In June of 2022, I made a trip to Vancouver island to visit my nephew, his wife, and their new baby. I was looking forward to the trip. I’ve always had an affinity toward British Columbia. Somehow, in my mind, I pictured it as a more pristine landscape, less touched than the busy industrialism of central Canada. At least that is what I thought. I had expected to see swaths of intact forest, so dense that you could hardly make out the ground below. I was shocked to instead see from my airplane window seat a landscape almost completely razed, with hills totally ridden of trees by clearcutting. I had not expected this. Not even a little bit. “How did this happen?” I pondered. This is not how it was supposed to be.
Sure, I got to walk through the Cathedral Grove, and I have to say, it was a magical place. But to imagine that the entire island was once like that, and that the grove exists now only as a tiny sliver of what once used to be, completely vulnerable to any natural or man-made shocks since the rest of it no longer exists to act as a kind of protective buffer. According to a CBC documentary, less than 3% of old growth forest remains.[1]
British Columbia, as far I understood, did not suffer from the same disease of commercialism. Didn’t all the cool people live there, like a kind of California of the north? Sure, I had heard of overfishing of spawning salmon, but I thought there were smarter politicians out there who would know better than to cut down old growth forest for the sake of “two-by-fours and toilet paper.”[2] But I was wrong. And I was saddened.
When you see one of these majestic trees culled, like I did on the back of a flatbed truck while I was out there, you wonder what stories it might now never get to tell. The wisdom we won’t get to heed.
“If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?”[3] Well, we might hear, but we sure aren’t listening.
Until we see forests as something other than what we can get out of them, nothing will change, and we will continue to make the same mistakes for the sake of a quick buck. No one seems to care that at some point there won’t be any left to cut down. What then?
But I challenge us to not wait until then. Because by then it will be too late. The forest serves as so much more than a natural resource, there for the taking. It is the storyteller of life. It holds the secrets of flora, fauna, and dare I say, humanity. It gives us not only air to breathe but keeps the landscape naturally cool so that things and shelters us from extreme temperatures. In the forest, everything lives in harmony; each organism there for the benefit of another.
When you clearcut an entire ridge, you remove the forest’s ability to hold back the soil, so erosion takes place, and dangerous mountain slides occur. These are not things for which industry is held to account. They only take, they do not put back. So, the true costs of things become far more expensive too, when governments must then give money to help repair washed out roads, or worse yet, when houses get washed away. The BC government suggests that in response to mudslides in 2020 and 2021, the Cariboo region of the province is eligible for almost $1 billion dollars in federal disaster funding.[4] So, in essence, the provincial government makes some money from the short-term logging, leaving the hillsides subject to erosion, while the federal government hands out aid money to those impacted by the erosion. Does that seem right or smart to you?
This kind of cycle of behaving badly, then the parent coming in for the rescue, means there will never be an end to this kind of after-the-fact damage control. The only thing that will change is the extent of the damage and the number of zeros the government will need to fork out. It will not stop these types of crises from happening in the first place.
But whose problem is it and who is responsible? Government at all levels could put measures in place to ensure companies behave responsibly, and sustainably. We could think pre-emptively instead of reactionarily. We could encourage real innovation and ascribe value to not only profit, but to people, ecosystems, and nature itself.[5] I have yet to see government courageous enough to want to do that.
The removal of forest also doesn’t factor in the fact that climate gets altered. Without the canopy the trees provide, there is no shelter from the heat, and we start to see the record-high temps, like in Lytton,[6] and forest fires that British Columbia has not seen. The soil is warmer than ever before. The jet stream is changing due to elevated ocean temperatures.[7] And its only getting worse. What we are seeing now is only the tip of the iceberg. Climate extremes are becoming normal; fires and floods a common thing, sometimes within the same year. Research by Columbia University suggests that we can now expect major heat events every 10 years come 2050,[8] and that these are the result of human-induced warming.[9]
Two hundred homes were destroyed in the Lytton fire. Not to mention the death toll. There were 1400 people who lost their lives under the heat dome.[10] Loss of life suggests we haven’t accurately accounted for the cost of things, when we only think of the profit we can make, not the negative by-products of extractive industry.
But how do you make a difference, when it seems that the odds are stacked against you?
The concept of land has been one near and dear to my heart, never more so than when I started reading and listening to indigenous voices. On CBC’s The Nature of Things Episode “War in the Woods” we see the Wet’suwet’en First Nation defending their land which they never ceded, nor by treaty surrendered. How is it that the gas industry, by way of RCMP special forces unit,[11] can arrest them for being on their land, with the intent of running a pipeline through their unceded territory? How, because money talks. There is a lot of money to be made. (I highly recommend people educate themselves on what is happening on First Nations land, and more specifically, this heated situation in BC.)
Just like for the logging industry. But I dare say, that the money to be made is a short-term gain for something that has, and should continue to, survive for thousands of years. You cut down a tree and that tree becomes the sum of its parts. This is a linear economy. The tree will never again become a tree. You employ people to cut down that tree, that too, is a short-term gain. You are not ensuring employment ad infinitum.
With any kind of extraction there seems to be a myopic view that the resources will always be available for the pillaging. According to the UN, the world cuts down a staggering 7 million hectares of trees annually.[12] I fear that our hunger for logging won’t subside until every single tree is cut down. At what point will society and governments intervene and say, “enough is enough”?
I remember the Mad Max and Waterworld movies that came out years ago. Their post-apocalyptic storylines seemed so far-fetched. And yet, 30, 40 years later, they don’t seem so far out of reach. I do believe that in the end, when we have done away with most of our resources we will fight over things like wood and water.
But in the meantime, most of us sit cozily in our homes, going about our business in our happy, suburban homes, and don’t much care for what doesn’t immediately impact us. Not my problem. Not my monkeys. But I dare say, it is our problem. We should be standing with First Nations helping defend their unceded land. We should hold government to account, by petitioning them, by writing our elected officials. We should vote for people who care more than just about the myopic campaign promise of less taxation. For people who see all things as necessary to existence: humans, plants, animals, ecosystems. Because it’s not just about us. We exist alongside other species. And the future should include all of us. We should care. We are only here for a short time; merely borrowers of the things the earth has to share.
[1] CBC. The Fifth Estate: Whose Police? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQO2RIytszY
[2] CBC. The Nature of Things: War for the Woods: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2182341187799
[3] Cockburn, Bruce; If A Tree Falls; 1988.
[4] Owens, Brenna, March 23, 2023, in Canada’s National Observer. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/23/news/logging-forest-ancient-bc-landslides
[5] One of the best works I ever read on the topic of innovation for the sake of planet and people, is a book by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter L. Lovins. It is called Natural Capitalism. First published in 1999, it is old now, but I remember reading about the brave people who went against the flow of the status quo and made real change happen, and it had a huge impact on me. It gave me hope that there is indeed a better way.
[6] The highest ever recorded temperature in Canada occurred in Lytton, B.C. on June 29, 2021. It was 49.6 degrees Celsius.
[7] McKinley, Steve; Blame For Dead Dome, Lytton B.C. Blaze Pinned on Climate Change in New Study in The Star: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/blame-for-deadly-heat-dome-lytton-b-c-blaze-pinned-on-climate-change-in-new/article_fd796c75-c391-5deb-b484-b96b7b7d602f.html#:~:text=Researchers%20at%20Columbia%20University%20have,dome%20squarely%20on%20climate%20change.&text=JOIN%20THE%20CONVERSATION-,Damaged%20structures%20and%20vehicles%20are%20seen%20in%20Lytton%2C%20B.C.%2C%20on,the%20village%20on%20June%2030 .
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] The force is called the Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG).
[12] Kilgore, Georgette, July 10, 2023. How Many Trees Cut Down Each Year or In 2023. The Deforestation Crisis Explained. https://8billiontrees.com/trees/how-many-trees-cut-down-each-year/