Read this story from the Victoria Times-Colonist on the brazen theft of a massive 800 year-old Western Red Cedar from the Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park on Vancouver Island. (May 17, 2012)

Tree poachers have stolen one of the largest red cedars in Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park in what is believed to have been a two-part operation over the past year.

"If poachers can run around roughshod in the parks, it's a terrible thing for B.C.," said Torrance Coste, a Vancouver Island campaigner with the environmental group Wilderness Committee. He reported the theft to B.C. Parks and RCMP, but was told there was little chance of finding the thieves.

Coste, who measured rings on the stump, said the cedar, which is valuable for roof shakes, was probably about 800 years old and measured 2.75 metres across.

"I believe the poachers have access to heavy-duty equipment. Firewood salvagers in pickup trucks can't handle trees this size," he said.

The demise of the tree started one year ago when parks staff found it had been 80 per cent cut through with a chainsaw.

"It's hard to say why it was cut like that and just left. It created a hazard to public safety and park safety," said Andy Macdonald, B.C. Parks west coast regional section head.

"There was no other option than to hire a professional faller to complete the job," he said.

The tree was left on the ground to decompose and provide habitat for insects and wildlife, Macdonald said.

But someone had other ideas.

"The trunk has been hauled out, cut up and taken away, presumably to be further processed and sold," Coste said. He assumes it was the same person who initially cut the tree.

Macdonald said the parks department discovered the tree had been dragged out about a week ago. There was little evidence to investigate as even tire tracks had been obscured.

"It's one of the more remote parks on Vancouver Island that doesn't see a lot of visitation, so I would guess the illegal activity occurred when no one else was present," he said.

Coste said tree poaching is an example of what can happen when there is no staff to monitor what is going on. "We have been concerned about the cutting of park budgets for a number of years. Until about 18 months ago, people would have been watching," he said.

Read this editorial from blogger Laila Yuile on BC Auditor General John Doyle's new scathing report on the mismagement of BC's forestry resource by the BC Liberal Government. (Feb. 16, 2012)

John Doyle never fails to impress, and his latest report is a scathing commentary of how inadequate the BC Liberals really are at managing one of our most precious assets and resources, our forests...

...The BC government has clearly, and on an ongoing basis, failed to balance economic interests with protection of our forests for future generations, and this is highly visible as you fly over these great lands. Much of what I had the pleasure of exploring with my dad growing up just north of Prince George, is now a vast expanse of dead trees, or vast areas of clearcut. 

I’m sorry to say I took it for granted back then, thinking in the innocence of childhood that it would be like that forever.

Nothing stays the same, I know now. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the extent of kill and clearcut driving to Babine Lake on a visit back home a few years ago -nothing could have prepared me for the physical pain  that clutched my chest as tears sprung unbidden to my eyes at the sight of once fertile, old growth forest dead, dying, gone.

Read more: http://lailayuile.com/2012/02/16/john-doyle-does-it-again-officially-states-the-obvious-failings-of-the-bc-liberals/

BC's Auditor General John Doyle was at it again this week - publishing yet another tough report on the mismanagement of the province's resources by the BC Liberal Government. Doyle began his term as AG with forestry issues and returns to that subject in his latest report. (Feb 15, 2012)

Read the report here

Damien Gillis discusses a range of topics with Mehdi Najari - host of The Hidden News on Victoria's CFUV 101.9 FM - including the escalating stand-off over the proposed Prosperity Mine in the Tsilhqot'in Territory, southwest of Williams Lake, BC. Since the taping of this interview, the Tsilhqot'in peoples won an injunction to halt early construction work on the highly controversial mine. Gillis and Najari also discuss the history of indigenous resistance to mining projects in BC, including the historic Tsilhqot'in War over an eerily similar stand-off in the same territory 150 years ago. From November 29, 2011.

One of the last remaining intact old-growth Douglas Fir groves on Vancouver Island is slated to be logged today, following an injunction last week against protestors who halted an earlier attempt to commence work. The forest, near Nanoose Bay, is known in logging parlance as DL33 and is home to red-listed Coastal Douglas Fir. The issue is pitting environmentalists against the local First Nation, as the company doing the logging, Snaw-Naw-As Forest Services Ltd, is aboriginal-owned. But conservationists were shocked to at the BC Supreme Court this past Friday that the First Nation has already got a buyer lined up to purchase the logs - namely Timberwest.

Read this article from the Nanaimo Daily News on the passing of legendary BC forester Merv Wilkinson, whose Wildwood Forest Operation earned him global acclaim for leading-edge sustainable forestry and an Order of Canada.

"Wilkinson, in a conversation with the Daily News in 2010, said old-time forestry workers knew how to manage a forest. He recalled a former employer telling him, 'Merv don't you take out any trees that are less than 16 inches at the stump...The old-fashioned logging was way ahead of what we have now. It wasn't self-destructive. It was sustainable and more people were employed in the industry back then,' Wilkinson said." (Sept 1, 2011)

http://www2.canada.com/nanaimodailynews/news/story.html?id=156065c6-f5e5-4a69-94a6-7e079d4666eb

A scant 10 minute walk off a logging road near the BC's West Coast town of Port Renfrew is Avatar Grove, a stand of old cedars so majestic, powerful and gnarled that T. F. Watt said he and his colleagues from the Ancient Forest Alliance "were running around like kids in a candy store" when they found it in 2009...Shortly after that, timber cruisers surveyed it for logging, hanging the ominous ribbons of plastic tape that marked a cutting boundary.

From the Vancouver Sun - May 17, 2011

by Gordon Hamilton

METRO VANCOUVER - When Port Alberni Mayor Ken McRae sees a freighter leaving his coastal sawmilling town loaded with wood, the pride he once felt has turned to a deep concern for the future of the British Columbia coastal forest industry.

Once those ships were loaded with lumber. Now, half the cargo is logs.

Log exports have exploded in B.C. in the last few months, largely to feed China’s voracious appetite for fibre. McRae is not opposed to exports; they have a place in a healthy industry, he said. But he fears China’s appetite for B.C. logs is going to cut into manufacturing here.

“China, Korea and Japan are paying more for logs than most of our sawmillers can afford. It’s a huge issue that’s going to come back to bite us,” he said in an interview.

From Focus Online - Feb, 2011

by Briony Penn

Wham BAM, thank you TAM

Corporate mergers raise questions about who really owns BC

I used to report on the colourful species that inhabit this part of the world, but those articles are diminishing with their populations. Now I’m as likely to report on the colourful CEOs of companies who are doing their best to liquidate these last “distressed assets.” It’s quite a challenge, as one has to be able to follow the ever-changing mergers, selloffs and vertical integrations that the big players concoct through Byzantine-like structures and deals. 

One also has to be able to remember three-word acronyms which often change. To follow the money in this region right now, the most important ones to be aware of are BAM and TAM. Look out your window anywhere from Crofton to Sooke and you’ll be gazing at a piece of real estate owned in some fashion by BAM or TAM.

Mr Martin J. Whitman, the founder of Third Avenue Management (TAM), runs his empire out of New York; a few of its minor assets have included Western Forest Products, Timberwest, and Island Timberlands through  associations with another roving predator of distressed companies, Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) under CEO Bruce Flatt. 

TAM and BAM form a many-headed hydra that has been devouring most of the private forestlands on southeast Vancouver Island. These distressed asset managers live in the skyscrapers of New York and Toronto from which they “manage” thousands of hectares of forest in the Capital Region. We rely on these forests for water and are now having to buy them back from BAM/TAM at great expense.

If you travel around British Columbia, you’ll gaze upon many other TAM assets. In fact, fully one quarter of BC’s public harvesting rights—over 10 million cubic metres of Crown forest—are now under TAM’s controlling interest through their acquisition of huge chunks of BC’s biggest forest and pulp companies, including Canfor and Catalyst. As pressures to privatize crown assets continue, the companies with existing leases to resources will be best poised to secure title to the land underlying those resources.

TAM, working alongside Jimmy Pattison (who is also a board member of BAM), has majority share ownership in Canfor. Pattison and Whitman joined together in 2007 to vote in their own slate of directors, including TAM men like Amit Wadhwaney, an ex-Domtar forest products analyst who heads up the TAM International Value Fund, and Ian Lapey, Whitman’s future successor (they are not on the board now, though Pattison is). The same sort of thing went on with Catalyst. The typical pattern is: close down facilities, consolidate, liquidate assets, avoid taxes (as happened in Crofton), try and exert influence on the political system, wait out the process of privatization and then sell.

Whitman’s investment mantra is “Safe and Cheap.” He coined it after the war when he discovered there was a lot of money to be made buying distressed companies in sectors hit by recession; liquidating and consolidating; then waiting it out for the rising market. The philosophy is stated this way on TAM’s website: “We believe the cheaper you buy, the greater the potential investment reward and the cheaper you buy, the less the inherent risk.” 

What was Whitman’s inspiration? His biography states: “When he encountered a timber company rich with assets [aka forests] but no visible earnings power he realized there was a better way.” One assumes the “better way” is to liquidate the forests prior to selling the land when real estate prices are rising. In southeast Vancouver Island, there has never been so much timber removed from these forests so quickly. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that our province attracts such companies. Who could resist British Columbia, a great little banana republic on the doorstep of America that meets all those great investment criteria? Safe? For sure, there are no Zapatistas here. And cheap? Once you’ve creamed the forest off the top, you have free real estate that can be sold. Moreover, we have a provincial government that seems easily swayed by corporate investors.

Read full article

Watch this video clip from Al Jazeera English on the campaign to protect a piece of old growth forest on Vancouver Island: