A lecture from Dr. Hamish Kimmins at the Civic Centre to an audience of around 400 on forestry and the environment. Dr Kimmins is a Professor of Ecology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Kimmins speaks about forestry clearcutting from scientific and academic point of view with slide presentation including local examples of forest management. Discusses historical perspectives and the needs for sustainable development, conservation and ecological issues.
Shaw Cable 10 Production
Nelson Museum, Archives and Gallery Shaw Cable 10 Collection
The length of the speech will be in the neighborhood of 40 minutes and at the end of 40 minutes uh Dr heish kilms will entertain questions and the questions if uh we can follow a few simple rules um we have two microphones here and uh I would ask you that you come up
To the microphones and we’ll take you one at a time um we would limit your your discussion till to 2 minutes and uh please show respect for um our speaker tonight and if we could I that’s my job is to make sure that uh we keep within those limitations but I
Think you’ll really enjoy the speech that we have tonight and I’d like you to please give a warm welcome to Dr Amish Kim good evening everyone very happy to be here thanks for the introduction Doug personally to disappoint you I’m afraid as you know all academics own their
Living way talking my speeches can be a tired longer than 40 minutes it was 40 minutes in the briefing notes but I’m afraid it goes closer to an hour a bit longer so I hope I can keep you all awake I know you’ve all had supper it’s
The end of the day so I hope I can keep you all going I’m very happy to be here the last time I was in Nelson doing something remotely like this was about 18 years ago when I was giving a short course to uh people in the forest Service on Forest
Ecology the next closest thing was was about 16 years ago when Ralph Moore of one of the environmental groups at creson got me down there to give a some presentations on Forest ecology and then John Woodworth of Okanagan s Parks Association had me give a short course on Forest ecology over in
Yanaga tonight I’m sponsored by Forest industry and personally I think it’s very interesting that this is the sponsorship now not the ministry of forest not environmentalist groups cuz I I think it shows that there is a change and so there should be there is a change and the forest industry is very
Concerned to try to respond to uh increasing change in public attitudes towards the environment public uh requirements or or um things they would like to have from their Forest environment and I think it it does go very well and that is the sponsorship of course there will be some people who
Feel this time that I’m talking from an industry point of view just as someone might have thought I was speaking from an environmentalist point of view the last few times I did it I’m no apologist for industry I’m no apologist for any side I’m here to speak about good
Forestry from a scientific point of view from an academic point of view and the industry forestry and Ministry forestry must stand on their own merits and they must answer for what they are doing I am here to talk about what I perceive to be some of the environmental aspects of forest
I’m going to talk about clear cutting not because it’s necessarily the most important issue in any particular case I could have talked about herbicides or slash burning or some other aspect of Forestry but I decided to talk about clear cutting because in discussing clear cutting I have to deal with a lot
Of the issues and things that need to be thought about as we address many of the different issues in forestry and the question of the forest environment debate I’m not here to try to persuade you what you should think about clear cutting I would like to suggest however how you
Might think about it that in considering how we achieve the conservation we all want how we improve the management of the world’s forests and the forests around Nelson too as we strive to get those improvements some of the questions that we have to ask ourselves and have to ask
Other people and get answers to those questions so that we can make the right choices that in fact will achieve conservation and improved Forest management we live in a democracy and in a democracy it is the ultim ultimately the will of the people that should influence how things are done but
Democracy only works well when the choice is an informed choice and when we go to The Ballot Box and when we make decisions and when we participate in decision- making organizations we must be sufficient I familiar with the various aspects of the issues we’re talking about so that we can contribute
And achieve the the goals that we have set ourselves so that’s my goal tonight is to try to present to you a context within which questions like clear cutting slash burning homicides or any other aspect of management should be considered and a variety of technical questions that I will not bore you with
The infinite detail of but just to go through some lists of questions that have to be addressed in reaching the answer to the question is clear cutting the appropriate or is it an inappropriate method of harvesting the timber component of our forests on any particular site in British Columbia
Turns out it’s a very complex question and there are many things we have to think about so if I could have the lights please and I’ll proceed to my slide why I feel that way I then want to talk about the two phases of conservation and the role of the
Environmental movement in achieving the change that we want and I will be suggesting that there are two phases to conservation and we need to understand these two phases if we are to be effective in achieving that which we uh desire then I’m going to go into the
Technical part which is an evaluation of some ecological and other aspects of clear cutting just a list of technical points that need to be considered and I will terminate this somewhat long presentation with an an urging that we use ecologically based planning tools that I don’t think we we are using some
Some very good ones and they’re having a very good effect but there are some additional uh ecologically based planning tools that I think should be used in forestry around the world and in BC before we start with the historical and Global Perspective we need to be
Sure that we all are going to share a common image in Our Minds when we use particular words and I want you to understand the way I am using the word clear-cutting there are many conflicts in life that arise because we share the same words but we do not share the same mental
Images a single word elicits different thoughts in different people’s minds many conflicts between countries between spouses and other people in relationships come from the lack of communication because people interpret words or phrases different ways so it’s very important when we’re talking about these things that we all understand the
Way in which a particular word is being used so I’ll start off with some definitions cleck cutting is simply the removal of all the trees from an area but that definition isn’t enough because the removal of four trees from a patch of forest is the removal of all trees
From that little area but that’s not a clearcut not ecologically so ecologically it is the removal of all trees in a single cut from an area sufficiently large to remove the forest influence from the majority of the harvested area if you look please at the first of these two diagrams we have a
Forest here and a forest has a microclimate you walk through a forest in Midsummer and it’s cool there’s not much wind the air is moist perhaps and then you walk out into a large area without trees and it’s hot it’s much drier the air is much drier you’re
Perspiring as you hike through the forest you’re quite quickly dry as you walk across a clear area and the wind may be higher so there is a substantial modification of the microclimate around a forest and that microclimate extends out as a microclimatic shadow some distance from the forest into the area
From which trees have been removed similarly below the ground the roots of trees can spread substantial distances out into an area from which trees have been harvested creating an underground Shadow or Forest influence so a clear coat is an area from which trees have been removed large enough that most of
The area no longer receives this Forest influence down here we have areas from which all the trees have been removed but the forest influence extends far enough out that most of the area is occupied by the forest influence that is not a clearcut it’s one of the other
Systems and if we look at some of the other systems we go all the way from clear cutting down here where clearly most of the area no longer has a forest influence to a seed tree method where Foresters leave individual trees scattered across the area to provide a seed source for natural regeneration
Each of those extends a small area of microclimatic modification but again most of the area is still lacking such a modifying influence so that is really a clearcut method with some sea trees left shelterwood is where sufficient trees are left that the microclimatic modification of the individual trees in
Fact influences most of the area there may be some diminution some significant diminution or even complete absence over some of the area of that modifying influence but most of the area has some modification so that is not a clearcut method patch cutting is where all the trees are removed from this small patch
But again a minority of the area loses its Forest influence smaller still where we might remove only 4 to 20 trees a little patch cut there is some diminution of forest influence in the middle of each patch but essentially the forest influence is continuous and finally Single Tree selection individual
Trees are removed and there is essentially no significant diminution of the forest influence what I talking about here is clear cutting and I will be contrasting it at various times with various other non-clear cutting methods so is it happening in British Columbia well yes it is and and it
Always has happened in various places there’s various places where it doesn’t happen uh here is an area over by Arrow Lakes and it it is uh an area of essentially seed tree individual trees are left there’s not really enough left to produce much microclimatic modification so that’s really a
Clear-cut method here’s a closeup of a seed tree essentially the foreground is all free of trees in the background we have this is near cam loops a few large Douglas Furs they’re wind firm because they’ve all stuck up above the canopy so they used to being blown around in the
Wind the smaller subordinate trees in here wouldn’t be wind firm if they were left they would blow over but individual Douglas trer trees that are wind firm left here as a source of seed but not to specifically modify that environment below ground or above ground here however enough trees have been left to
Create a substantial microclimatic modification and below ground modification you can see much of the forest still has essentially a forest microclimate and here’s what a shelter would look like from below quite a lot of trees left on the site so that is not a clear-cut method here from the air we see a
Shelter wood in the right hand side here and over here we see a group selection in which patches of perhaps 5 10 15 trees have been taken out so this is a one of the selection methods here is the shelterwood from the ground substantial microclimatic modification much of the
Below ground here occupied by these tree roots and here is the group selection uh patches with relatively um less modified s somewhat modified microclimates and patches here essentially a completely Forest microclimate now there are some areas in British Columbia where clear cutting is completely inappropriate for reasons I’m
Going to be talking about there are some areas again I’ll discuss the technical reasons later where clear cutting should be done it it is the method of harvesting that should be done for as a say technical reasons I’ll discuss scientific and and environmental reasons
There are a lot of areas where one has a choice sometimes however the choice is limited for example here was a case where removal from a selection cut a group selection cut resulted in about 30 or 40% of the trees being damaged many of these trees have now got rot and will
Uh probably suffer wind blow before the uh crop is harvested again if that cannot be avoided then it may not be a suitable method again in the stand that we saw from the helicopter there many many patches of dead trees from our malaria a root rot which gradually
Spreads out in concentric Rings like the fairy rings of mushrooms on your front lawn if you have them killing Douglas fur and some other species as it goes and if you try to practice selection harvesting or even very small group selection in a stand which is full of this particular pathogen and you’re
Trying to grow Douglas fur it will be very very difficult you’ll probably lose a lot of trees to wind blow because the the Decay kills the roots and they lose their wind firmness and you’ll finish up with a wind blown area that becomes a clearcut anyway so some system other
Than individual tree or possibly even group selection would be appropriate because nature is limiting your choice in that environment even though for other reasons climatic reasons uh you might not want to clearcut and uh alternative non-clear cut systems might might be very appropriate here’s another case where sometimes uh selection type
Systems may be very difficult this is in a very wet area fairly high elevation and tremendously aggressive brush growth in here so we’re not getting natural regeneration because the underst story has become so aggressive the trees can’t seed in or will seed in exceptionally slowly and in areas like that it may be
Very difficult to do the wheat control U it may be not appropriate to use herbicides mechanical sight treatment may be difficult because of damage to the roots of the residual trees leading to root rots and in cases like this it may be far more effective to harvest
Areas small clear Cuts or larger patches so that one can deal with the competition it’s very sight specific situation but that is a case here’s a case near the Selmo Crescent Highway where selection cutting has been done for uh visual reasons but some very very heavy brush growth has resulted on this
It’s very rich and fertile site and significant problems in getting regeneration in here there are ways of dealing with it but it is very difficult then there are environments where nature takes over and really takes all your choices away here’s a bar Beetle outbreak in mature lodal Pine the entire
Area there is dead and you simply can’t go in and start practicing selection cutting in this kind of a stand this is actually a fire killed stand but it’s much the same as a beetle kill stand where the The Beatles have killed all the trees that doesn’t always happen of
Course but where it does the analogy is is good and for a start workman’s compensation board wouldn’t let you go in and do anything other than clear cutting in an environment like that so yes we are practicing um alternatives to Silver culture in many environments there are some where clear cutting is totally
Inappropriate uh there are areas where clear cutting is done and and probably should be done and there are areas where there are choices and perhaps we should be clear cutting perhaps we shouldn’t and one can debate whether or not the correct Choice has been made so having
Got aside the question of the definition and yes indeed there is lots of alternative silver culture being done now let’s go on to the historical and Global Perspective clear cutting is probably as ancient as the human species has had the technology axes and things like that to
Cut down more than a few trees at a time in other words to make a big enough patch that they removed the forest influence it’s the way we Harvest most of our food crops too and clear cutting is the predominant Timber harvesting system used around the world however the
History of public outrage and antagonism about clear cutting is not as ancient but it is certainly very long ordinances were passed in Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries forbidding clear cutting on very steep Mountain slopes where that clear cutting led to soil inst ility Avalanche cold air drainage that
Affected agriculture or things in The Valleys a number of situations that that Society found unacceptable and still today in parts of the European Alps the Alps are largely Limestone they’re incredibly over steepened by recent glaciation the soils are extremely unstable and it is absolutely inappropriate to start removing Forest
Cover over significant areas of those Mountain slopes and so in Austria there is a law restricting clear Cuts well they’re not clear Cuts often um Forest Harvest patches to one hectare in most cases a hectare is not a clearcut because the forest influence is not lost
Over most of the area uh often the the harvest areas are much larger because of insects disease wind snow damage and various other natural agents but where it is possible the Foresters are incouraged very strongly to keep the patches very small because of those environmental reasons so that’s a historical perspective on on
Clear cutting what about a historical perspective on forestry well forestry is a human endeavor that has always been about conservation and it’s always been about attempting to satisfy society’s demands for continuing supplies of a variety of values from their forested Landscapes and some of you may not think
That that rings a bell with you um that sometimes forestry doesn’t look like that but uh the historical record from around the world shows that that’s what happens and let me explain that originally when there’s a few people in a country they just cut cut trees down
They cut them down to clear land for agriculture some of the biggest clear Cuts or if you like the biggest deforestations in British Columbia are for cities and for agriculture if you like the biggest clearcut is the lower Fraser Valley for agriculture and that’s
A good thing to do because we put a very high high value on food and so we just get rid of forests so that we can grow food uh but then as the population builds up you cut more and more trees more and more forests and eventually that leads to local resource depletion
Unregulated exploitation of forest has always and will always eventually lead to local resource depletion the answer to that is to go and steal someone else’s forests you have a war or you have a trade war war and you colonize another country and you you take their Timber but usually you finish up
Exploiting that and creating shortages there and finally there’s nowhere else to go and you have to bite the bullet and Institute regulations that attempt to achieve sustained supplies of whatever it is you want from the forest clean water Wildlife Timber recreational opportunities or whatever however the first stage in
Forestry where we introduce these regulations that I call here the administrative phase has always and I think always will be unsuccessful it’s always been unsuccessful why because it’s based upon a lack of understanding of the biology and the Ecology of the resource that is being conserved or they’re trying to conserve so
Administrative forestry that lacks a sound basis in ecology and soil science and climatology it fails it always has it always will nothing surprising about it it fails to achieve sustained yield and the conservation that we seek that then leads to the third stage of Forestry that is ecologically based
Forestry where you recognize you’re dealing with a living changing Dynamic resource you can’t frame it and hang it on the wall like grandfather unchanging forever it changes and you have to have policies that reflect that change over time the change from one place to another and that has usually led to sustained yield
Of various resources and maintained Environmental Quality however that is not necessarily the end of the evolution of Forestry because forestry that is sustainable and maintains Environmental Quality may not satisfy everything that people want from the forest for example some very ugly Forest harvesting and Forest management that does not please aesthetically may be
Completely sustainable and completely compatible with a high quality environment but it sure doesn’t look nice and we happen to be a species that puts great stock on how things look look at the Fashion industry look at the Cosmetics industry look at the money that’s spent on making
Cars look nice so that we’ll buy them look at our art galleries we as a species put a lot of value on how things look and sustainable forestry environmentally sound forestry can not is not necessarily attractive to look at in fact some of the new forestry coming
Out of Oregon is rather unattractive to look at but it may be very environmentally sound so the next stage of Forestry is a social stage in which we practice not only sustainable environmentally sound forestry but forestry that satisfies a number of other values like Aesthetics like Recreation perhaps spiritual values
Particularly in an increasingly urbanized Society we have to think about these values and make sure that we provide them in various places in the forested landscape now uh I maintain that that can that pattern can be recognized many places around the world in many different countries where do we
Fit in in British Colombia well Canada is a very young country and Forestry in Canada is even younger our forest history out here in BC is even younger still is a very very recent history so we only started emerging from unregulated exploitation with the Fulton Commission of
1907 which was really the beginnings of the end of straight exploitive forestry we didn’t complete the transition to administrative stage of Forestry until the second Sloan Commission in 1955 for most of us in here that’s pretty recent so we we entered the administrative phase and it took only
About 15 to 20 years up until about the mid 70s for it to be realized increasingly by the public and increasing by industry and the ministry of forests that it wasn’t working that what was being done was not achieving that which was set out to be achieved in
The various commissions and why surprise surprise it was an administrative non-biological non-ecological approach no surprises entirely predictable and so starting in 1975 the ministry moved towards establishing an ecological basis for Forest Management in this province and that was by adopting the work of Professor kenina and his students at the
Department of Botany at UBC who had produced over the previous 25 to 30 years a worldclass ecological site classification specifically for this purpose finally forestry woke up and realized what cinaa was doing and adopted it but it takes quite a Time forestry like earther kits metaphorical Englishman takes its time it takes time
It’s a long cycle and when you start improving things the evidence of the Improvement often is not readily visible on the landscape for some time it takes perhaps 15 or 20 years for it really to become obvious that things have improved as a result of going from administrative forestry to ecologically based
Forestry and that was no problem in Scandinavia and Europe they went through this series because they spent perhaps a a century in this phase before Society said hold it we want something else out of our forest as well and they started moving towards the social stage so there
Was lots of time to demonstrate that this was a workable system even though it didn’t satisfy everything that people wanted now in British Colombia we started entering this phase in 1975 it wasn’t written into the forest act until 1987 we are only just beginning the ecologically based phase
Of Forestry but at the same time that was happening Society had changed its mind about what it wanted from its forests many of the things that many of us feel very strongly about and very critical about are the result of decisions made during the administrative stage and were implemented 10 15 20
Years ago they are not necessarily what is being done today and as we look at forestry we have to be very careful to separate out things that we don’t like that the were were the result or are the result of the administrative phase of the past and things that are actually
Being done today that’s one of the questions we have to address so the problem here is that we’re facing Alvin toffler’s Future Shock Alvin tofler said in his famous book that one of the problems in modern society is that the social conditions and desires are changing faster than institutions can
Respond and this gives you Future Shock it gives you conflict between people and the institutions that serve them and I think we’ve got Future Shock in forestry because rather than the normal sequence of going to the administrative phase it fails ecologically based phase it does
Some good things but then we go on after a while to the social phase we are struggling to enter the social phase almost before we’ve entered the ecologically based phase in fact we’re entering them both together and I think some of our conflicts stem from that getting out of step with the normal
Historical sequence of events now we should all be very concerned about local things you know the old saying think globally act locally we have got to look at the small the detail and the local problems of conservation and resource management but I would suggest we re-evaluate that admonition to think globally act locally
But keep thinking globally I’m extremely concerned as a professional ecologist that if we put all our eggs in the local conservation basket and don’t periodically check over our shoulder we may be overwhelmed by Global Environmental changes that May frustrate the very best efforts we make at the local level in particular the
Threat of global climate change which which could cause Forest types to move 300 to 500 km North and 3 to 500 M up the mountains the valley bottoms around here might be grassland so all our attempts to conserve the forest types we now have could be totally frustrated irrespective
Of the kind of harvesting system we use because there might not be Forest here anymore because the climate would have changed to be inappropriate for Forest vegetation if we look at the really serious problems that threaten the Earth it is the human population growth we’re now at 5.7 billion people the optimistic
Assumption is that this will go up to somewhere between 11 perhaps 10 and a half 11 billion people that’s the most optimistic pessimistic but nevertheless perhaps realistic is 16 billion the optimistic is double the present population by the time seedlings that were planted this summer are ready for
Harvest around here there will be twice as many people in the world realistically but perhaps pessimistically there will be three times as many people in the world China is currently undergoing a population explosion apparently if one can read the population statistics in the next 10 years China’s population will increase
By about a 100 million people thanks to Chairman Ma’s policies of 30 years ago where he encouraged Chinese women to have as many babies as as they could and in spite of the reversal towards the one child family average family size is still 2.7 in China and you have an
Enormous number of women just entering the childbearing years and this is predicted to give a 100 million increase the Chinese are on the brink of industrialization and they intend to drive that industrialization by using their vast reserves of sulfur bearing coal the air pollution and the possible Greenhouse effects and climate change
That could accompany that and other population increases around the world could totally frustrate our conservation efforts if we don’t think about those conservation efforts in the context of these larger issues over which we may have frustratingly little control and we had a very eminent International ecologist giving the Ida green lecture
At UBC in ecology recently and he came across from Britain and he said if you want to prevent species extinctions yes we can worry about the spotted a and species like that but if we focus on that and forget the bigger issues we are going to see hundreds or thousands of
Species extinctions because of climate change so we have to look at where we’re putting our conservation efforts if we are really serious about achieving local conservation we’ve got to work on the national and international scene as well as the local scene I’ll talk more about the greenhouse effect later
So it was the conclusion of the United Nations Commission on environmental and environment and development chaired by Madame bruntland of Norway that the although the industrialized countries including Canada to this point in history bear the greatest single responsibility for environmental degradation because of our our proplate use of resources because of our
Selfishness because of our very high standards of living and because of our wastefulness there’s no question it’s our fault collectively it’s not them it’s not industry because we buy the things from industry it it’s all of us that allows industry to operate in the way it does and encourages encourages
Them to operate by buying the things that they produce for us to buy so us collectively as a society are responsible for what has happened in the world to this point however we are not the long-term problem maslo a very well-known psychologist suggested in maso’s hierarchy that there is a
Hierarchy of human needs that must be satisfied first there is food then there is shelter then there is security then there is other things including environment if you don’t have food if you have children and you’re a third world World parent and your child is starving to death you will probably cut
Down the last tree even if it means the mountain collapses into the valley because that’s the way parents are towards their crying cold starving babies so the greatest long longterm threat is poverty in the third world that’s 3/4s going on 80% of the world’s population are poor because of unequal
Distribution of wealth expenditures on military hardware rather than people and simple poverty and unless we address that issue that is likely to overwhelm the best conservation efforts that we can apply so we really have to think about our local conservation and resource management issues in the larger context if we want to succeed
Now I’m convinced that we need to change the way in which the world’s forests are being managed and I want to go through a few issues I think if we’re going to survive as a species and maintain the environment we want this has to be done and let’s go through some of these
Issues I’ll start with tropical deforestation because it’s one that we see so frequently on the television and hear so frequently in the media I must say however that when I read in the newspaper or here on the radio statements that forestry in British Columbia is no different than or
Worse than deforestation in the tropics I can only conclude that the person who made the statement hasn’t been there or if they have they didn’t understand what they saw here’s an area of central Brazilian Savanah an area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers maybe millions that
Only 90 years ago carried a forest of average stature of about 30 m tall and perhaps UH 60 to 80 cm diameter of bre height on a mature individual these trees are about 2 m tall and about 25 years old three cutting Cycles to produce chalal to provide fuel for the
Expand rapidly expanding population burning of the area for cattle grazing to feed the rapidly expanding peasant population have so degraded that environment that it is not capable of growing a forest now I haven’t seen anything in British Columbia that remotely resembles that here is an area
Of the wet Tropics this is close close to the capital of manous in the heart of Amazonia very very ancient soils very deeply weathered largely silica and aluminum oxides an average pH of the mineral soil of about 3.2 something like the pH of vinegar if you stick your hand
In there for a couple of days your skin starts peeling off that stuff is really acid all of the nutrients in this kind of environment are up in the vegetation this is degraded secondary Forest it’s already been cut once but the forest was allowed to invade if you strip the
Forest and burn it and maintain agriculture here for a few years the area gets so acidic again and so depleted of nutrients that nothing can grow there I saw areas down there that had been Disturbed 80 years ago and they were a wet white desert wet because
You’re in the tropics but a desert nothing was growing after 80 years there were no weeds there was nothing on the sand it was just bare sand and aluminum oxide type of materials again there is a soil called seaback Sands East of Prince George which is a post glacial Delta
Which is supposedly one of the poorest mineral soils in British Columbia and there are certainly some parallels considering the nutrient distribution and the sensitivity of those seaback Sands um some parallels to the tropics but for the majority of British Columbia that has geologically young soils with very good reserves of erodable mineral
Um weatherable minerals there is simply no useful parallel the speed of nutrient cycling processes in the hot wet environment of the tropics compared with our frequently cold forests where the problem is processes going too slowly again there are simply no useful parallels there are of course enormous concerns about what’s happening in the
Tropics the the tropical forest isn’t the lungs of the Earth the way you sometimes here if that were true there would be 40 or 50 ft of organic matter on the soil in the tropics because for oxygen to be released carbon has to be stored and there is very little carbon
Stored in most of the of these tropical forests in some of the poor ones there is a Pete soil but in most of them there is very little organic matter so in fact they are carbon in the undisturbed condition they are carbon and oxygen neutral but they do play a very
Important role in world climate and and in Regional climate and massive deforestation which is a land use change issue not so much a forest management issue uh that has very very serious implications for the people there and for everyone in the world and the attempts to apply Northern temperate Plantation forestry uh most
Inappropriate here is the kind of Plantation that turned ludvig from a billionaire into a millionaire uh stripping primary tropical rainforest in areas like Jer this area is more up towards the Venezuelan border uh stripping the tropical rainforest and burning it and planting Molina arboria from West Africa it grew about 15 ft the
First year about 6 ft the second year about 1T the third year and then died um obviously totally ecologically insensitive total lack of understanding of how that ecosystem works and total biological simplification very low diversity in that Plantation compared with there there are some very serious
Problems in the tropics and we have to change the way the tropical forests are managed not all tropical forests are so sensitive there are some very ferti tropical soils there are tropical soils that will support permanent sustainable agriculture if it’s done carefully and areas that will support sustainable
Forestry even high yield forestry but there are certainly areas of the tropics like these that are very sensitive and we must change the way those forests are being managed now if you’re a farmer you may have a a herd of cows a crop of corn and
The field of cabbages you can sell and perhaps you will periodically sell those three crops but you still have a farm a farm is a a landscape area that has a soil and a climate that makes you able to grow crops that you can sell and thereby make a living well forests are
Somewhat the same a forest from which you’ve cut the trees down is still a forest if you have the soil intact and you have the climate and you have the seeds to re replant the trees if on the other hand you lose the soil you no
Longer have a farm and if you lose the soil you no longer have a forest at least not until that soil has recovered so here are some horror stories and I can usually out horror any environmentalist if I dig deeply into my slide collection uh many of my slides
Are from 20 years ago uh I have fewer horror stories recently perhaps that’s because I don’t get out as much but I think it’s also from what I’ve seen particularly in some fairly extensive field visits I’ve made recently that there are fewer of these I hope so so
Anyway this is on Vancouver Island on highly erodable Vol volcanic soils skidding straight up and down slopes abs absolutely unacceptable absolutely inappropriate and we simply can’t do that if we want to have sustainable forestry here is an escaped slash bur on organic soils over Limestone on the west
Coast of Vancouver Island and there have been cases where in the era of paranoia about fire that the ministry required companies to burn on such sites absolutely inappropriate enormous ecological change this site will carry trees again but it’ll be a long time in the future and we are not prepared as a
Society to accept that long delay in gaining social values of various types from that landscape here is a slide taken about 18 19 years ago down Southeast of Cranbrook um very very excessive disturbance from skid roads compaction loss of top soil erosion where the skid roads were put
Too steeply up and down especially if the material was fine textured silty soils which are common in in this part of the world large Landings not rehabilitated massive loss of productivity over a significant part of that area for a substantial period of time we don’t know how long but
Certainly absolutely unacceptable uh in the context of sustainable forestry this is not British Columbia I’m glad to say although I dare say this happens this is Oregon here is skid logging during the winter on a clay soil in you’ve probably heard that much of Vancouver is getting rebuilt we’re
Getting all these monster houses I’ve got 10 of them on my block right now and a house is an old house is made of wood and plaster and wires and glass and when the bulldozer has been through it for half an hour all the parts are still
There but they’re in a little pile on the ground it’s no longer a house well soil is the same a house has an architecture that’s what makes it a house soil has architecture too and if you rearrange the pieces so that you lose that architecture then it’s no
Longer a soil and no longer capable of growing plants the way a soil can so this is like the bulldozed houses in Vancouver this soil has lost its architecture and in some places in Oregon apparently it’s taking more than 80 years for such soils to recover significantly if you’re in a very
Northern environment where you get a great deal of frost heaving and frost uh thoring freezing Cycles such damage is repaired much more rapidly still unacceptably long but certainly there is variation in how long this kind of damage takes to recover down in Oregon this is absolutely disastrous because in
Their mild climates this kind of damage is exceedingly persistent and quite unacceptable climate change we’ve all heard about the greenhouse effect the release of various kinds of gases into the atmosphere the Trap solar heat light comes through reflected as heat and that gets trapped in the atmosphere of course
We have absolutely no evidence that climate change is occurring the fact that eight of the hottest years in the last 100 years were in the 1980s and the hottest year of the century was in the 1980s two years ago doesn’t prove a thing because statistical variation in the climate
Could explain that alone we don’t yet because climates are always varying so we don’t have statistical proof however that doesn’t uh convince me at all if you look at the evidence on the release of greenhouse gases the ‘ 50s the 60s the70s and the ‘ 80s the ’90s what we’re
Going to do as a society if we don’t get our act together and what we what is expected to happen through the 2020s based upon predicted human population growth and the anticipated use by that population of various or release by that population of various greenhouse gases
This is what is going to cause the greenhouse sorry the climate change that I believe is going to occur and is if we don’t do anything about it going to threaten our our best conservation efforts at the local local level and it’s all of us we all drive cars and we
All heat our houses and we all waste a bit and we have to look at everything we do including forestry to ask whether or not we are contributing significantly either positively or negatively to the greenhouse effect then there’s air pollution and acid rain you know when I
Was growing up in England oh by the way here’s a clear sunny day in Midsummer in England taken from airplane when I was a lad growing up in England I used to wonder why I never got a sunburn when I took my shirt off in the summer I used
To wonder why I I had never seen a sharp Shadow until I came to New Brunswick in 1961 because the shadows in England aren’t sharp in the summer they’re fuzzy around the edges because the air is so polluted most of Europe sits most of the Year under an incredible cloud of air
Pollution and we enjoy great clarity of air most of the time in British Columbia although living in Vancouver I’m beginning to doubt that more and more that the Big Smoke is becoming a reality and if the Chinese get together and have their population explosion and industrialize we may well enjoy some of
Their air pollution too all of us well you’ve heard about the damage to the black forest and here indeed is the black forest dropping apart at the hinges as a result of air pollution and acid rain but it’s interesting to get to the bottom of conservation issues you’ve
Got to understand them now we had to drive this is near fryborg in the Black Forest we had Drive quite a long way to find any dead trees I’ll tell you the story about these dead trees these trees were killed by Bart Beatles the trees became susceptible to Bart beetles
Because they were stressed by drought now they’ve always been stressed by drought periodically but they hadn’t been killed by Bart beetles before why were they stressed by drought they were stressed by drought because the rain around here contains about 70 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare per year which
Is a heck of a lot of nitrogen on the coast in BC we get get about four or five kilog a year here you might I don’t know how much you get you may get three you may get five but it’s not very much they get 70 now these soils are granitic
Soils they have very little magnesium and if you add too much nitrogen to a soil that doesn’t have magnesium it causes physiological stress in the trees and The Roots die that means they’re susceptible to Drought when they’re stressed by drought they become susceptible to Bart beetles so yes ultimately it’s the acid
Rain and the nitrogen that’s causing this but it’s a very complex scenario without the drought they wouldn’t be dying without the BART beetles they wouldn’t be dying if you put dolomitic Limestone on here that contains nit contains magnesium they don’t die so if we want to understand the problem we
Really do have to understand it now they thought the nitrogen was coming from industry and German Mercedes-Benz whizzing up and down the autoband at 160 km well it turns out that the major problem is farming in the Netherlands where because we in the western societies when we go shopping we
Us usually buy the cheap chickens on special we like cheap food we buy the specials that drives agriculture into production methods that tend to produce an awful lot of ammonia these range houses that produce these incredibly cheap chickens um very uh massive production of of pork and beef that produces huge quantities of
Animal manure that all gets spread on the land in the Netherlands that much of that volatilizes as ammonia that causes the acid rain in the black forest that’s doing this in some places so firstly we have to understand that it’s really Society demanding cheap food driving the farmers in the Netherlands to produce
Agriculture in a way that produces heavy nitrogen deposits in the Black Forest that is the main problem it is not the industry and it is not the cars that was originally thought so we have to understand that before we can solve the problem and we also have to understand
That when you read in the paper that all of the Black Forest is dying that simply isn’t true however when you go to the hearts mountains it it is true you have massive deforestation occurring in some mountains in Northern Germany and in Eastern Germany whole mountain ranges have completely lost their forests and
Will not grow coniferous trees now because of sulfur not nitrogen now sulfur pollution and ozone damage so air pollution is a tremendous threat to the world’s forests different kinds of air pollution cause different problems if we’re going to get on top of that particular threat to forests we have to
Understand which is the problem in a particular place because something that gets rid of nitrogen problem in the Black Forest will not solve this sulfur problem something that solves the sulfur problem will not solve the Black Forest problem so we have to be very specific in dealing with these environmental
Issues and then of course one of the major things is social change people have changed what they want from forested Landscapes it is not many decades since the society in Australia thought that the best thing to do to to trees like that was to cut them up into 2x
Sixes now the Australian Society feels trees like that are very huggable and I rather agree with them that trees like that have something very special something spiritual and we must ensure that we cons serve enough of trees like that for future generations to enjoy and the same thing in the queen Charlottes
Or the kamana uh in this province we need areas of big Spruce and big Cedars we don’t need them everywhere but we need enough of them excess ible to urban populations and other people so that we can enjoy the spiritual and emotional values of this kind of forest that is
Very important to many of us so all those changes need to be undertaken now how are we going to achieve that change well I believe there’s two stages the first stage is the political phase and here I would like to pay tremendous tribute to the environmentalist movement academics and
Scientists like me have been singularly unsuccess successful and perhaps we haven’t even made enough effort to and where we have it’s not worked to make the public aware that there are tremendous environmental problems that need to be addressed that we need to change the way we’re managing our forests now Forest managers also
Foresters have been complaining in Canada for decades about the quality of forest Management in Canada it was a group of professional Foresters who marched on Ottawa at the beginning of this Deca not the last decade the beginning of the 19 80s to demand that the federal government put more money
Into the management of Canada’s forests because Canada’s forests were a disgrace and the government became persuaded and they put the $600 million Forest resources development agreement in place that has substantially uh ameliorated the problems not finished yet we need another further and if you want to do something good for conservation and
Forestry write to your local MLA and say we need another further because the mistakes that were made in the past must be rectified that was professional Foresters but that did not convince the public that there was a major problem and because the public weren’t convinced the politicians weren’t convinced on a
Broad scale it is the Environmental movement through their rhetoric their determination their commitment their sometimes verbally violent statements and their sometimes scientifically wrong statements that performed the absolutely essential first stage of conservation and that is The Greening of politicians that requires The Greening of society and I think only the environmentalist
Movement could have done that and I think they had to use those tools in many cases because the science the logic didn’t work didn’t do the job however you don’t actually achieve conservation by achieving the political phase of conservation what you do is make it possible without the political phase it isn’t
Possible but with that in hand you then need to move on to the second phase and that’s the implementation phase in a democracy change comes through policy and regulation that is driven by legislation but if we put the wrong regulation and policy and we have the wrong legislation we won’t get the
Conservation we need witness trying to solve the black forests acid rain problem if they had applied the policies for the hars mountains there’s no way they would have well they haven’t dealt with it yet but there was no way they would be able to deal with the black
Forest and vice versa looking at it from a black forest perspective they would not be able to deal with the acid rain problem of the hearts Mountains and the fen burger and those other mountain ranges so we have to take the level of the debate from the level that is
Necessary in many cases to achieve the political goals of conservation we have to take it to a socially realistic and scientifically sound level so that we get the policies regulations and legis ation that will achieve the conservation we want let me give you a couple of examples well-meaning environmentalists
In some European countries have recently passed legislation Banning the importation of tropical hardwoods in an attempt to try to limit deforestation in the tropics a very worthwhile goal but I hear from ecologists and resource managers in some Asian countries at a couple of conventions one on tropical forest this
Summer that in some countries this has resulted in a doubling of the deforestation there are many people who have been displaced over the last 20 years from cities and now live in the forest maybe they shouldn’t because they’re displacing the native peoples rightly or wrongly I’m not debating that
Issue the fact is those people are there and they have children lots of them and they’re hungry and then some sometimes cold and the people who live with those children in those forests Harvest Hardwoods that they sell to us for how many of you have teak furniture in your
Bedrooms we buy the stuff and we provide a living for those people in the tropics by taking the value away from the forest those people have no living so they cut the forest down and grow food crops which they can sell and feed their children with so in some of the
Countries this particular policy had had exactly the opposite effect because it was socially unrealistic it didn’t recognize the social realities of some of the environments where they were trying to contribute positively towards conservation another example is you’ve heard of the ivory hunting and the hunting of rhinoceroses in East
Africa well the logical thing to do is to ban hunting seems like a very good idea but that created a black market in many countries and the price of the ivory and the rhinoceros tusks for aphrodisiacs went up so high that even the police and the Army couldn’t stop
Them because the poachers were better armed and had greater numbers in Zimbabwe the wildlife biologists and conservationists are trying another approach they have studed studed the wildlife populations and they’ve calculated how many of each species and which age of animals of the various trophy animals can be harvested and
Sustain the populations into the future and keep those populations healthy they sell those hunting licenses to the local people the local people then can sell them to hunters from United States Germany Japan people who pay enormous sums of money to go and shoot these trophy animals apparently they like to
Do that and this provides a sustainable local economy for these people and these people jealously guard and protect the wildlife poachers have their throat slit you don’t need police and you don’t need the Army now I’m told by African experts that will not work in every African country because of problems of
Corruption and bribery and political organization but there are some countries in which it does work it is working and as we try to protect the Wildlife Resources of Africa we have to look very in a sophisticated fashion at the local sociology the political environment and the ecology so that we
Come up with the right approaches to achieve the conservation so we need socially and ecologically sound conservation policy we also need socially and ecologically sound Forest harvesting policy and management policy other things other than harvesting but in seeking this once again we must avoid generalizations if we wish to be
Successful here is the biog climatic zone map originally developed by professor CA and his students and subsequently developed by the pedologists and ecologists and other people in the ministry of forests it’s world class I don’t know of any better around the world I know of some very
Good ones in other countries but this map embodies the a really outstanding ecological basis for the management of forest resources in this province it doesn’t solve all the problems however but it provides a basis from which we can begin to solve them and there are 14 different biogeoclimatic zones in the
Province the 14 different colors in the map here and 12 of them are forested most of those have three to five different subzones ecologically uh distinct areas within the ecological Zone and most of those have between three and seven distinct Forest types within each subzone there might be
Somewhere between 3 and 400 different types of forest within British Columbia if we want to get conservation of the resources in those different Forest types we have to render our management ecologically sensitive to those differences and many of the problems of British Columbia forestry came from because in the administrative phase of
Forestry uh regulations were put in place that that told Foresters to do the same thing everywhere slash burn all SES that was the instruction from the ministry because that was the policy clear cut on the coast/ bur and plant Douglas fur from sea level to the Alpine
That was the policy and we found it didn’t work and we are now moving to a much more ecologically based strategy and I think I have witnessed a remarkable change in the way forests are being managed over the last 15 years but it would be a unique irony if the people
Of this province 50 years from now looked back and saw the tremendous contributions the environmental movement had made to making change possible but then saw that by failing to move the level of the debate to a socially sophisticated and ecologically sophisticated level that the very same movement had
Frustrated the efforts to to achieve conservation by not basing the conservation policies and regulations on this ecological variability and on the social variability within this province people are part of it Nature’s part of it we have to recognize the variability of both well leaving that essentially background material the context in which
We must struggle with these difficult decisions about how to manage our forest resources I’d like to quickly go through a technical list of some of the questions that need to be asked firstly the components of ecosystems how are they affected by clear cutting or by alternative harvesting systems I’m going
To focus on clear cutting because often it makes the most extreme change there’s no question that clear cutting results in a very significant alteration of the microclimate of the harvested area that’s really the definition of clear cutting where the microclimate has been lost and in some parts of British Columbia particularly
The hot dry Southern interior valleys if you remove the forest microclimate it is extraordinarily difficult to reforest the area you’ve created grass land and it’ll remain that way for a long long time if you want grassland that’s a fine thing to do but if you want Forest then clear cutting becomes inappropriate in
Some of the Interior Douglas fur Zone particularly the dry Sub Zone again and particularly on hot dry south facing slopes clear cutting is quite inappropriate because of the undesirable microclimatic change however when you go up to some of our high elevation forests that have very cold soils and some of our far
Northern forests the Chang microclimate the warming of soils becomes extremely important to get the forest regenerated the way we want and on some of our very humid cool West Coast climates if we want to grow certain light demanding tree species again we must create the open microclimates that characterize
Clearcuts in fact in Sweden about 20 or so years ago 30 years ago they passed a law requiring clear cutting I don’t like that I don’t like requiring that one thing be done everywhere I think that’s that’s an inappropriate approach but the reason they made that rather wrong
Decision I think was because for the previous 50 years they had largely practiced selection or selective logging in Northern cold areas that resulted in a degradation of their forests if you ask Wildlife authorities from Africa from Alaska the reason why Alaska is so famous for its Wildlife is
Alaska Burns over about every 60 years that disturbance is essential in that Northern cold environment because in the absence of fire for more than a couple hundred years muskeg develops over much of the landscape you don’t have Forest it turns into MUSC so in that environment the disturbance of fire or
Logging or in sex or disease something that removes the forest microclimate is essential to maintain what we think of as a productive forest and productive wildlife habitat similarly in some of Sweden’s Northern Forest our high elevation forest and our Northern Forest it may be highly desirable to have that
Exposed clearcut so we have some areas where we don’t like the microclimate change some areas where we do there are some areas where it really doesn’t matter it’s fine it’s it’ll work either way and we have a choice and we have to look at all the other things to decide
On that choice depends upon the species we want to grow but we don’t have to and and it isn’t a case of absolutely forbidding it soils well there’s no question that clear cutting and other harvesting systems can have a dramatic effect on soils Greg IG who’s in the audience here
Uh put out a very valuable report a number of years ago reporting that a loss of social value of about $80 million a year in the province from damage to soils so we absolutely cannot tolerate continuing significant damage to soils we have to look at that but in
Many cases clear cutting does not damage soils in fact very often clear cutting creates such little disturbance of soils that Foresters then have to spend a lot of money and time going in and disturbing the soil so that trees can become reestablished however there are cases where there are problems and generally
They are associated with roads here are some more 20-year-old slides from Coast where inappropriate Road building techniques side casting leading to instability and the loss of soil over here are going to result in prolonged loss of productivity of this area this area is reforested now it is
Growing trees but not as well as the trees over here here’s another case where this road here has created instability side casting above has contributed in a loss of soil right down to the compacted underlying material a prolonged loss of product activ ity on that site so very
Often our clearcut problems with soils are Road problems they’re not the fact that all the trees have been removed and the microclimatic influence has been lost and sometimes we can have significant problems from non-clear Cut methods some of the recent slides that have caused some tragedies and have
Attracted a lot of attention have originated from roads in areas that were selectively logged in the last 30 to 40 years a time at which roads were not put to bed and culs were not removed as they now must be and I hope are when harvesting is finished and some of those
Old roads are in some cases the origin of these problems it isn’t the fact it isn’t the fact that the area was harvested it was the fact that the roads created problems and that can occur in clear cuts and alternative areas so roads are often the problem not always
But very often vegetation whoops I went too fast vegetation yes indeed when we clear cut we by changing the microclimate we cause dramatic changes in vegetation we get fir weed we get lots of flowering plants we get lots of shrubs coming in that do not do nearly
So well not nearly so abundant in partially harvested areas because partially harvested areas don’t have the conditions that favor those particular early successional species and in fact most clear Cuts have very high diversity of vascular plant species often very much much higher diversity than the forests that have just been harvested however that
Diversity doesn’t remain because the process of vegetational succession proceeds trees usually invade they shade out the shrubs and herbs there is a period of greatly reduced diversity and gradually the forest plant competition vegetation composition returns towards its original condition in non-clear Cut methods there is a much less dramatic
Change in the vegetation on the area but once the Harvest is completed it also starts moving back towards the little the original condition some of the vegetation changes are considered desirable for example there are trees we’d like to grow will only grow in clear Cuts they won’t regenerate
Effectively in some of the partial cut systems uh sometimes uh the microclimate we’ve created and the vegetation we get is not what we want and we would be better off with a partial cut system microbial life yes indeed dramatic changes in the microbes many soils in forested areas are dominated by
Fungi and the animals that are associated there with that often makes the forest floor thick and acidic that’s the nature of mature forest ecosystems following clear cutting there is a substantial loss of the fungal component of the soil and a replacement by bacterial species that cause much faster
Decomposition of the organic matter and increase in fertility and often a reduction in the acidity of the forest floor all of which is is often very desirable for wildlife because it gives more nutritious plants for the Wildlife to feed on many of the grazing and browsing animals to feed on and it is
Also very favorable for the early growth of new a new Forest however just like the plants as the plants grow back towards the forest the bacterial dominance is gradually lost and there is a gradual return to fungal domination and eventually as you get a mature forest and a forest
Influence you reestablish much the same original microbial Community as you had in the original Forest Wildlife something that concerns all of us well again Wildlife is like the the microbial life it’s a question of habitat they depend upon the vegetation there are some species that need the
Vegetation of a mature old growth forest uh Woodland Caribou spotted owl there are a few species that have virtually an absolute dependence upon mature old growth forest there are also some species that have an almost an absolute depend on open areas there are birds and animals that really do depend on
Accessing or having access to Disturbed ecosystems whether it’s fire insects wind disease or logging it doesn’t really matter and if you don’t have Disturbed areas in a forest those species will either go extinct or they will completely disappear over large areas so you see Nature’s nature doesn’t
Judge whether a sparrow in a clear coat is better or worse than a spotted owl in an old growth forest it doesn’t say that a fern in a mature Forest is better or worse than a fire weed in a clear cut they just are they just exist Evolution has produced
Species that benefit from or require either Disturbed ecosystems or undisturbed ecosystems or something in the middle and there’s a lot of species that don’t really care and can make their living in all sorts of places so it is us as society that makes those those judgments and in fact we often use
Terms and there’s a couple of mistakes on my slide for which I should get a D minus on my ecology exam because I’ve used the term ecologically sound there isn’t such a term it’s environmentally sound ecology is a science it describes it explains it helps us to understand how ecosystems
Work how organisms live how ecosystems respond to disturbance and how they recover from disturbance it makes absolutely no judgments about those those eroded soils versus mature for forests they are just two different conditions of the ecosystem and ecology helps you understand the consequences for Society of those different
Conditions It Is Us in society that says what we want how many spotted alvs do we want how many sparrows how much fire weed how many ferns that’s our judgment and we have every right to make that judgment so Wildlife is a question of habitat there are species that benefit
From Clear Cuts there are species that benefit from partial clear cuts and we have to decide what is the spe spum of Wildlife and what is the relative abundance of different species that we require in our forests then we can set about harvesting and managing forests to produce vegetation conditions that in
Fact produce the habitat conditions required by those species fish and water very important fish is an important resource in this province both for recreation and commercially industrially and water is very important because we all depend upon it for drinking and we like the Aesthetics of of clean water lakes
Etc no question that Forest harvesting can have a significant effect on water and on the fish and other aquatic organisms that live in water bodies but as we try to Grapple with the question about what is the effect of harvesting and okay let’s focus on clear cutting
What is the effect of clear cutting on streams if you ask the question what is the effect of clear cutting on watersheds I can’t I can’t answer that question because I haven’t asked the question yet if I say what is the effect of clear cutting on a first order
Watershed I can address the question what is the effect on a third order Watershed I can address the question you see all of British Columbia is in about three watersheds and the phrase a river as it runs out past Vancouver I think is either an 11th or a 13th order of
Watershed little trickle on the hillside little tiny trickle 6 in a foot wide wide perhaps going a few hundred meters down into a stream that’s a first order stream the stream it goes into is a second order stream that flows into a third order stream that flows into a
Bigger fourth order stream which we probably Now call a river and that flows into a bigger river which is the fifth order so the phraser when it goes down past New West is probably 11th or 13th order clear cutting in British Columbia has no measurable effect on the quality
Or the regimen of the Fraser as it flows past the uh us min but clear cutting has the potential to have tremendous effects on first order streams it can have a great effect on second order streams that is a given clear cut if the clear cut is big enough
To include all of the water shed of a third order stream it will have a tremendous effect on that third order water stream that third order stream but if in fact only about 20% of a third order Watershed is clearcut then as the water exits that third order waterers
Shed there is usually very little measurable effect on the quality or the regimen of that stream on the other hand the first order stream in the clear cut is dramatically altered in terms of the amount of water flowing through it the quality of that water dissolved chemicals and perhaps sediments and also
The regimen the peak flows how much flows it’ll probably dry up in the summer PE higher Peak flows in the winter so when we talk about the effects of clear cutting on water we have to first address the scale that we’re talking about and consequently when we
Talk about fish we have to say which stream order is the fish moving in or is it living in before we can really address the question now in the old days clear cutting was done right down to Lakes right down to streams and I guess sometimes mistakes are still being made
Uh people who work in forests are humans I expect there’s some of them in this room too um that the fact is that things do not always go according to plan but my understanding of the planning process is that that is no longer done according
To the plan but it used to be done and yarding was done across the streams because many of the cat operators and skid operators who are perfectly nice people they’re mostly weakend fishermen um never understood that that had a negative effect on what they did on
Weekends that is to try to go out and have some Recreation catching fish mostly when that’s explained to them they take a very different approach to things so yes there has been bad impacts of clear cutting on uh water bodies quality from clear cutting uh many of
The bad impacts are related to roads as I’ve already said because of slides uh generally speaking where clear cutting is conducted with adequate riparian Leaf strips and where roads are built in a fashion that does not cause erosion uh clear cut has very little effect on streams other than the first order
Streams that are flowing through those clearcut areas well those are some ecological impacts what about some ecosystem attributes and resource values that might be affected by a harvesting system what what about biodiversity we hear a lot about biodiversity but once again if you ask me what is the effect of clear
Cutting on biodiversity I will tell you I can’t answer because you haven’t asked me a question yet there is a diversity of biodiversities until and until we establish which one we’re talking about I can’t give you a scientific answer or any other kind of answer come to think
Of it I’m sorry this looks a bit academic but I’ll try to lead you quickly through this and as painlessly as possible but it’s necessary to understand the different kinds of biodiversity if we’re going to establish policies to protect biodiversity whichever one we’re talking about now if
You go out for a picnic in the woods and you sit down and whilst you’re eating your picnic you make a list of all the flowers and the mosses and the trees around you uh that is the alpha diversity of the plants in that ecosystem but if you then go for a
Little walk after lunch into a different kind of forest on that mountain or Hillside and you make another species list and you compare the two lists and see how many species are different difference between the two lists that’s the beta diversity of that Forest so this is the local diversity and this is
The diversity across the local landscape and that diversity goes for the species and also the structure you can be in a lodge Poole Pine Forest with just a few mosses maybe two species of mosses on the ground no shrubs no herbs just one layer of old mature um LGE Pine very low
Species and structural Alpha diversity and because old fires created such forests over large areas may be very low ba beta diversity as well then there is landscape diversity if you hike from the valley bottom here up to the tops of the mountains you’ll go through at least two
Biog climatic zones if you go from Penticton up to Silver Star you go through five different biog climatic zones enormous biological diversity across the landscape enormous differences in species lists and structures of forests even though any one Forest type within that elevational sequence might be quite low the
Diversity might be quite low now we hear about the high alpha and structural high alpha and beta species and structural diversity of the tropical rainforest well um mostly it’s Alpha diversity we can have 400 species of tree in a hectare we can have a thousand species
Of animal in a hectare of forest in the tropics so we have an enormous list but if we walk for several kilometers our species list may not change CU many lowlands tropical rainforests are very uniform over large areas so they have low beta diversity but very very high
Alpha diversity many of our forests in our mountains have relatively low Alpha diversity but enormous beta diversity so a complete reversal then there’s landscape diversity that’s going up the mountain to SilverStar there’s geographical diversity if we go from Fort St John across to New Finland we’re
In boreal forest pretty well all the way but there’s quite a diversity of boreal forest as we go across the country that’s broad geographical diversity then there’s functional diversity some forests are very low productivity they have few nutrients they cycle slowly um some are very highly productive there’s temporal diversity
Clear cuts are often very diverse in their vascular plant species much more often than the forests that were harvested as they get reforested the diversity of vascular plants goes below quite often the original forest and and as the uh Forest naturally thins or is thinned by Foresters under story
Redevelops vascular diversity goes up again often to higher than in an old growth forest but again finally it declines and of course I’ve left an important type of diversity off here that is genetic diversity genetic diversity is the means by which Evolution has fine-tuned individual species to live in a variety of physical
And chemical environments and different biological environments too and it’s very very important in conservation and Forest management that we conserve our genetic inheritance and there are rules and regulations in forestry to ensure that’s done but we have to keep struggling with that to make sure that in fact those rules and regulations are
Adequately protecting that genetic diversity ecosystem function yes indeed Forest harvesting can have a dramatic effect on um on ecosystem function as can natural disturbance on the North End of Vancouver Island there was a humongous wind storm in 1907 it’s interesting it was the same year as the Fulton
Commission maybe nature didn’t like the thought of going from unregulated exploitation to manage forestry because it blew down about 40% of the forests on the North End of Vancouver Island the forests that are there now the natural second growth that came from that blowdown has in places standing volumes
Of up to, 1500 cubic meters of wood per hectare and it is growing in many places as much as 16 cub Cub m per hectare per year in the old growth that wasn’t blown down it’s growing at between 1 and 3 cubic m per hectare per year and it has
A standing volume of usable wood of sometimes about 500 cubic M so sometimes Disturbed forests are very much more productive than undisturbed forests because very old mature forests in some environments not all but in some site types in some bioclimatic sub zones undisturbed forests decline in their productivity and sometimes harvesting
Enhances productivity sometimes Forest harvesting depending upon how it’s done reduces productivity because it has been mismanaged and there are certainly far too many cases where that has happened in the past and I’ll return to that because there may be some cases where unwittingly that is still happening carbon storage the Greenhouse
Effect one of the greatest single threats to species perhaps if the climate change occurs we will have one of the greatest historical periods of species extinctions courtesy not of our resource management but courtesy of the action of all of us as a society in putting greenhouse gases up into the
Atmosphere now old growth forests contain a lot of carbon particularly those in humid areas particularly on the coast the the forests around here are often I’m surprised at the forests I’ve seen today remarkably little carbon much of this country was completely burned down to Mineral soil about 100 years ago
Many of the beautiful um Rich colored forests are that way because the miners 100 years ago burned off most of this country most of the watersheds most of the lovely forests we have now were completely raised and probably before they did that there weren’t nearly as many Larch because Larch are encouraged
By fire and probably it looks much more beautiful now because the whole area was burnt over but that’s a different story so there isn’t as much carbon in the forest I saw and I suspect it’s because the whole country was burned to a crisp about 100 years ago but on the coast
Where the forests haven’t been burned for a long time you do get huge quantities of carbon stored in the soil in the forest floor and in rotting logs and and in the standing trees actually for the ecologist here you’ll notice this is the I but I just happened to put
It in I didn’t have a coastal one that was quite what I wanted um the ecologists here will have noticed that I’m cheating a bit anyway so there is a concern there’s a legitimate concern that in harvesting old growth forests we are significantly contributing to the Greenhouse Effect and if that’s the case
We have to do something about it let’s examine the issue when you clearcut an old growth forest because of the change in the microclimate and the stimulation of bacterial decomposition much of this carbon will be decomposed and vented to the atmosphere and will contribute to the greenhouse problem if we then as is
Required by law in this province reforest promptly and now the law requires that it’s much more prompt and jolly good too than it was in the past um if you look at the carbon storage in the New Forest because the New Forest is made of carbon um you find generally
That the amount of carbon that’s lost in most of our old growth West Coast forests will be recaptured by the New Forest in between 30 and 60 years depending upon the productivity of that Forest now that New Forest will not contain as much carbon as the old Forest
Did but it will have recaptured the for the carbon that was released by decomposition from the forest floor on the soil so so what’s the difference in storage the difference in storage is what was harvested it’s the logs that were taken away way now what happens to
Them if we make them into Timber and build the houses that we live in and the furniture we sit on and the other wooden things we use then that carbon is stored it does not go to the atmosphere and in fact converting old growth forests to new second growth forests and managing
Them productively does not make a net addition of carbon to the atmosphere however if we take those harvested logs and turn them into pulp for the newspapers we read every every day and for the toilet paper we use and for the writing paper and all the other
Things we use and then throw away so quickly then that decomposes and the carbon dioxide goes back to the atmosphere and so much of what was taken away from that system does go to the atmosphere and harvesting those old growth makes a onetime quite significant contribution to the
Atmosphere if however we are proplate and do silly things like putting all our waste our diapers disposable dipers and newspapers and all the other things we use and we put them in a landfill site as we have done to a great extent and they decompose anerobic they will turn
The carbon in those materials will turn into methane now methane is 25 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas so in fact we would be very very significantly contributing to the greenhouse problem and it is now suspected that landfill sites across North America and other industrialized
Sites are one of the major reasons why methane’s going up and methane is one of the big problems in the greenhouse problem so it means that we’ve got to get away from landfill sites or we’ve got to cap them and use the methane as an energy source and we’ve got to try to
Recycle carbon or burn it uh instead of using fossil fuels because if we burn wood products that was carbon from the atmosphere we’re just putting it back again if we displace fossil fuels to heat our homes Etc that means we don’t have to put the fossil fuel carbon up
And doing forestry is a net Improvement of the greenhouse thing a greenhouse effect so you can see it’s very complex and ultimately the bottom line is the major effect of harvesting forests in British Columbia on the greenhouse effect depends not so much on the age of the forest harvested or how it’s
Harvested but upon what you and I do with the harvested products if we’re sensible with them we can minimize the negative impacts and in fact make forestry a net positive sink for carbon if we are foolish with those harvested products and proplate then that is Mak making a net Problem by harvesting old
Growth forests so it’s a complicated issue and the story is not in on that we don’t have all the answers there’s a lot of research being done and within two or three years we’ll have a pretty good picture as to what the story is and how we should perhaps modify policies to
Take care of any um adverse effect however just before I leave that I should put it in perspective it’s been calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency in the US that about 20% of the uh all the carbon released to the atmosphere is by deforestation and harvesting of old growth forests about
80% of that is deforestation in the tropics so we’re talking about 20 about 20% of 20% of the carbon dioxide is coming from harvesting all growth forests but CO2 is only half the problem the rest is chlorocarbons in our hairsprays in our refrigerators in our air conditioners in our cars things like
That and from methane so in fact even if old growth harvesting does produce a net negative effect it is very much less significant than what you and I do in heating our homes driving our cars and the various other greenhouse gas activities we anticip we participate in Aesthetics very important and part of
The social forestry phase that in fact forestry in this country has only come to very recently and has been obviously very slow to recognize the fact that forestry has not been aesthetic in the past clear cutting is never going to be beautiful in the short term on a
Particular site but it doesn’t have to be ugly in the landscape here you see uh clear cuts that has revegetated down here in the landscape and to me that in fact enhances the quality of that landscape because we have all rather uniform old growth forest here uniform
Color texture and this is to me a rather Pleasant diversity of color and texture just like the rocks and the mountain Ms are of course I’m pulling your leg that’s not a clicker that’s a natural disturbance that has created uh a difference in vegetation and and I find it equally attractive whether it’s
Natural or human-made if there was an ugly Road scar there I probably wouldn’t like it at all but just a change in the texture and age and quality of vegetation in the landscape if it is done with an eye to Aesthetics the shape the location it does not have to
Necessarily damage at least not for very long the visual quality of a landscape so is the problem clear cutting or is it some other aspect of forest harvesting or Forest management is the problem clear cutting or the harvesting equipment that’s used and I’d suggest to you that in many cases it’s
The harvesting equipment that produces the soil damage that puts all the skid roads that in many cases we should be using cable logging or helicopter harvesting on steep slopes and not skits so very often the problems the roads and the direct imp impacts of clear cutting come from the equipment not the fact
That all the trees have been removed sometimes it’s not clear cutting it’s the size of the clear cut clear cuts that are too big so that they give either environmental problems water quality or aesthetic or maybe Wildlife problems so smaller clear Cuts may be may be size it’s not the fact you’re
Cutting all the trees it may be the shape in terms of visuals it may be the block location whether they’re stacked up one next to the other or whether they are distributed in the landscape however sometimes the answers to that question is not always obvious now here’s some logging up in the
Charlotte the this was back in the mid ’70s the kind of logging that was done and and Society back in the 60s and 50s generally thought that’s the way it was done and should be done nobody well not nobody but very few people complained very loudly about this generally people
Accepted it um except it used to be done in squares now this cut is is carefully feathered and by the time that’s green up in about 10 years that’ll be a lovely velvet green blanket of uniform forest and it’ll look much as though a wildfire
Had been through the area and to me that will look very aesthetic in contrast scattered patches on the landscape to me can look very unnatural and very unesthetic now these are rather square and angular and certainly you can ameliorate the visual impact by having feathered edges and stuff like that but
It looks rather as though somebody got a giant shotgun with square bullets in it Square balls and and shot the landscape in fact nature doesn’t do that nature produces a variety of patterns of disturbance on the landscape a variety of shapes a variety of locations nature produces lots of little patches and some
Very big patches and a whole bunch of intermediate patches and it’s now coming out of Oregon and Washington a lot of the ecologists there are very concerned about harvesting policies that were instituted because of public pressure about big clearcuts and instituted by Wildlife because they wanted to maximize The Edge because
There was a preoccupation with deer and elk and those kinds of wildlife species that resulted in a fragmentation of the forest which is having negative effects on those animals that need bigger patches of vegetation of one particular age and these ecologists are now saying look guys we got it wrong the public got
It wrong the wildlife guys got it wrong industry and government did what the public wanted but now ecologists and the public have changed their mind and so industry and government have to change back but I I don’t think we we should reinvent the wheel and make the same
Mistake that was made down in Oregon and Washington I think we should learn from their mistakes and we should Institute policies that put disturbance in the landscape whether it’s partial cutting or clear cutting that more closely mimic natural patterns of disturbance in the landscape it’ll be better for wildlife
It’ll be more aesthetic and I think that’s what we should do we should have a diversity of disturbance not something like this that personally I don’t think is the way we should do it is it clear cutting or is it post harvesting sight treatment now sometimes you need to do
Post Harvest site treatment because you’ve done a big clearcut yes that’s true but that is certainly not always the case but here is another Horror Story on slash Burning uh misapplication on thin Rocky sites uh that wasn’t clear cutting that created that problem this site could have regenerated without a
Slash burn uh but it was policy in those days that’s what people did everybody thought it not everyone some people thought it was a terrible idea at the time but the authorities thought it was a good idea so that’s what was done please don’t get the idea that I’m
Totally against slash boning I hope that’ll come up in the questioning I would be very vehemently opposed to any policy that ban slash burning everywhere just as I have always been vehemently opposed to policies of Slash buring everything um we can come to that into the discussion if you
Like sometimes it’s mechanical site preparation here I’m very glad to say is not British columia this is Nelson not this Nelson Nelson South Island New Zealand this is the golden Downs Forest Nelson New Zealand and here they have a tremendous problem with gor in introduced from Britain to plant here
You have to wear either a lead jock strap or a steel suit of armor because the gor is about 2 m tall and if you know what gors is it’s very prickly and so what they do what they did here is they hired a kamakazi pilot
And put him on a bulldozer and headed him downhill at about 35 km an hour and to slow himself down to that speed he had to put his brush blade about a foot and a half down into the soil so of course there is no soil on this Hillside
Anymore it’s all down in the valley in the Stream absolutely terrible just absolutely appalling not the way to solve the problem there was a problem there that needed solving but it wasn’t a problem of clean clear cutting it was a problem of vegetation that had to be
Solved in fact it would be even harder to solve it if it wasn’t clearcut but that was not the way to solve it and here’s another very sad research Forester he didn’t do this but he’s extremely sad about it again on the Canterbury Plains of South Ireland New
Zealand the sad thing about this photograph is the Forester who did this really thought he’d done a good job and because he made planting very easy in the gravel all the top soil and all the Slash and everything had been scraped off into these sort of four to
Six foot 6 M tall piles across the landscape and research by the research institute in New Zealand has demonstrated that you lose at least 50% of your productivity if you do this and that’s not clear cutting that’s post clear cutting sight treatment so we have to sort out the problem it’s like the
Black forest and the hars mountains we can’t cure the problems of acid rain over there unless we know what the problems are what the source of the problem is we have to know the source of the problem here it wasn’t clear cutting it was the way the site was
Treated and finally clear cutting and utilization and here I come to an issue that I am very concerned about and I think we probably do have a problem in British Columbia here is logging in central Sweden mechanized harvesting which harvest the whole tree including the branches uh of the hardwoods there and
The spruce on a rather poor nutrient site research has shown a loss of about 25% harvestable yield from this site as a result of that whole tree harvesting or full tree harvesting 25% loss of productivity to me of site productivity is quite unacceptable although just as an as side
It raises an interesting dilemma here the new forestry that we hear about coming out of Oregon by according to the ecologists down there that I heard a report recently will probably result in about a 20 and some cases as much as 25% reduction in harvestable yields not
Because it’s damaged the site in fact it’s probably protected the site but because in instituting the new forestry practices you may have to forego 20 to 25% of your harvestable logs now a lot of people feel that the new forestry is highly desirable because it protects the
Environment Etc but on the one hand we will condemn a practice that loses 20 to 25% harvestable yield when it’s done by poor Forest inappropriate Forest management but we’re prepared to accept it when it’s done in in the name not of well protecting the environment but in
The name of a silver cultural a particular silver cultural system and as a society we have to struggle with that if we don’t like a 25% loss for one reason uh do we accept a 25% loss for another reason well you may because that 25% loss for the second reason may give
You other values you want but you certainly have to think about the question so here the haltry harvesting on these poor sites is inappropriate most of the harvesting I’ve seen in Southeastern British Columbia in the last 6 weeks is Hal Tre harvesting and some of it has been done
Because the public has complained about waste now a log on a clearcut is a packed lunch for earthworms 20 years from now it’s part of the system it’s part of the soil biology it’s part of the humus the renewal of the humus of the soil people going out to a logging
Site and seeing a lot of logs there they say that’s waste in terms if that log is harvestable and you can SE it up and sell it in economic terms that’s waste in Social terms it’s waste because we lose jobs but biologically it’s not waste ecologically it’s not waste it’s part of the
System so as we look at clear cutting or other Harvest methods we must not confuse our social perceptions and our visual perceptions with the ecological function and I’m very concerned that in some cases public pressure about waste is leading to clean harvesting that I think is ecologically very detrimental
For long-term site productivity and I agree with a lot of the precepts of new forestry about retaining Woody debris on a site some ecosystems in BC have too much Woody debris it causes stagnation in growth and productivity but a lot of our sites need retention of Woody debris also sometimes public concern about
Clear about Slash burning has led to Hal tree harvesting as an alternative and if we compare if we compare Hol tree harvesting with the old Weena roasting late summer slash burning the very hot slash burning hry harvesting is probably less damaging but if we talk about the kind of light
Spring burning for silver cultural purposes that is done nowadays in many many cases that is much less detrimental to the environment than ptry harvesting on poor soils so again we have to struggle with which is the least negative thing to do so to start to bring bring this long
Presentation to a conclusion one of the conflicts I think we face in uh Forest management and public attitudes and public thoughts is because different people are thinking on different time scales now ecosystems again I grew up with Eartha kit a lot of people over here don’t seem to know who
Eartha kit is she was a very sexy singer and she used to talk about to these gentlemen and she always used to talk about Englishmen take their time well Nature’s like that nature recovers slowly from disturbance Nature’s time scales ecological time scales of recovery from natural disturbance range from centuries to Millennia nature
Doesn’t care how long it takes that just nature does it the way nature does it management time scales we don’t accept that Forest managers resource managers require or expect their Forest to recover significantly in decades and hopefully rather completely in many cases within about a century anything other than that is probably
Inappropriate Forest resource management but many people particularly people with gray beards like myself or senior citizens we don’t have 50 years like some young people have for an ecosystem to recover if it hasn’t recovered in a shorter time period for us it’s forever so we have to think about time
Scales Nature’s time scales of recovery management time scales and social time scales and somehow struggle with resolving these differences something which may not satisfy a social time scale may be completely um sustainable and maybe well within the range that nature itself would recover from disturbance so here we have ecological
Condition here’s a harvest we’ve Disturbed it nature tends to take these kinds of time scales Forest management strives for these time scales but many people want things to get better than this time scale