Our new forest minister has been touring the North, trying to learn about forestry, and I hope, forests.
I sure hope someone is telling him about the need to stop clearcutting Douglas fir forests.
But it doesn’t look like it.
On Jan. 14 Parmar took a helicopter flight to a Douglas fir clearcut being carried out down the Mackenzie Forest Service Road south of Prince George, a region hit hard by massive clearcuts already. He posed with the loggers from the Lheidli Tenneh logging outfit, LTN, in a new flannel jacket and a grin.
I’m not sure the moose are grinning, though.
It’s not something we talk about much anymore but our region has seen catastrophic moose declines. And those Douglas fir forests are important winter habitat for our struggling moose as well as mule deer.
And we don’t have much Douglas fir.
Douglas fir represent only two per cent of our forests in the Prince George Timber Supply Area. It’s a relatively fire-resistant conifer species with good biodiversity values we could use more of, not less.
Sadly, our Ministry of Forests, and our minister, are apparently happy to watch it disappear.
Now you may be saying to yourself, sure, but the treeplanters can fix that.
Not Douglas fir. Douglas fir clearcuts typically regenerate to lodgepole pine up here - a highly flammable, low-biodiversity forest type in whose basket we are already putting too many eggs.
This is for a couple of reasons. Douglas fir seedlings have a higher rate of failure compared to lodgepole pine. They are vulnerable to frost damage. During heatwaves the sun can cook them. Local research by a team including Suzanne Simard suggests the absence of healthy mycorrhizae supported by surviving Douglas fir mother trees further undermines survival.
Lodgepole pine, on the other hand, have much higher initial survival rates. They love clearcuts.
Combined with the fact nurseries grow pine seedlings for a fraction of the cost of spruce or Douglas fir, there is a strong financial incentive to plant mostly lodgepole pine.
So we are growing a lot of pine everywhere at the expense of other forest types, which of course is perfectly legal.
It’s not like some folks in the ministry don’t recognize the problem.
The Planning and Practices Branch in the Ministry of Forests finally issued a report two years ago called “Improving Survival for Planted Interior Douglas-fir (Fdi) in The Cariboo Natural Resource Region.”
This report identified another threat to Douglas fir regeneration: the elimination of our critical deciduous species. Douglas Fir, the report argues, are protected and enhanced by the deciduous “brush” that we currently eliminate from our regenerating stands, either with herbicides or with brush saws.
Page 28 of the report shows one of the only surviving Douglas fir seedlings in a clearcut. It is almost completely being smothered in the loving embrace of a small alder or birch. This image is a fundamental challenge to long-held views that still hold sway: the “competing” brush is not the threat we think it is - it’s almost certainly the reason the baby fir is still alive.
But the reality is regenerating interior Douglas fir in a clearcut will take longer, will cost more and will produce less volume in the same amount of time compared to lodgepole pine.
That’s a pretty cynical and short-sighted rationale to replace a fire-resistant species with a more fire-prone species, further simplifying our landbase, increasing the risk of fire and disease, while hurting moose, mule deer, and other Douglas-fir dependent species.
If we insist on logging a regionally-rare stand type, it should be entirely with selective logging methods. I’ve heard leaving as few as 20 large Douglas fir per hectare can ensure Douglas fir naturally regenerates.
More would be better.
As a minister in charge of a great public resource, Ravi Parmar doesn’t just work for the lower mainland corporate lobbyist and billionaire class who have no problem turning the entire Central Interior into a giant fire-trap, monocrop pine farm for short-term gain.
Indeed, that’s what’s happening.
His legacy will be determined by how well he understands the fallacy of that path.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
