PART TWO

From Binkley through to Gorley and Merkel, the calls for zoning suggest that the provincial government’s approach to managing the province’s forest resources has been a failure and is in need of a radical revamp.

Restoration’s great potential

“The age of multiple use is more or less dead,” Werner said in one of his talks. “It’s not dead because I say it is. It’s dead because we’ve been trying it for 50 years and it hasn’t worked.”

“We can’t do everything on the same piece of land. You can’t maximize two-by-four production and have owls. You can’t maximize fibre and expect to have functional food webs.”

Where Werner sees a huge challenge — one that may deliver great benefits over time but at considerable expense — is in the area of restoration, something his talks illustrated to dramatic effect.

Worldwide, Werner notes, the United Nations has declared this to be the decade of restoration, arguing that without global efforts to restore damaged ecosystems, poverty will rise, extinctions will accelerate and the impacts of climate change will be far worse.

The international Convention on Biological Diversity has also strongly advocated restoration efforts, stating that roughly one-third of degraded ecosystems should be being restored by 2030 and that a further third of ecosystems should be conserved outright by then as well.

In the last few years four parcels of forest land within the large logged-over area Werner focused his two talks on were restored.

The restoration projects each involved 14 square kilometres of tree plantations for a total of 5,600 hectares of land, which combined is an area roughly 14 Stanley Parks in size.
With approximately $1.5 million in funds provided by the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, which invests in wildlife restoration projects using money collected as surcharges on hunting and angling licences and the provincial government, the four areas were treated beginning four years ago with the express purpose of opening them up so that wildlife might once again use them. Partners in the restoration project included the Saik’uz First Nation, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and the Society for Ecosystem Restoration in Northern BC.

Using the tools of logging, from feller-buncher machines to chainsaws and even handsaws, dense and dark tree plantations stocked with as many as 10,000 and sometimes even more planted and naturally reseeded trees per hectare were thinned down so that 600 or fewer trees remained. This was a dramatic difference that turned the treated lands into what from the air looked more like woodland parks with clear spaces between trees for sunlight to reach the once heavily shaded ground, creating openings for light to encourage plant growth and space for animals to move about.

In other cases, small gaps were opened in the forest, ranging in size up to two hectares. In these new clearings, sunlight fell where previously it had not. The debris left over after cutting down the small, planted trees was then piled and left where it was so that scientists could study how it might become habitat for rodents and other small animals.

Over time, as those piles decompose, Werner says, they may eventually become soil hummocks that hold water. In the event of future wildfires they may alter fire behaviour by causing the advancing flames to “skip and jump,” thus leaving some areas of land lightly charred and other areas not at all.

In all cases, this work was done leaving buffers or ribbons of trees between the treated areas and adjacent logging roads so that deer, moose and other animals foraging or moving through them were not seen by two-legged and four-legged predators.

Lastly, money was used to cut down trees to block nearby logging roads so that nobody on ATVs could travel down them scaring away wildlife or carrying hunters closer to their prey. Machinery was also used to dig up and mound earth and debris along entire stretches of logging roads in the restoration areas so that the roads would naturally reseed with trees — a gold standard in road rehabilitation and deactivation.

Restored or destined for toilet paper?

Densely stocked tree plantations are “the British Columbia special,” Werner said. “And, as we all know, and there are thousands of papers corroborating this fact, there is very little biodiversity in these systems and the health and integrity tends to be about as low as you can get.”

The encouraging thing is that those efforts, which have happened almost completely outside the limelight, appear to already be delivering results.

Moose have been seen occupying ground in areas where the plantations were opened up with clearings, while deer appeared to favour sites where the trees had been thinned.

Over time — decades, to be precise — many things may come to pass in such clearings. Perhaps more hardwood trees like aspen will come back, trees that are critical habitat for birds that have plummeted in number across North America in the face of a deepening extinction crisis.

But will these important restoration sites make it that far? It’s a critical question, Werner told his audiences.

As of now, those restored lands are still part of the multi-use, timber-harvesting land base that resulted in them being clearcut logged in the first place.

“Could this be turned into toilet paper 10 years from now? There’s no protection for anything we’ve done. And ecological restoration is a long-term investment. The benefits are not really going to be borne for another 40 to 50 years,” Werner said. “Do we know that investment is going to last?”

A provincial government commitment to a three-zone system that gives the forest industry something to work with year in and year out, a system of protected primary forests where industrial activities are forbidden and a network of restored lands that would not be logged again is, in Werner’s opinion, the only thing that might bring thousands of species back from extirpation or extinction in the province while giving extractive industries an area of land to work in with some certainty.

To not make the leap to such a new regime is to stay the course with a system that has for decades delivered not multiple uses, but multiple and still far from over abuses. [Tyee]

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