I am recently retired from the BC Forest Service. I conducted inspections on logging, road building and road maintenence for 20 years. My zone was central Vancouver Island and many of the areas I worked in connected to what was at one time very productive salmon streams including the Nitinat River, Klanawa River and the Sarita River watersheds. The legislation regulating this work is almost useless. I documented siltation going into streams from roads and landslides all the time. In many cases we have roads running parallel to major salmon streams and there is no appetite to rehabilitate and move these roads.
Since retiring I have talked to co-workers. They have told me there are almost no inspections anymore and the industry operates on "Professional Accountability" and "self reporting". The day before I retired an Assistant Deputy Minister called me and asked for feedback on what the organization could do better. When I brought up the legislation and the issues he said "thats not our department ". I was told when working at one point to stand down on a landslide investigation and to quit picking on the companies.
In short we fully understand the impacts from Industrial Logging and the damage that is happening but it is simply not being addressed. Instead the Ministry produces web pages talking about what a great job they are doing a great job protecting watersheds, fish and fish habitat. In my mind it was a complete snow job.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Brent. I've heard much the same from ethically-minded employees at the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, and other agencies. There is a profoundly dangerous institutional culture, extractive momentum, and entanglement with regulated industries (such as the "revolving door") in these agencies.
This video means so much to me. My father was a timber cruiser in those forests of the Coast Range - he knew Clatsop County forests especially well. He both loved forests and individual species (Doug Fir and Silver Fir were his favorites) and made his living in industrial forestry, which means replacing real forests with plantations, logged again and again in short rotation, as the soil becomes ever less fertile. His hard work (logging and logging-adjacent work is dangerous and physically challenging) fed me, clothed me, housed me, and sent me to college. The grief I feel, for my father whose love of forests led him to this work, for the salmon runs gone extinct, for the sad logging towns of Oregon, for those mountains which should be blanketed in flora - alder, big leaf maple, ferns, vines, and a mix of tree species, each with its own green - and are denuded and scraped, is something I rarely express and rarely hear anything about. Yes, the work lies before us. Thank you for giving this voice.
Thanks for sharing that, Janet. I feel the same way. The industrial forestlands of Washington, Oregon, and BC are such a mess, and it feels so incredible to find tiny little postage-stamp parcels that are intact. The beauty is stunning. I'm a big advocate for forming a National Park or Monument in the Coast Range. Even if it's composed at first of mostly young plantations, it could grow in a century to something unmatched by any other protected land in the lower 48 (if the broader ecological crisis is halted or slowed). The lowland ancient forests have been so hard hit, and even parks like Olympic are mostly beauty strips or upland old growth. It's good that there's so much attention paid to stopping logging on Federal Lands in the National Forests, but the fact that there are few-to-no levers to stop logging on private timberlands is such a problem.
I am recently retired from the BC Forest Service. I conducted inspections on logging, road building and road maintenence for 20 years. My zone was central Vancouver Island and many of the areas I worked in connected to what was at one time very productive salmon streams including the Nitinat River, Klanawa River and the Sarita River watersheds. The legislation regulating this work is almost useless. I documented siltation going into streams from roads and landslides all the time. In many cases we have roads running parallel to major salmon streams and there is no appetite to rehabilitate and move these roads.
Since retiring I have talked to co-workers. They have told me there are almost no inspections anymore and the industry operates on "Professional Accountability" and "self reporting". The day before I retired an Assistant Deputy Minister called me and asked for feedback on what the organization could do better. When I brought up the legislation and the issues he said "thats not our department ". I was told when working at one point to stand down on a landslide investigation and to quit picking on the companies.
In short we fully understand the impacts from Industrial Logging and the damage that is happening but it is simply not being addressed. Instead the Ministry produces web pages talking about what a great job they are doing a great job protecting watersheds, fish and fish habitat. In my mind it was a complete snow job.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Brent. I've heard much the same from ethically-minded employees at the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, and other agencies. There is a profoundly dangerous institutional culture, extractive momentum, and entanglement with regulated industries (such as the "revolving door") in these agencies.
Thanks for your hard work Max in letting people know.
This video means so much to me. My father was a timber cruiser in those forests of the Coast Range - he knew Clatsop County forests especially well. He both loved forests and individual species (Doug Fir and Silver Fir were his favorites) and made his living in industrial forestry, which means replacing real forests with plantations, logged again and again in short rotation, as the soil becomes ever less fertile. His hard work (logging and logging-adjacent work is dangerous and physically challenging) fed me, clothed me, housed me, and sent me to college. The grief I feel, for my father whose love of forests led him to this work, for the salmon runs gone extinct, for the sad logging towns of Oregon, for those mountains which should be blanketed in flora - alder, big leaf maple, ferns, vines, and a mix of tree species, each with its own green - and are denuded and scraped, is something I rarely express and rarely hear anything about. Yes, the work lies before us. Thank you for giving this voice.
Thanks for sharing that, Janet. I feel the same way. The industrial forestlands of Washington, Oregon, and BC are such a mess, and it feels so incredible to find tiny little postage-stamp parcels that are intact. The beauty is stunning. I'm a big advocate for forming a National Park or Monument in the Coast Range. Even if it's composed at first of mostly young plantations, it could grow in a century to something unmatched by any other protected land in the lower 48 (if the broader ecological crisis is halted or slowed). The lowland ancient forests have been so hard hit, and even parks like Olympic are mostly beauty strips or upland old growth. It's good that there's so much attention paid to stopping logging on Federal Lands in the National Forests, but the fact that there are few-to-no levers to stop logging on private timberlands is such a problem.