inconspicuously. The opportunities these sensors will provide to scientists are paramount in a global environment that is changing at an ever-increasing pace. Once the display-house prototype is tested and customized, at least two sites are to be fully deployed in the fall, one likely in the Brazilian rainforest, and the other in a forest in Panama. The project has been made possible by close collaboration with Olsonet Communications Corporation in Ottawa, which has implemented the WSN nodes and supported the project since its inception. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080604165554.htm

10) The root systems and associated plant cover, so important to holding the soils on these fragile rocky slopes, is being removed. Once the soils are gone, the centuries-old cycle of soil-building will stop. Mother Nature will have a difficult time restarting the process. What a waste. Do the Ministry of Natural Resources managers and responsible company foresters truly believe that by eroding the hillside and streaming the nutrient riches into the valley bottoms that forest sustainability can be ensured? What about all the other natural resources that used and/or inhabited those sites? I have been a logging contractor for about 40 years. Knowing that clear cutting was damaging to sites, we understood that careful logging was necessary to ensure that harvesting could again be done in the foreseeable future. This kind of environmentally sound harvesting can still be done. But with today’s harvesting practices, the emphasis is on the need for large heavy equipment. One feller-buncher can destroy 10 acres of trees in one day and provide jobs for only three people. Only one harvest of timber products could be realized during an 80- to 100-year rotation. The net volume of timber harvested under a careful logging scenario would yield at least twice as much timber as the one-shot removed-all process. Furthermore, the timber from the partial-harvesting method would be of higher quality, and therefore command a significantly higher return. So, why do our government officials allow these destructive harvesting practices on our lands, where the forest are really ours, the people of Ontario? Perhaps if more control over harvesting practices had been exercised, our weather patterns and global warming would not be such a concern. http://www.saultstar.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1060881