British Columbia: Logging Wildwood 13 times in 70 years, old growth trees still remain!

During his 70 years at Wildwood, Wilkinson has made 13 full cuts on
the property as well as many cuts for specialized timber. He has
harvested more than twice the volume of trees, yet the land sustains
110 per cent of the volume he started with. The numbers have been
confirmed by top U.S. and Canadian foresters. “The system is used all
over the world — it goes over much better in other countries than it
does here, but there are a few doing it now,” he says.

Wilkinson has
been critical of logging companies over the years, and in 1993 he
joined the protest blockade trying to stop trucks from entering
Clayoquot Sound. According to news reports at the time, the judge who
sentenced him for blocking the Kennedy River Bridge (100 hours of
community service, not to be done in forestry) said he was
“magnificently unrepentant.” And he’s still raging about land-use
policies that allow developers to break up valuable acreages for
real-estate speculation. “Some of the things we do in forestry in
B.C., I think, ‘Oh no, what the hell do they think they’re doing?’ It
flies in the face of reason,” Wilkinson says. “It’s all about money —
they want to maximize the money right now rather than thinking about
getting it over a lifetime.”

Wielding a chainsaw is harder when you’re
90. Wilkinson felled his last tree when he was 93, and although he
still lives at Wildwood, his work is now mainly guiding tours of the
forest and sharing his skills with visitors from all over the world.
In 2000, the Land Conservancy of B.C. bought the property to ensure it
would remain a forest and learning site forever, but Wilkinson can
live there as long as he wants, in the house he built for his family
decades ago. Over the years, he has raised a family — or two — at
Wildwood: three marriages, one son, two stepdaughters and many foster
kids. He’s not exactly sure how many kids call him grandpa, but
there’s at least a dozen. “Am I retired? I guess so, but if someone
had a tree they were really worried about, I’d be tempted to pick up a
chainsaw and take it down.” wmclellan
@theprovince.comhttp://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=e5fa3387-b00a-468f-820f-1963fb0dfcd1

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